While Samsung’s first ever Quantum Dot OLED (QD OLED) TVs have understandably being hoovering up most of the headlines this year, they’re not actually the flagship models in Samsung’s 2022 range. Far from it, in fact. Instead this year’s flag-waving duties actually belong to Samsung’s QN900B range of LED TVs - and you don’t have to spend long exploring the 75-inch QN75QN900B’s feature list to start to understand why.

For starters, it’s an 8K TV. I realise this won’t in itself be enough to persuade many of you - even a few of you - to instantly rush out and buy one. As I covered in this earlier article, sales figures suggest that 8K TVs continue to be met with apathy by today’s AV consumers. However, I’ve seen enough first hand evidence now to know that 8K TVs accompanied by high quality processing systems can deliver better pictures than 4K sets, even without there being really any real-world native 8K sources to draw on.

The Samsung QN75QN900B

Perhaps more importantly, though, for better or (if you really are a 4K only kind of person) worse, 8K TVs typically accompany their massive 7640x4320 pixel counts with lots of other premium picture features delivered to a level of specification you don’t typically get with 4K TVs. In other words, their 8K resolution is just the beginning of their picture quality appeal. Which, it’s fair to say, needs to be the case with the 75QN900B given that it sets you back $5,799.99 in the US (and that’s on the back of a recent $700 price cut) or a mighty £6,499 in the UK.

More than just a monster pixel count

The 75QN900B’s ‘above and beyond 8K’ appeal kicks off with its design. The impressive 75-inch expanse of screen appears to be enclosed by pretty much no screen frame at all, while its rear end is almost as flat as the screen and sticks out much less than that of its QN900A predecessor. Which was itself hardly chunky.

Despite the slender depth and barely-there frame, the QN75QN900B (which sells as the QE75QN900B in Europe) still manages to house speakers at various points all around its edges, tucked behind an attractive grilled finish, in order to deliver a flagship-worthy 6.2.2-channel version of Samsung’s Object Tracking Sound system. This steers sounds so that they appear in precisely the correct place on - or even just off - the screen. The system even tracks the sounds of objects as they move across or around the screen.

The mini LED TV lighting in the 75QN900B is backed up by 1920 local dimming zones.

Helping the 75QN900B look so monolithic and slender is the way it uses an external ‘One Connect’ box to house of all of its connections and much of its processing power. This year’s One Connect is much slimmer and smaller than the one provided with 2021’s QN900A model, and can slot tidily onto the back of the neck of the 75QN900B’s heavy duty, centrally mounted desktop stand.

The One Connect hooks up to the TV using a single long, slender cable that carries power as well as all the AV data, giving anyone who wants to hang the TV on the wall with the One Connect tucked away elsewhere a nearly cable-free finish.

Connections are as uncompromising as you’d hope for such a premium priced TV. In particular, all four HDMIs are capable of handling the 4K/120Hz graphics now possible from the PS5, Xbox Series X and high-end PC graphics cards, as well as variable refresh rates (including AMD’s FreeSync Premium Pro system) and automatic low latency mode switching. Plus, of course, there’s 8K at 60Hz support should you be lucky enough to find an external device capable of supplying such signals to your ready, willing and able TV.

Samsung's new smart TV home screen

There are three USBs for multimedia playback too, as well as the now impossible to live without Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless connection options.

The 75QN900B proves more adept than most at ‘sniffing’ potential wireless devices to connect to without you always having to trigger the connection, while its Tizen-based smart engine delivers a huge array of content options.

This smart content has previously been delivered in a very tidy and compact interface, too, so it’s a shame to see this interface jettisoned on the 75QN900B in favour of a more cumbersome, less logical and generally less helpful new menu system. Hopefully Samsung can refine this interface for its 2023 TV range.

Samsung does provide, though, good support for the Bixby, Alexa or Google Assistant voice control systems, which can help you navigate around the OSD’s frustrations.

The One Connect box's connections.

As we’ve come to expect from Samsung’s high-end TVs, the 75QN900B uses Quantum Dots to create its colours. Even more significantly, its pixels are illuminated using a premium version of mini LED technology that fits far more LEDs behind the 75-inch screen than you’d get with regular LED TVs, and then lights all those tiny LEDs via a much more sophisticated local dimming system than you get with pretty much any other TV in 2022. This sees the screen using an AI/machine learning-bolstered processing system to drive no less than 1,920 separate dimming zones, while Samsung’s new Shape Adaptive Light technology even provides a degree of extra light management within each zone.

Samsung’s flagship 4K mini LED, the QN95B, by comparison, uses ‘just’ 720 separate dimming zones. And while I’m putting numbers on ways the 75QN900B outguns Samsung’s 4K flagship, it’s also capable of pumping out in excess of 4,000 nits of peak brightness on a 10% white HDR window test screen, compared with around 2,800 nits on the QN95B.

This brightness performance crushes the sub-1000 nit peaks you get with most OLED TVs, as well as the marginally over 1000-nit peaks you get with Quantum Dot OLED TVs, raising hopes of a whole new level of HDR performance. Especially if the mini LED enables Samsung’s screen to combine its enormous brightness peaks with strong black levels. That said, even the 75QN900B’s hefty 1920 local dimming count can’t hold a candle in terms of local light control to the pixel by pixel light output of OLED/QD OLED screens.

The 75QN900B in a posh house that is very much not mine.

The 75QN900B builds on the already impressive processing power of its flagship 4K sibling with a specially optimised for 8K version of Samsung’s grandly named Neural Quantum Processor. This should prove especially effective at upscaling content to 8K (handy given the lack of native 8K sources), driving all those extra dimming zones, and optimising a new 14-bit contrast sampling designed to deliver clearer, cleaner details in dark areas.

The 75QN900B also claims to deliver wider viewing angle support than regular LED/LCD TVs, and bolsters the gaming-friendly connectivity we mentioned earlier with a Game Bar that gives you at a glance information about the gaming signal the TV is receiving, as well as quick access to key gaming features.

The set’s fastest Game Mode setting also gets the time the screen takes to render images down to under 10ms - an exceptionally rapid response made all the more impressive by the fact that it has to upscale in real time all current gaming sources to its 8K pixel count.

Impressive though the 75QN900B’s specifications look versus any other TV in the brand’s range (and the vast majority of other LCD TVs, period), they’re not spectacularly different in their fundamentals to those of 2021’s QN900A. The Mini LED lighting and local dimming zone count is the same, and both sets sported an 8K resolution. The HDR support also remains limited to HDR10, HLG and HDR10+, meaning that disappointingly there’s no Dolby Vision provision.

The main picture differences/improvements are therefore limited to the aforementioned Shape Adaptive Light Control feature, the move up to 14-bit processing (though the panel remains 10-bit), the use of a greater number of neural networks in developing the picture processing’s recognition and handling of different source types, and a Smart Calibration system that lets you calibrate your TV to a startling degree of accuracy using just your mobile phone.

Corner detail of the Samsung 75QN900B, showing the grilled edge finish.

While these improvements might sound more technical than revolutionary, it turns out that they have a big impact on the 75QN900B’s performance, enhancing things in multiple small areas and delivering a big leap forward in what was arguably its QN900A predecessor’s only major area of weakness.

This big improvement relates to the intensity with which the 75QN900B is able to play small bright parts of otherwise dark images. Even the combination of mini LED lighting and lots of dimming zones couldn’t prevent 2021’s QN900A from leaving such small bright highlights looking rather dim as the backlight struggle to maintain consistent black colours for the dark areas.

The 75QN900B is able to deliver small bright highlights of dark images with much more intensity and verve, making tricky content such as star fields and street lights against a night sky look much more contrast rich, natural, convincing, exciting and ‘HDR’.

Sometimes a particularly small, isolated bright highlight can still lack sparkle, but crucially the size of these ‘flat spots’ has been much reduced on from 2021, meaning they occur less often and are less distracting when they do.

If you mount the 75QN900B on a wall, you only have to worry about one cable running into the screen ... [+] thanks to the One Connect box.

Samsung has managed to achieve these punchier bright highlights on the 75QN900, too, without compromising the class leading (by LCD TV standards) black levels that have characterised all of its mini LED sets. Especially its flagship models. So dark scenes enjoy not only black colours that look black to a degree you would only normally see with OLED technologies, but those remarkable black levels tend to remain outstandingly uniform and free of light ‘blooming’ for an LED/local dimming solution. Despite the punchier looking highlights.

Since Samsung hasn’t increased the number of dimming zones or mini LEDs from 2021’s QN900A model, I can only assume that the 75QN900B’s local contrast improvements are down to a combination of picture processing improvements and the new Shape Adaptive Light Control feature.

Samsung’s pursuit of immaculate black levels for dark scenes on the 75QN900B can cause some subtle detailing in dark scenes to be crushed out of the picture when you’re using the Standard preset. Fortunately, though, you can bring much of this lost detail back with judicious tweaking of some of the Standard mode’s picture settings (especially the Contrast Enhancer) without destroying the rest of the picture.

The Samsung 75QN900B's smart remote.

While massively improving (if not entirely fixing) the bright highlight dimming issue with its illustrious predecessor, the 75QN900B has retained that predecessor’s other strengths. The screen’s brightness, for instance, is truly fierce, unlocking levels of punch, dynamism and pure luminance with full-screen HDR imagery that you won’t find anywhere else bar, perhaps, Sony’s flagship 8K TVs.

Did you just see a real bright light?

If it’s the 75QN900B’s black levels and suppression of blooming that most sets it apart from rival LCD TVs, it’s its enormous brightness that gives Samsung’s 2022 flagship TV its biggest advantage over the OLED competition that’s now so popular with premium TV buyers. Even the brightest OLEDs will struggle to get barely a quarter as bright as the 75QN900B can (though of course, OLED maintains peerless local contrast capabilities).

As well as bringing out more of the raw visceral impact of aggressively mastered HDR sources, the 75QN900B’s brightness potentially makes it a strong option if you typically find yourself watching TV in a bright room.

The 75QN900B’s extreme brightness helps it unlock a huge volume of colour, too, while its Quantum Dot colour system ensures that the spectacular colour volumes on show extend equally well across the whole colour palette. So provided you avoid the at times over-enthusiastic Dynamic preset, the screen’s bold, punchy colours enjoy excellent balance and subtlety.

Speaker detail of the Samsung 75QN900B

This again helps the TV deliver on the extra realism, especially with bright content, that HDR was at least partly developed to provide.

It’s good to see Samsung taking a much more open-minded, wide-ranging approach to the way the 75QN900B deploys its vast brightness and colour capabilities than it used too, as well. By which I mean that as well as the OTT Dynamic picture preset and aggressive but typically extremely watchable Standard preset that really shows off what the screen is capable of, you get both a decently ‘accurate’ Movie picture preset and even a Filmmaker Mode designed with the UHD Alliance to deliver an image that closely tracks the image values used by content creators in mastering studios.

While I’d still like to see Samsung include a few more picture preset options, the days where Samsung’s presets were a case of ‘our way or the highway’ appear to have gone.

It’s a testament to the 75QN900B’s all-round quality that I’ve barely mentioned the impact of its headline 8K resolution yet. Even though it does make a positive difference.

Native 8K content - provided in our case predominantly by Samsung and Spears & Munsil demo sequences - looks more natural, lifelike and refined than even the best 4K TV can. The best way to put it is that you just feel like you’re looking through an open window rather than looking at a TV picture. Which is quite something when you’re talking about a screen as big as 75 inches.

The quality of Samsung’s AI-driven upscaling also yields resolution benefits with 4K sources, adding a mild sense of extra sharpness but, more noticeably, also giving the picture a denser, more three-dimensional feel. It does this, too, without making the picture look processed or unnatural. There’s no exaggerated grain (provided you don’t overcook the sharpness setting), and edges typically avoid the coarse look and glowing ‘echo’ that low quality upscaling can cause. Nor is there any smearing or lag in upscaled 4K images.

The upscaling even does a pretty amazing job of removing noise and source mess in HD sources. Inevitably, though, given the sheer numbers of pixels involved, while HD content is perfectly watchable, even enjoyable on the 75QN900B, it can sometimes look a little softer and less pristine than it does on the best quality 4K TVs.

First impressions of the 75QN900B’s motion processing aren’t great. In the TV’s Dynamic and Standard picture presets the default motion processing causes all kinds of unwanted and distracting side effects. It seems genuinely strange to me that a brand as typically accomplished with its processing as Samsung should be happy to send the 75QN900B out with such rough and ready motion defaults.

Fortunately you can improve things massively with a little manual intervention. I’d suggest choosing the Custom setting for the Picture Clarity menu where the motion settings reside, and then setting the separate Judder and Blur motion processing elements to their three or four levels. Don’t feel obliged to stick with these specific suggestions, or imagine that you need to set the two motion components to the same level. But I really would strongly recommend that you don’t stick with the default motion settings, while bearing in mind that the higher you push the judder and blur processing elements, the more likely you will be to see unwanted processing side effects.

Viewing angles hold up better on the 75QN900B than they do on most LCD TVs. However, the backlight blooming around bright objects that’s so impressively handled when viewing the TV head on does become substantially more noticeable from an angle.

The 75QN900B deserves not to have me finish talking about its picture quality on a negative note, though. So let’s conclude on a real high: Its gaming performance. The screen’s extreme brightness, colour range, contrast and 8K sharpness add up to what are at times, at least, the most flat-out spectacular gaming images I’ve seen from any TV to date.

The 120Hz motion performance works beautifully too (actually the screen can handle up to 144Hz), the VRR support is flawless, and the various tweaks Samsung lets you make to motion processing and relative black levels all do a great job of enabling you to optimise the image for different types of game. And all the 75QN900B’s gaming goodies are delivered, don’t forget, with input lag times only fractionally behind those you get from dedicated gaming monitors.

Illustration of the 75QN900B's OTS audio system.

The 75QN900B’s sound isn’t quite as aggressively spectacular as its pictures. The main reason for this is the way the soundstage seems to mostly be built behind the screen, rather than the sound being propelled powerfully forward into your room. This can leave you feeling slightly detached from the action at times, and can deny dense movie moments a little clarity and detail.

On the upside, a bank of drivers built into its rear help the 75QN900B deliver a strong bass performance by built-in TV sound system standards, while the impressive number of speakers built into the TV’s frame combine with Dolby Atmos playback to deliver onscreen sound effects - including dialogue - with an almost baffling degree of positional accuracy. This injects real life and realism into the audio experience, compensating handily for the audio’s general lack of forward projection.

The Samsung QN75QN900B is a sensational TV - and not just because of its 8K resolution. In fact, while all those pixels do contribute to the set’s stunning images, they’re arguably the least of its picture charms. Where it really earns its flagship corn is with its stunning brightness, colour and, most strikingly of all for an LCD TV, contrast. So while even at its recently discounted price the 75QN900B represents a serious hit to your wallet, it also delivers in many areas the most flat-out spectacular pictures the TV world has given us to date.

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