Samsung Q900R QLED TVs To Land This Fall

Samsung Q900R QLED TVs To Land This Fall – IFA 2018

- August 30, 2018

Samsung's new Q900R QLED TVs with 8K content upscaling will begin hitting store shelves at September's end, according to an announcement made by the company in conjunction with IFA Berlin 2018. The televisions will be available in a total of four sizes, ranging from 65 inches up to 85 inches in 8K resolution and with HDR10+ support out of the box, but the biggest feature may be the included A.I. functionality. To begin with, although content for 8K is still relatively scarce, the Q900R features what the company calls "Quantum Processor 8K" which is responsible for upscaling content to 8K. Regardless of whether the media content is streamed, mirrored from a mobile device, or through wired-in connection, that will effectively upscale playback to 8K resolution using A.I. That happens irrespective of what quality or format is used by the source. So a user who is watching a 1080p video from YouTube or an HD movie through a DVD player or Blu-ray device will still have the benefit of a full-resolution experience. That includes contrast adjustments as well as color and color shade management.

Meanwhile, the 8K capability and dynamic range quality are accommodated by another set of enhancements Samsung refers to as "Real 8K Resolution" and "Q HDR 8K." The first of those ensures that the Samsung Q900R takes advantage of the sets' 4,000 nit peak brightness. That figure was set based on the standard met by most studios responsible for producing content, to begin with, but the enhancement also allows for far more pixels to be created by this particular model of television. By comparison, the new televisions produce four times the pixels of a standard 4K UHD set and that jumps to as many as sixteen times when compared to a standard full HD television, according to Samsung. Q HDR 8K is, as the name implies, Samsung's own term for the HDR10+ standard as applied to its 8K technology. That decoding and encoding standard allows content creators to include more metadata on a frame-by-frame basis, which Samsung's new TVs can work with and scale to 8K. The A.I. extends further to features encompassed in Samsung's SmartThings platform too. That means automatic detection and adjustments to sound output and image settings based on the system's recognition of connected peripherals or media devices.

No pricing or exact availability information has been provided for the new Q900R televisions as of this writing. They aren't likely to be as expensive as the company's aptly named "The Wall" when that eventually hits the market but it's safe to say the new sets will not be on the budget end of the market spectrum. With that said, the result of all of that technology is a set of TVs that deliver 8K resolution that is as close as possible to what the originally intended results should be with frame-by-frame optimizations. That includes optimizations to brightness levels, colors, and other aspects of each frame. Moreover, that will be applied by an A.I. system that manages each part of the enhancements on a case by case basis in order to ensure that the best image possible is presented regardless of the source.