Samsung unveiled its newest gigantic television, the 115-inch Q90F, at an event in New Jersey this week. The $27,000 TV appeared alongside the company’s other 115-inch Micro RGB TV, which costs even more: $30,000. But what do these LCD TVs give you that smaller, cheaper models can’t? I saw both TVs on display, and this is what I think.
The QN90F is the largest model in Samsung’s flagship QN90F range, which starts in a 42-inch size. This 4K TV boasts the company’s top technologies — one it shares with the Micro RGB TV — but there is one big difference between the two.
Why do they cost so much?
The short answer: Most TVs sold are 65 inches or smaller. Display factories can economically produce TVs of certain sizes, but as the size increases, the cost also increases. TVs bigger than 100 inches are a novelty right now, and so are priced accordingly. Samsung currently has not one but two 115-inch TVs, and their closeness in price is likely due to the production cost of the large panel itself.
Apart from an identical 115-inch size, these two TVs have another costly feature in common: the QN90F and Micro RGB TV both feature the company’s Glare Free technology. In the QN90F room, I stood between a wall and an opaque window — an environment that would be hell for most TVs. In addition, these gigantic TVs feature Samsung’s Supersize Picture Enhancer, which is a sharpness algorithm designed to fill those screens with detail and reduce artefacts.
The most significant difference between the two LCD TVs, though, is the backlighting: the QN90F has an LED backlight with a Quantum Dot color filter, while the Micro RGB, as the name suggests, uses a micro-RGB backlight. Samsung wouldn’t tell me specifics such as the number of backlighting zones on either model, but the QN90F has Quantum Matrix Technology, which has the “most precise lighting control for enhanced contrast and clarity.”
The other TV’s micro-RGB backlight is much smaller, and it allows both finer light control and the ability to remove the color filter layer. Samsung says this has benefits for its color reproduction, too, with 100% coverage of the BT.2020 color space. If this is accurate, it’s the first consumer TV to hit this HDR-related reference target.
I have $30,000 to burn. What should I get?
The Samsung Micro RBG TV had impressively bright colors.
Having seen the two TVs one after the other, the differences between the two models were obvious. However, I only had around 10 minutes with either model, and they weren’t displayed together, so I wasn’t able to compare them in our typical side-by-side manner.
I briefly played some Halo (streaming via Xbox Cloud Games) on the QN90F — a luxury that the company didn’t make available on the Micro RGB. It was pretty low-res, as you might expect from cloud gaming, though I couldn’t see any smearing or tearing on the screen, even though its huge size would have more readily shown defects.
I can say it would be worth spending the extra $3,000 on the better-specified model. If you’re already spending 27,000 clams, what’s a few more? Two things helped clinch things in the Micro RGB’s favor for me. First, its off-axis performance was something I haven’t seen before from non-OLED models, with seemingly very little color shift when viewed from the side. The other was the appearance of halo effects, visible as a white halo around the Samsung logo on a black background, or their apparent lack of on the Micro RGB TV.
Earlier this year I wrote about how big TVs are in our future, and while 115-inch monsters are expensive right now, they will inevitably get, well, maybe not “cheap,” but more attainable. These two models are just part of the groundswell. Two models from Chinese rivals are already available right now — the Hisense UX116 and the TCL 115QM891G — and they’re also priced between $20,000 and $30,000.
I can imagine that in the next few months, the prices will change and the QN90F will come down to, say, $24,000 — a figure which would be much more representative of the gap between the two models. While I will likely never get a formal review out of any of these TVs — the size alone makes testing them difficult — they do point to a fascinating future where your wall is now a TV.
