Picking a TV this year is going to be particularly interesting for consumers looking to plonk money down on a new purchase, and with Samsung showing its might in LCD development, the choice between OLED and LCD is now harder than ever.
You may have seen the news on this website, and you might not have, but Samsung has been talking up a storm this week, practically declaring its 2015 range the best TVs it has ever made.
Earlier in the week, Samsung’s Corporate Vice President said that “the Samsung SUHD experience will change the way Australians think about Samsung’s home entertainment and visual display technology” and that it was “on a completely new level to anything we have ever produced.”
It even introduced a letter to the “UHD” initialism, with the “S” there to represent the best in class performance that Samsung gives to its other “S” initialled products, like the Galaxy S6 phone and the Gear S smartwatch phone-hybrid.
To prove that it’s best in class, Samsung is even releasing a few TVs that miss out on the S model variant, with simply “UHD” being used for them.
But enough about the product naming, because there are new products, and we’ve gone eyes on with them, seeing how far Samsung has come with its new crop of TVs.
So what are they like?
Not bad. Not bad at all.
And from the few minutes we’ve spent with the TVs, we already want to spend far, far more time with them.
The latest range of TVs is relatively varied, ranging in price for $4999 to $24,999 for the SUHD TVs, and offering a new smart TV operating system (Tizen), access to Netflix, and even a whole bunch of nano-crystals, as Samsung makes a play for the technology known as “quantum dot” which essentially is a very, very, very small set of crystals being used to bring out more colour, with the different sizes of crystals changing the colour of light that is being produced.
Samsung isn’t the first to use this technology, but is hoping its implementation will be one of the better ones, with a range of colour that is wider and more natural, while pumping out the sort of vibrance you might come to expect out of Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED).
We’re not quite sure if you’d put them on the same plane as viewing an OLED screen, but it’s not far off, and the images you’re seeing in this article are out of the camera with a hint of brightness added to bring those TV frames back in just a smidgeon.
Essentially, the image quality we’re seeing — the colours and vibrancy — just looks too real, with a performance that reminds us of OLED, only without the same noticeable risk of the technology failing a few years into viewing, which is one of the possibly problems OLED can have, being an organic-based technology.
Looking at the Samsung TVs, we’re quite impressed with what we’re seeing, and while the initial glances don’t tell us whether the curve is really going to draw us in, the colour definitely has, with a picture that’s hard not to be impressed by.
Samsung has also clearly spent time designing the whole frame for the screens, with a sleek thin metal look, with the occasional texture on the back of the TV dependent on the screen you end up going with. It’s clear you’ll be focusing more on what’s on the TV than the build and construction of the television itself, but it’s nice to see both play a role, with a level of importance ushered in by the minimalistic design Samsung is going for.
The pricing is the part that stings, and it’s just likely part and parcel with buying anything new, because a $5K minimum for a television sitting in the 55 inch space isn’t going to easy on everyone’s wallets, especially when bigger is almost always better when dealing with TVs.
That said, if you’ve been wanting to buy a new TV for a while, these could offer some pretty heavy competition to the other players, though we’ve yet to see what Sony and Panasonic will be throwing in the game alongside Samsung, with LG launching products recently.
Samsung’s TV are out now, and they look stellar, but if we were looking to buy, we’d probably wait to see what the other manufacturers were doing in the next month to see how the TV market pans out.
