Simply stellar: hands-on with Samsung’s 2015 Series 9 TV

Every year, televisions get better, and this year, the important technology is quantum dot, also known as nano-crystals, but how does this actually look, and will it make your content shine? We’re going hands-on with Samsung’s cream of the crop to find out.

It seems that every week we talk to people who want to buy a new TV.

“What should I buy?” they ask us, and we in turn ask what they want.

The most common answer is “I want a TV that lasts for the next five or ten years”, and that’s a fair answer when you consider we hold onto our tellies for a long time, generally not giving them up until they’re either on their last legs or a family member wants them. In that last situation, if you’ve owned a TV for a few years, you’ll just end up buying something new and handing the current TV down, because you’ve earned yourself an upgrade, surely.

These days, though, the question of what TV will last you 5 or 10 years isn’t answered with a Full HD TV, but rather an Ultra HD TV, with these new tellies providing a larger resolution, and while the format isn’t quite catered for yet, it’s only a matter of time until we see Ultra HD movies provided to us on a Blu-ray disc, or better yet, some form of digital storage.

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Samsung is ready for that future, and this year has its strongest line-up of TVs yet, ending with the Series 9 SUHD, a TV that not only delivers Ultra HD resolution with upscaling for content that isn’t in 4K, but also a technology called “quantum dot” that will make the colours simultaneously vibrant and natural, delivering something previous Samsung TVs weren’t able to do.

This week, we’ve gone hands-on with one of these TVs, and after spending a few hours with the 65 inch Series 9 — a TV that grabs a price close to the $10K mark — we can tell you what your content at home will look like.

So what will my TV shows look like, and my Blu-rays, and can I watch Netflix?

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TV

In what will probably come as no shock to anyone, yes, you can watch TV broadcasts on your television.

There. We’ve said it.

That being said, you probably shouldn’t, not unless your broadcast is in digital, and your media has been converted into something higher than the low-resolution 480i/480p broadcasts old TVs received, and DVDs were recorded with.

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Simply put, traditional standard definition looks pretty shocking here, evident when we grabbed a DVD of Frasier and loaded it up.

The video is blocky, softness is easily noticed as the TV does what it can to bring a low resolution up to the requirements of an Ultra HD TV, and the video just doesn’t look good at all, telling us that this won’t only be awkward to watch, but so too will any DVD.

Stick to high definition content if you can.

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Digital TV broadcasts fare a little better, that being said, and SBS HD running at 1080i was much clearer on the eyes, thought softness in skin detail could be seen, as could the odd artefact here and there.

Other broadcasts might throw up a bit of a red flag, mind you, as ABC News 24 looked blockier and softer than what we were seeing on SBS HD in our test, but it’s nothing in comparison to the lack of quality being offered from standard definition TV on DVD.

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