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Review: Samsung UA55JS9000T SUHD TV

By Joel Kopping
Johannesburg, 21 Aug 2015
The visually most obvious aspect of the TV is that is has a curved screen.
The visually most obvious aspect of the TV is that is has a curved screen.

Not so long ago we, the buying public, were told that high-definition (HD) TV was the way to go and the market was bombarded with HD Ready and Full HD TVs.

The difference between HD Ready and Full HD was that Full HD TVs were characterised by 1 080 lines of progressively displayed video resolution (and these lines were 1 920 pixels wide), while their HD Ready counterparts offered either 720 progressive lines or 1 080 interlaced lines of resolution. The difference between the two was huge, but Full HD was better.

Skipping forward to the present and we now have Ultra High Definition (UHD) TVs.

In Europe, UHD has pretty much been accepted as being a TV that has 2 160 video lines that are 3 840 pixels wide. Those mathematically inclined would have noticed that UHD offers twice the vertical and twice the horizontal resolution of good old HD. This is important and I'll show you why in a moment.

Down here in SA, it appears that some TV manufacturers have started playing a similar game that was played when there were HD Ready and Full HD TVs. Essentially, what they're doing is saying that a TV with a resolution higher than Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) is a UHD TV.

This matters for three key reasons. Firstly, you're not actually buying a UHD TV. Secondly, these TVs have to scale - or convert - an incoming signal to fill the screen. This is easy when converting HD to UHD, the video scaler simply multiplies by two. If the TV's resolution is an odd one, the video scaler has to decide in a mathematically complex way how to fit all the new pixels on to the screen. This processing usually results in some weird artefacts that weren't in the original image, making their way on to the screen. The last reason resolution matters is that when being fed with a UHD signal, and UHD streaming is happening, these TVs, at best, will have to throw out some video information, or may not be able to display UHD video at all.

This brings me to the Samsung UA55JS9000T SUHD TV, which is a true UHD TV and a member of the brand's flagship 9000 range.

The visually most obvious aspect of the TV is that is has a curved screen and this makes it look just a little smaller than its 55-inch diagonal screen suggests it should. With a separate connect box, into which you plug in all your devices, it's also an alluringly good-looking TV.

The Samsung UA55JS9000T SUHD TV's screen curvature adds some depth to on-screen images.
The Samsung UA55JS9000T SUHD TV's screen curvature adds some depth to on-screen images.

For interest sake, I used an old DVD player via component video in, a Mede8er media player HDMI in - a hard drive supplied by Samsung with UHD Video content on it - via USB and a memory stick, also via USB. I also connected a terrestrial aerial to the TV so that I could watch over-the-air transmissions. These were available from both digital and analogue broadcasts.

In addition to the above, the TV was connected to my home network and my daughter tested the limits of my Telkom cap by streaming lots of YouTube videos to the TV. All in all, the TV was given a good workout.

One of the first things I did when connecting devices and turning the TV on for the first time was to take an hour or so to read through every page of the TV's user Ts and Cs. These, I believe, are skewed in favour of Samsung, and if you don't accept all of them, some of the TV's smart functions won't work properly. This is mentioned as I like knowing what rights I'm giving up before doing so.

With this task out of the way, I connected the TV to my network, did a software upgrade and let the TV play for a few days before going through my usual set up and calibration procedure. During this time, I got to grips with the TV's user interface, which I found to be easy to use and a step up from the last TV I reviewed, and grew to like the simplicity of the supplied remote control. Kudos to Samsung for realising that you don't need a million buttons on a remote.

When setting up a TV, I always disable all automatic contrast and image-enhancing features. This way, when I turn them on again I get to see if they do what they are supposed to. I also do this as I don't want the TV to second-guess me when I'm setting the TV for optimum contrast and brightness.

These auto features can also affect the measurement I take when I do grey scale and colour corrections.

For those interested in the technicalities of TV calibration, I found that the TV's movie setting was closest to what I want to see on a TV. The default Vivid setting was awful. From the movie pre-set, I moved on to doing a two-step grey calibration, following this with a 10-step calibration and a check on colour gamut and Gamma.

Pros: Spectacular detail and image clarity when viewing true Ultra High Definition video content and online browsing easy enough for my seven-year-old to navigate.
Cons: Slight colour shift visible on the edges of the screen when not at the optimum viewing distance and black levels could be better. Sound quality could be better.
Operating system: Tizen
Display: 55-inch
Resolution: UHD 3840 x 2160, 3D
Connections: 4x HDMI, 3X USB, Component, VGA, Composite Video, LAN, Wireless LAN, 3G/LTE dongle ready, Bluetooth.
Rating: 8/10
Price: R 45 000 (approximately)

With calibration complete, I confirmed what my eyes had been telling me all along. Here was a TV that in almost all technical aspects ticked the right boxes. The only area where it could have been just a little better was in in its black levels. Here with its auto contrast and local dimming features disabled, I felt that deep blacks could be a little better. You can get inky blacks if you want by simply turning on the aforementioned features. But if you do this, I found that I lost some detail dark areas of on screen images that the TV makes too dark. I must add that the increased contrast does make images pop off the screen, but they lose some naturalness.

As can be seen by the devices I connected to the TV, I threw pretty much everything, bar the kitchen sink, at the TV and its performance ranged from good, to better to wow.

When watching terrestrial TV, you could see the shortcomings of the standard definition signal, but the TV did a good job scaling these with as few artefacts as possible. Terrestrial TV, both analogue and digital, was watchable. HD terrestrial broadcasts were surprisingly good, as was the video quality when watching DVDs through the TV's component video input.

Next up was watching HD video from my Mede8er and here the TV really started to show how good it was. The screen curvature seemed to add some depth to on-screen images and this made action-movie watching almost 3D-like, but without the pitfalls of having to don glasses and getting a headache.

The wow moment came when switching to watching the UHD video from the hard drive. Here I could get really close to the TV and enjoy what technical buffs call a really immersive experience. Here again the curved screen added to my viewing experience, giving that little extra depth, and the sheer clarity and detail visible on screen was impressive.

While the UA55JS9000T SUHD TV is a superb TV, it did have a few minor flaws, albeit ones that most wouldn't notice.

I've mentioned black levels and there could be some slight patchiness when looking at a completely dark screen. I noted that depending on where I sat, there was slight colour shift towards the edge of the screen. This, from experience, is less noticeable on flat screens. I also noted there could be some edginess to fast-moving images. All these were, however, relatively minor infractions in what was a superb overall TV performance.

If you can afford it, the Samsung is a great TV, and one that my daughter will sorely miss.

In summary

If you're willing to spend the money, you get a stylish, curved TV that looks good when fed a High Definition signal and even better when fed with Ultra High definition signals. UHD video is, however, rare. You also get TV-delivered images with good depth and colour accuracy and one that despite offering lots of viewing options - from terrestrial TV, to online, to USB or HDMI in - is easy to use.

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