Review: Samsung Series 9 burns up the screen on 4K viewing

Samsung’s latest smart TV and Blu-ray player combine to finally make sense of having a 4K TV.

A Samsung Series 9 KS9500 65-inch SUHD TV.

Can you cope with a gorefest and enough open flesh wounds to turn you vegetarian for your next five lifetimes? Because that’s the realism you get with a premium Samsung’s smart TV in 2016, watching a 4K Blu-ray disk on its new high capacity Blu-ray player. In my case, it was a 4K version of The Revenant with Leonardo DiCaprio.

In 2016, the technology catch cry is 4K and HDR (high dynamic range) together. 4K movies show incredible detail, but without the HDR element, you can still miss detail carved out by subtle colour changes in light and dark sections of a scene, such as the details under the shade of a tree on a bright and sunny day.

4K movies with HDR show that incredible detail everywhere. In the case of The Revenant, the story of an 1820s fur trading expedition, you see the subtle shadings of grime on people’s clothes, the dirt under their fingernails, their filthy faces and beards. You see the intricate details of open wounds and the stumps of legs freshly ripped off in a frenzied attack. When DiCaprio is repeatedly clawed by a bear, you see parts of his body with slabs of flesh missing.

Confronting? Yes. Unnecessary? That depends on your point of view. The Revenant is no third-rate splatter gore cheapie from the 70s. It’s majestic cinema that, through advanced cinematography, shows the nauseating conditions people 200 years ago suffered as it tells a challenging story. It’s just that we’re not used to such detail. We’ve been raised on generations of lower resolution.

As well as releasing its new TVs, Samsung is selling its high capacity UBD-K8500 Blu-ray player that plays these 4K/HDR movies comprising much larger files. Capacity is up to about 100 Gigabytes. The player costs $599 locally and premium movies $45-$50. Watching 4K Blu-ray movies in full resolution finally makes sense of having a 4K TV. All we need now is more content.

As for Samsung’s 2016 SUHD TVs, the 8 and 9 series models are “Ultra HD Premium” certified, which is the new industry standard. So you get 4K with HDR, up to 1000 nit brightness and a 10-bit colour palette — a broader range of fine colour variation. The series 9 65-inch curved TV model I used in this review costs $6299, while the flat version is a tad cheaper, $5999.

As for picture quality, it’s hard to surpass. I’m yet to be convinced that Samsung’s super UHD (SUHD) technology is as good as the OLED (organic LED) quality of LG’s EF950T that I reviewed in March. The backlighting offered with OLED offers an incredible sharpness that doesn’t seem to be quite there with side-lit LCD displays. But the shades of differences are fine in 2016. It’s still amazing.

Samsung went all out to convince we journalists how amazing the picture quality is. It engaged experimental physicist Professor David Reilly from The University of Sydney to explain its quantum dot technology that generates colour on the new displays. Sadly, your TV salesperson at JBs or Harvey-Norman isn’t an expert in quantum mechanics and will struggle with lecturing customers about TV quality at atomic level; it will be a case of “suck it and see” for consumers.

My review setup included a series 5 soundbar on the front of the set linked to a wireless rear speaker kit. Speakers at the back plug into a box that communicates wirelessly with the soundbar. You don’t need cables running through the room. The kit costs $179.

This year’s premium models claim to recognise set-top boxes, gaming consoles and others that you connect to an HDMI plug. You plug them in, and the TV will label the devices as, say an Xbox. You’ll then use Samsung’s One Remote to control them all.

Samsung lists 25 devices that the TV will auto-detect and label. They include PlayStations, Xboxes, Fetch TV, Apple TV, various Roku boxes, Google Chromecast and more. While I did see this working at a demonstration, it didn’t work with an Xbox plugged into my review set. Therefore, I couldn’t also test the One Remote’s ability to control the Xbox.

The One Remote is long and slender with only a handful of buttons. There’s navigation keys, back, home, forward and pause buttons, a volume control and channel selector. That’s all. You can use the remote for web browsing, but the cursor is not directional as with LG’s remote. You move it with the navigation buttons. There’s also a more traditional TV remote if the new one is a step too far.

Samsung’s new Tizen 3.0 user interface presents apps and functions differently. Last year menu selections ran along the bottom of the display, and sources and apps were separate.

Now there’s an extra customised bar below those apps that you can fill with up to 20 short cuts. And apps and devices are treated equally. So a shortcut to, say, a Blu-ray player can appear beside the Netflix app. The Netflix interface has been integrated into Samsung’s design so that recommended content appears on the bar above. It’s intuitive.

There is a disappointing number of apps on these TVs. While you have ABC iView, SBS On Demand, Vimeo, Plex, YouTube and Pandora, there’s no 7,9 and 10 catch up TV. That’s surprising given this is the third generation of Tizen for Samsung smart TVs. Surely Samsung can make its apps compatible between generations. And while apps are listed under categories, I couldn’t scroll through all the apps to peruse whats available.

There’s also just 9 games. They include Frontline Commando: D-Day, Asphalt 8: Airborn and Dungeon Hunter 4.

As foreshadowed, Samsung has discontinued support for 3D viewing with this premium range.

The new 4K player operates pretty much like a standard Blu-ray player. You just load a disk up in the normal manner, which takes about 18 seconds.

Despite these quibbles this 65-inch Series 9 set is an amalgam of amazing screen technology with a well-honed smart TV interface.

Samsung Series 9 SUHD TV
Price: $6299 (curved), $5999 (flat)
Rating: 8/10