UHD vs UHD Premium TV?
Community Forums/General Help/UHD vs UHD Premium TV?
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| My TV is getting on for six years old and I'm planning on upgrading it in a few weeks. I'm quite tempted by the Samsung UE48JU6400. It's about £500 and it has 4k resolution, four HDMI 2.0's, Samsung's smart hub is really nice, their game mode makes their TVs by far the best for gaming and at 48" it's about the right size for me. I'm just looking at the new Samsung UE49KS7000. This matches all of the features of the cheaper set but also adds UHD Premium certification. So it uses Samsung's new Quantum Dots, has 10bit color, HDR, etc. The input lag is possibly slightly lower than the cheaper model too, but most of Samsung's TVs have very low lag anyway. That cannot possibly be worth another £800 though, can it? Is HDR that good or just another gimmick that no one will care about the TV manufacturers will be ripping out of their TVs in a couple of years like they already are with 3D? |
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| Hard to say -- one problem that I can see with HDR 'enhancements' is that the TV selectively messes with color curves and brightness trying to bring our 'more detail' in really light and really dark areas of the screen. Unfortunately, unless your source material is HDR as well, there's a high likelyhood that you're just amplifying noise and compression artifacts that normally wouldn't have been noticable because they blend into the background. It's one of those things that can be made to look fantastic with the proper demonstration videos in the store, but in the real world with a hundreds years of back-catalog video your mileage may vary. :-? Personally I wouldn't pay extra for HDR functionality-- any time the TV tries to 'improve' things over the version that the studio delivered, who knows what you're going to end up with. |
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| OK, I'll throw in some random thoughts Gabriel. I have a Samsung UE40HU6900 (silly confusing codes) which seems to be the 40" equivalent to yours cheaper option. Gaming on it is great but make sure you name your TVs HDMI port to "PC" or the 'gaming mode' option will be greyed out. A couple of things to check. On mine, the RJ45 is only 100Mbit, which is not enough for smooth 4K network streaming, unless pretty compressed that is. I have a gig router, so this was quite frustrating. There should be more options for dealing with smoothing of fast moving images in the TVs menu. Frustratingly, this is present on their higher end TVs. I installed a hacked BIOS that enabled them back onto my TV and they worked fine. I have since removed the BIOS to use built in BIOS updater, which although it removed the menu options, puts the TV back into auto update mode. A 2.0 BluRay should not have any problem. It has an USB 3, this is the simplest option to stream from files via a decent external drive. 4K TVs are fantastic to look at but unless you have the eyesight of a hawk, you loose the definition at over about two meters(A bed length if you have it in your bedroom). Gaming is something else, 4K makes 3D vistas lush with detail but you need at decent rig to get 60hz and HDMI 2.0 outputs. There is no display ports but I've heard good things about this dongle... https://www.amazon.co.uk/CLUB3D-Displayport-4K60Hz-Active-Adapter/dp/B017BQ8I54/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464046460&sr=8-1&keywords=displayport+to+hdmi+2+0 It a sneaky way to get at a feature that is only supported on the more expensive models. The 'smart' part of the TV behaves like a big tablet, with the controller acting as a pointer. It's quite good and you can install quite a lot of apps NetFlix etc. But don't expect opensource stuff like KODI/XBMP etc. There is Plex though. |
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| Thanks guys. @Xlsior - Does HDR work that way? I was under the impression that it was something which was only displayed if the signal contained HDR and was sending 10 bits of color. @Ian - Some good, info. Thanks. I definitely hadn't considered the RJ45 issue that you pointed out and that's definitely worth checking out. Not much point having a 4k TV if it can't smoothly stream 4k from Amazon and Netflix. |
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| @Xlsior - Does HDR work that way? I was under the impression that it was something which was only displayed if the signal contained HDR and was sending 10 bits of color. If you have a true HDR signal with 10 bits of info and the TV is 'Ultra HD Premium' you'll get the true HDR. Keep in mind: At this point in time, there isn't much source material in 10 bits yet. Amazon and Netflix are starting to have a couple of original serial that do, but even standard blu-ray discs don't have 10 bit video, it's all 8 bit. (I don't know if there's any UHD bluray discs yet) since at least there IS an official standard now I'm sure that media will start appearing, but "today" there isn't much to pick from yet. |
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| I went out to PC World this afternoon to see the UE49KS7000 and the even more expensive UE49KS8000 in action. The KS7000 was disappointing. Even on the test footage, it had huge color banding. Motion processing was very nice and the colors were excellent. The KS8000 was much better on the color banding front, no issues at all there. It looked like a really top notch TV. Then I came home and ordered the UE48JU6400K for £500. As lovely as the KS8000 is, I just couldn't justify spending three times the price on it. Plus, the KS8000 has no headphone jack. So you either need an audio amplifier or a new pair of bluetooth headphones if you want to use headphones with it. The JU6400K arrives on Saturday. If the image quality is massively inferior to the KS8000, I can just sent it back for a refund and get the KS8000 but I doubt I'll be able to see what the extra £1000 was buying me. Thanks for the advice. I do think the HDR TVs do an excellent job of upscaling the color as well as the image. Samsung seem to be better at upscaling than most other manufacturers so YMMV there. Ultimately, it just came back to price and £1000 is a lot for better colors and contrast. |
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| Ah, sounds good. Good luck with the unboxing, that's always the best moment! ;0) |
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| Well I got the TV over the weekend and I'm very happy with it. The difference between this and the UHD Premium set for three times the price is very small. Just one problem so far. Maybe you can help, Ian, since you appear to have a similar model. I've plugged a USB3 hdd in on the HDD USB slot. The drive itself is powered through a power supply so the USB cable is only being used for data. The TV doesn't say or do anything. Do I have to do something to set it up or is it just there when I want it? I was expecting some kind of plug and play alert asking me to set it up for use with the TV? |
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| You might have to configure something. On my TV I generally have to manually select what input is to be used. For example, I have a Roku 3 attached to one of the HDMI ports. By default I have to manually select that port. But after the appropriate setup, in this case on the Roku, the port change happens automatically whenever there is any activity on the Roku remote. I don't know about the USB. I've plugged in a thumb drive and changed ports manually. Maybe there is some way to tell the TV to detect the inserted drive and make the change. I never used the USB enough to bother learning about this. |
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| Thanks Floyd. Switching the sources enabled me to playback items from the drive. (It had already been setup automatically.) There was nothing there about recording though so I just tried hitting record. Then I was prompted to run a test, which was what I was expecting it to do automatically. It seems to be fine with both playback and recording now. Thanks! |
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| Sorry, missed your reply Gabriel, good the hear that you got it sorted out though. |
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