The best 8K TVs have amazing pictures because they have four times as many pixels as 4K TVs, and 4K TVs have four times as many pixels as 1080p HD TVs.
A 1080p HD TV has a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels, while a 4K TV has a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 pixels. This means that an 8K TV has a resolution of an amazing 7,680 x 4,320 pixels. So, if your TV is big enough, the difference in picture quality between it and a 4K TV will be amazing.
Up until recently, it was very expensive to get those extra pixels on one of the best 8K TVs. So, some of the best TVs have been 8K, but only people with a lot of money could afford them. As technology gets better, the price of 8K TVs is coming down. The same thing happened with the best OLED TVs. Their prices went down, and you no longer needed a second mortgage to buy one.
1. Samsung QN900B Neo QLED 8K
With its mini-LED panel, the Samsung QN900B Neo QLED 8K TV brings home entertainment to a whole new level. It has stunning picture quality, great color and brightness, great sound, and great blacks. It also looks great when it’s turned off, which is a bonus.
Samsung’s “Quantum” Mini LEDs are 1/40th as thick as a regular LED. This means that thousands more LEDs can be put in the backlight. That means black levels and dimming zones that are much more accurate and are almost impossible to tell apart from an OLED.
Smaller LEDs also give more accuracy and less blooming, so it should be much less likely that bright parts of the screen will spill over into darker parts in an unnatural way. We didn’t see this at all. Because this TV also has Samsung’s Multi-Intelligence AI upscaling, the QN900B is always able to show images that look better than their source.
The only bad thing is the Smart Hub UI, which takes Samsung’s smart TV interface, which was already great, and makes it worse. You can no longer change settings and viewing modes on the fly. Even though this is a small problem that will probably be fixed soon, it may still bother you for now.
2. Samsung QN900A Neo QLED
The Q900A, which is also made by Samsung, is the second TV on our list of the best 8K TVs. Like its sibling, it has great picture quality, great colors and brightness, great sound, and great black levels. It’s also a good-looking TV. Even though it can’t make lights and colors as well as an OLED TV, its contrast levels are very close to those of an OLED TV.
The Samsung has a mini-LED panel and an AI-based “Neo Quantum Processor 8K” that did a great job of upscaling. In our review, we wrote: “The way an 8K TV handles upscaling is one of the things that makes it stand out. The QN900A does a great job of making content look crystal clear without any extra smoothing, which is great.”
Even though it’s more expensive than most LED TVs, you don’t have to spend a lot of money on a huge one. There are three sizes, and the 65-inch one starts at a relatively low $4,999/£5,999. Because of this, we think this is the best 8K TV for budgets in the middle.
3. Samsung QN800B
The Samsung QN800B is an 8K TV that is very impressive. It has gaming features, a full smart TV experience, a good audio system, an external box for physical inputs, a mini-LED screen that promises better backlighting than LCD panels, and a profile that is thinner than the thinnest OLED TV you can buy right now.
Wow, it looks amazing. In our review, we said, “The brightness is good, the black levels are good for backlit LCD screens, the color palette is large and natural, and both edge-definition and motion control are good.”
But the backlight control isn’t as good as it is on other high-performance TVs that don’t have 8K resolution. During our tests, we also found that the way the screen controls its own brightness can make it hard to see clearly at times.
Also, if the Samsung has to scale up content that isn’t as detailed as 4K content, it can have a lot of trouble. Which wouldn’t be a problem if you could watch everything you wanted in 8K resolution, but that’s not the case yet.
The 65-inch model costs £2,699, which is about $2799 or AU$4499. This isn’t one of the more expensive 8K TVs you can buy. By the standards of 8K TV, that’s “cheap,” but there are better 4K TVs out there. No, neither the LG C2 nor the Sony A95K are ready to blow you away with their 8K picture quality. However, they both do a better job with 4K content.
Conclusion
You might also be able to find older Samsung 8K TVs for even less money, but you won’t be getting the newest technology. Even a year is a long time in the world of TVs these days.
We would tell most people who want to buy a TV to wait a little longer before getting an 8K TV, since it’s still very expensive. That’s always the case with new technology, but prices go down over time as more people buy the same thing. For now, 8K is mostly for early adopters. We won’t get an 8K TV for a while.
