Samsung’s 85-inch Q900FN 8K TV Lands In The U.S.

Samsung has unveiled its new Q900FN TV, which will be the first 8K TV available in the United States when it begins shipping this October. Attendees of Berlin’s IFA trade show were the first to experience demos of the new 85-inch TV, which has a screen resolution of 7680 x 4320 pixels. If you don’t have a calculator handy, that’s a total of 33,177,600 pixels — four times the number displayed by today’s 4K UHD TVs, and sixteen times as many as a lowly 1080p display uses to create an HD image. As the “Q” in its name would suggest, the Q900FN is a QLED display, Samsung’s enhanced version of an LED-backlit LCD. These displays use a layer of photo-emissive “quantum dots” (semiconductor nanocrystals) to convert the light from an LED into pure monochromatic red, green, and blue light. This method of generating colored light is more precise than the the use of RGB color filters, and it results in a brighter and more saturated image than standard LCD displays can produce. LG’s OLED displays still outperform Samsung’s QLED in some areas (such as the ability to display perfectly dark black levels), but Samsung’s tech literally outshines the competition when it comes to maximum brightness. The new Q900FN uses the newest version of QLED, and has a peak brightness of 4,000 nits. That’s about twice as high as Samsung’s current Q9 Series 4K TVs, which are already much brighter than LG’s current OLED models. These differences may not be critical in a completely dark room, but in real-world daytime viewing environments, brightness matters. Higher peak brightness also makes a significant difference when it comes to creating the punchy images and vivid specular highlights made possible by HDR content. The Q900FN supports the new HDR10+ high dynamic range format, and can produce 100% color volume in the DCI-P3 color space, according to Samsung.

8K TV but Where's the Content?

Like LG’s W Series Signature OLED TVs, Samsung’s Q900FN features a single, thin cable that carries both power and AV signals to the screen, presumably from a separate box that will connect to a power outlet and to source components via HDMI. The Samsung also offers a new feature that recognizes connected devices (such as sound-bars and AV receivers) and automatically selects the appropriate audio output. When the TV is not in use, an optional Ambient Mode displays weather, news, or artwork. These style and convenience features sound nice enough, but of course the real story with the Q900FN is the enormous 8K screen, which raises one obvious question: do we really need 33 million pixels? There is, of course, no 8K content currently available. The Japanese state broadcaster NHK announced earlier this year that it would launch the first-ever 8K TV channel in December of 2018, in an effort to prepare for broadcasting the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in 8K. But outside of Japan, it is unlikely that we will see any 8K content within the next few years, if then. Creating 8K content would require huge investments in new infrastructure, from the cameras used to capture the images to the hardware and software used in editing and mastering — not to mention the delivery pipeline to people’s homes.

Will Upscaling to 8K Be Enough?

It is therefore unsurprising that Samsung is emphasizing its new TV’s proprietary AI (artificial intelligence) image processing, which upscales lower-resolution images to 8K. Whether the source is a 1080i broadcast or a 4K stream from Netflix, the Q900FN’s “Quantum Processor 8K” uses machine learning to boost the resolution, reduce noise, and create more realistic edges and textures within the image. This upscaling process reportedly results in a picture that has more depth, with less blur during fast motion. It remains to be seen whether these enhancements will provide a real advantage over 4K TVs, which already display more than enough resolution for most people. But as TVs get bigger and bigger, people are effectively sitting closer and closer to the image. On a 55-inch or even 65-inch TV, you have to sit pretty close to see much of a difference in resolution between 1080p and 4K. But with an 85-inch screen, that difference is obvious. How big is big enough to justify the move to 8K?

A few years ago, the advent of 4K TVs also marked the arrival of HDR, so those new sets offered more than just a bump in pixel-count over their 1080p predecessors. Will 8K bring enough to the table to fuel another generation of upgrades? Manufacturers seem to think so. Although the Q900FN will be the first 8K TV in the U.S., Samsung is hardly the only company working on 8K screens. Sharp, which remains a popular brand in Japan, is already showing off its second generation 8K TVs. Having shown an early prototype of the tech at IFA 2016, the company shipped its first 8K TVs to Japanese customers last year. LG and Sony are both working on 88-inch 8K OLED TVs, though they haven’t yet announced when they might become available. The Chinese company TCL, which builds the popular Roku TVs, has also announced upcoming 8K models. Samsung has not yet announced pricing for the Q900FN, but it’s expected to fall between $10,000 and $20,000. Smaller (and presumably less expensive) models were shown alongside the 85-inch set in Berlin, but for now, these 65-, 75-, and 82-inch versions will not be available in the United States. Is 8K the inevitable next step for TVs, or will consumers decide that the potential benefits simply aren’t compelling enough to justify the high prices?

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