Samsung 65-Inch QN900D 8K QLED TV

It’s been five years since we started testing 8K TVs (the $30,000, 88-inch LG Z9 OLED was the first we reviewed), but the resolution is no closer to being viable for home entertainment. Even if it’s more affordable now, there’s no readily available 8K content for home viewing, so you’ll still be watching your favorite movies and shows in 4K at best. Samsung hopes to make 8K more appealing with the QN900D, which has an upscaling engine the company says can improve 4K to 8K and bump lower resolutions to 4K, along with extensive features for PC gamers with systems that support 8K. Its picture is very good, but 4K upconverted to 8K doesn’t look noticeably better, and without native 8K content there’s little reason to pay the premium the higher resolution demands. The 85-inch version of the QN900D we tested costs $7,999, and while it's an excellent TV, we recommend saving a few grand and sticking with a 4K model, like the excellent Samsung QN90D ($4,799 for 85 inches), or getting an even better picture with our Editors' Choice winner, the OLED Samsung S95D ($4,599 for a slightly smaller 77 inches).

Editors' Note: This review is based on testing performed on the 85-inch model of the Samsung QN900D series. Apart from the screen-size difference, the $4,999.99 65-inch QN900D is identical in features, and we expect similar performance.

Design: Sleek and Stylish

The QN900D follows the same design cues as Samsung's 2024 flagship 4K TVs, the S95D OLED and the QN90D QLED. The screen is completely bezel-less, framed only by a narrow metallic band so all you see on the screen is the active picture without any border. It sits on a flat, square base with a leg that lifts it up a few inches. Samsung calls this Infinity Air Design and claims the base's mirror finish makes it look like the TV is floating. That might be the case in some environments, but while testing the TV in a room with dark walls and light furniture and wearing a colorful shirt, I definitely noticed the mirror when I leaned back, and didn't get the sense that the TV was levitating. You can also mount the screen on a wall.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Also like Samsung's other flagship TVs, the QN900D uses a OneConnect box that connects to the screen with a single cable and holds all of the TV's electronics and ports. It's a simple, flat black plastic box equipped with four HDMI ports (one eARC), three USB ports, an Ethernet port, an optical audio output, an antenna/cable connector, and a 3.5mm EX-Link port for integrating into a home theater system.

The QN900D uses the same Eco Remote as Samsung’s high-end 4K TVs. It’s a simple but elegant rectangular wand with a prominent circular navigation pad in the middle. Volume and channel rockers sit below the pad, with Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Netflix, and Samsung TV Plus buttons further down. It features a battery you can keep charged by simply flipping the remote over and exposing its built-in solar panel to light. It also has a USB-C port for wired charging.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Software: Still Tizen, Still Frustrating

Like all Samsung TVs, the QN900D uses the company’s Tizen smart TV platform for its operating system. And, as usual, it’s a bit more frustrating to use than most other smart TV interfaces. The menus are a bit overbearing and require you to dive one or two levels deeper into them to access common picture settings. It seems to want to hold your hand through most adjustments or outright automate them, and this makes the experience of actively configuring the TV to behave the way you want feel clunky.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

On the bright side, the smart TV OS is full of features. All major streaming services are available, including Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Crunchyroll, Disney+, Max, Netflix, Twitch, and YouTube. It supports Apple AirPlay and Miracast/WiDi, so you can stream content from your iMac, iPad, or iPhone, and connect your PC wirelessly to use as a monitor. It also features Multi View, a mode that lets you watch video from multiple sources, like apps, connected HDMI devices, live TV, and Samsung Galaxy phones on the same screen. This is particularly appealing on the 8K QN900D, because even chopped up into sections you can get a 4K picture from each source at once.

Amazon Alexa is available on the QN900D, and you can use the voice assistant hands-free with the TV’s far-field microphones. It’s useful for controlling the TV and any compatible smart home devices on your network, searching for content, and getting general information like sports scores and weather reports.

Performance: Some Compromises for 8K

The Samsung QN900D is an 8K TV with a 120Hz refresh rate. It supports high dynamic range (HDR) content in HDR10, HDR10+, and hybrid log gamma (HLG), though Samsung continues to eschew Dolby Vision. It does support Dolby Atmos for audio, though, and has a 90W 6.2.4-channel built-in speaker system that can be supplemented, rather than replaced, with a compatible Samsung soundbar through the company’s Q-Symphony feature. The TV has an ATSC 3.0 tuner for over-the-air 1080p and 4K TV where available.

We test TVs using a Klein K-10A colorimeter, a Murideo SIX-G signal generator, and Portrait Displays’ Calman software. Out of the box, with an SDR signal in Movie mode, the QN900D shows a peak brightness of 283 nits with a full-screen white field and 391 nits with an 18% white field. It also shows perfect black levels with little apparent light bloom thanks to the TV’s mini-LED backlight. Perfect blacks have become commonplace among high-end LED TVs thanks to sophisticated local dimming arrays, but the individual lights are still larger and fewer in number than the pixels on each screen, so some light bloom is always possible. This isn’t the case with OLED TVs, which control how much light is put out on a pixel-by-pixel level. Still, evaluating TVs with the traditional effective contrast ratio has become less relevant on models like these, since the number, found by dividing peak brightness by black level, is “infinite.”

With an HDR signal, the QN900D puts out a modest 512 nits with a full-screen white field and 1,096 nits with an 18% white field. It’s dimmer than the 4K QN90D (618 nits full-screen white field, 1,253 nits 18% white field), and only slightly brighter than the S95D OLED when only lighting up part of the panel (321 nits full-screen, 1,060 nits 18%). 

(Credit: PCMag)

The above chart shows the QN900D’s color levels in Movie mode with an SDR signal compared against Rec.709 broadcast standards and with an HDR signal compared against DCI-P3 digital cinema standards. Whites are almost perfect and colors are nicely balanced, but the TV falls a bit short of fully covering DCI-P3. It’s still a strong performer in this regard, but like slightly lower brightness, a slightly narrower color range is a compromise for 8K resolution.

After several years of the technology being available to consumers, 8K still hasn't overcome its biggest obstacle: a lack of content. There simply aren’t any native 8K movies or shows available for home viewing. You might be able to find some 8K demo footage, but that's it.

Speaking of which, Samsung had some 8K demo footage for me to watch on the QN900D. Video at this resolution is incredibly detailed, with the fuzz on a tennis ball and the fur on an alpaca both looking extremely sharp. Because it's four times the pixels of 4K video, it can noticeably show much finer details, but the jump in clarity is less significant than the jump between 1080p and 4K, or SD and 1080p. A higher resolution allows you to comfortably sit closer to a larger screen (until it's too big for your field of vision), but on a 65- or even 75-inch TV from across an average living room, you won't see that big a difference.

That said, the extra pixels are there, and the point of buying an 8K TV is to make the most out of them, which means relying on the QN900D's 8K AI Upscaling Pro engine. It upconverts and attempts to augment details in lower-resolution content, and Samsung says it can push 4K video up to 8K-like quality, and SD and HD content up to 4K-like quality. I tested this with some Ultra-HD Blu-Rays and regular Blu-Ray discs.

The upconversion from 4K to 8K isn't readily apparent in the "Lions" episode of BBC's Dynasties. The details of grass and lion fur are as sharp as they would be natively on a 4K TV from a comfortable distance, but they don't look sharper, and looking at the screen closely shows the telltale faint fuzz of lower-resolution video being bumped up to a screen's native resolution. It doesn't look soft at all, but it isn't any crisper, either.

While the upconversion from 4K doesn't add anything that wasn't already there, the QN900D still has an excellent picture. In the same "Lions" episode, animal fur looks natural and the sunny savanna is very bright. Shadow details are clearly visible in bright and dark scenes, but fine textures on silhouetted objects can occasionally be consumed by blackness. These are extreme cases for shadow details, though, and very few TVs can reproduce what's in those areas.

The party scenes in The Great Gatsby, also upconverted from 4K, show off the QN900D's strong contrast performance. Black suits look properly dark and show the cuts, contours, and textures of the materials. Highlights from white shirts and lights look properly bright and retain strong detail in the highlights, and skin tones look balanced.

Bumping down to watch the same scenes in 1080p on a standard Blu-Ray, the QN900D's upscaling engine starts to shine. In most shots, edges and textures are indeed enhanced to near-4K visual quality, and outside of fast camera pans I would be hard-pressed to tell the difference without looking at both versions side by side.

Gaming: Where 8K Might Matter

Gaming performance is excellent on the QN900D, which is good because PC games are some of the only consumer content you can conceivably enjoy in 8K—if you have a powerful enough computer and the game you’re playing supports 8K resolution.

The TV has a 120Hz native refresh rate, but it can boost to 240Hz with a 4K picture and supports variable refresh rate and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro. And, while the Tizen OS has some frustrating elements, its Game Bar feature in game mode is very helpful because it lets you confirm you’re getting the right refresh rate from your console or PC and offers useful game-specific settings like genre-based picture mode. It also helpfully lets you configure features and display an ultrawide 21:9 or 32:9 picture across the screen, zoom in on a mini map, or toggle on-screen crosshairs.

The smart TV platform also has a gaming hub with access to most major game streaming services, including Amazon Luna, Nvidia GeForce Now, and Xbox Game Pass for cloud gaming. Since it supports Wi-Fi 6E (and Bluetooth for pairing a controller), you can enjoy the best streaming experience currently possible if you have a compatible router.

More importantly, the QN900D is very fast. Using an HDFury Diva HDMI matrix, we measured an input lag of just 2.0 milliseconds in Game Mode. This is fantastic, and well below the 10ms threshold we use to consider a TV to be good for gaming (though not as fast as the sub-1ms S95D OLED).

An Eye-Catching TV With Nothing to Watch (in 8K)

The Samsung QN900D is a feature-filled TV with excellent picture quality, but unless you’re a gamer with an absurdly powerful PC, there’s little reason to seriously consider it over a comparable 4K OLED TV like the S95D, our Editors' Choice. Mainstream 8K content is still simply unavailable, and considering how that resolution bumps the QN900D’s price far past outstanding 4K alternatives of the same size, it really isn't worth it outside of some very specific use cases. It doesn’t help that the S95D and the QN90D both have slightly better contrast and color performance. Even if the QN900D is a compelling TV on its own, 8K still isn’t worth investing in just yet.