 Fundamentally, a mini LED is just an LED, but smaller. So I can understand why some people wouldn't be that excited about it. But hold on, because mini LED, that's the same technology that enabled Apple to create their upcoming iPad Pro that everyone is so excited about, except that on Samsung's new generation of Neo QLED TVs, you can have it in a display that's up to 85 inches diagonally. On paper, they've got all the benefits of quantum dot, like crazy brightness, accurate and wide gamut color, and resistance to burn-in, and they could even deliver black levels that are competitive with OLED. That is a lot to live up to. Just like your expectations for my sponsor Segways, Honey is the free to use shopping tool that helps search some of the best promo codes on lots of your favorite sites. Get it today at joinhoney.com slash LTT. In the high-end TV space today, you essentially have two competing technologies, QLED, which is short for quantum dot LED backlit LCD, and OLED, which is short for organic LED. You've probably heard me call OLED the best TV technology on the market, and justifiably so. Its main advantage is that each individual pixel acts as its own backlight and can be turned off individually, allowing the color black to be just actually black, as in a complete lack of light. However, it's not for everyone. At least as of the 2020 models, OLED displays just aren't bright enough that I would call them a perfect option for a well-lit environment like this one. Although LG did just launch their second gen OLED panels, which are supposedly much brighter. Get subscribed so you don't miss our upcoming review. We have a Sony TV of all things that has one of those. Getting back to more traditional display designs though. When you've got a backlight shining through one or multiple filter layers, the only way to achieve black is to remove or block as much of that light as you can. Now with a single full screen backlight, the best that you could really do was a washed out sort of bluish, purpley black that makes it virtually impossible for older TVs to display HDR or high dynamic range content. To combat this, manufacturers came up with the idea of splitting the backlight into zones that could be individually dimmed to reduce the amount of light in dark areas of the scene, making them more black or well, rather less lit. Really cool. But when you only have 50 zones, for example, on a 75 inch display, they can be pretty large and very obvious resulting in something called the halo effect, which is just a fancy way of saying, wow, I can really see where the backlight zones are and they're super distracting. It's especially noticeable when a user interface element comes up over top of a dark background like a loading circle or media controls. That's not to say though, that there aren't any TVs with lots of backlight zones like Vizio's P series Quantum X, for example, which has 480 on the 75 inch model. But even that is not really competitive with the nearly 8.3 million zones on an equivalent 4K OLED. So either OLEDs need to get brighter, QLEDs need to get enough backlighting zones to effectively eliminate the halo effect, or we just need something else altogether before we end up with something that I would call the ideal viewing experience, regardless of the environment. Now, Samsung themselves are working on micro LED displays, which would similarly to OLED displays have pixel level control, but they are not how you say price feasible for the average end user just yet. That long history lesson is where Neo QLED comes in. This is Samsung's first foray into mini LED technology. Mini LEDs were developed to help shrink the backlight LEDs down as much as possible in an effort to add more dimming zones. And this is the same approach that Apple takes with their new iPad Pro, except that it has nearly 10,000 mini LEDs contributing to 2,500 zones on just a 12.9 inch display. That is very impressive density to say the least. This TV by contrast, pun intended, isn't anywhere near the level that Apple is able to achieve. More on that later, but I still wanna give it a shot. So let's... Oh gosh! Well, just finished the setup process here and it's got a nice phone wizard to make the setup easier, like most modern TVs and consoles. But one thing that did stand out that was positive was that Samsung allows you to choose your own voice assistant rather than forcing you to use Bixby. That truly is a pretty nice touch. Now price wise, the QN85A we have here is at nearly the same price level as LG's 2020 model OLEDs like the C10 at each size. So we grabbed a 48 inch C10 for our image quality comparison. Don't mind the fact that they're a little bit different in terms of size. Now both of them are in their default filmmaker modes for the most accurate representation of the original footage. But it is worth noting that these modes are not typically the brightest that they can do. In a bright room, and this is a very bright room, we've got direct sunlight coming in, bouncing off the floor over at the other end there, you've got all the lights on. They look kind of similar. If you lied to me and said, that's an OLED and that's an OLED, I'd be like, okay. It looks totally fine. I don't notice any bloom. Nope. It's hard to tell in these scenes though, but no, it looks good. If it's hard to tell, that means they're doing a good job. So what I've read is that Samsung's algorithm for doing this sort of stuff is very passive. Like they really try to not have bloom. As opposed to seeking the blackest possible black levels. So like if you notice in certain scenes, if you have very dark and just a small amount of light, that light will not look very bright. Is LG in like a warm preset for its filmmaker mode? Because honestly, the Samsung looks way more true to life to me. There's your problem. Warm two. Try warm one. Thanks for that. Yeah, that looks pretty much the same. Warm one. That's pretty close. Try cool or medium, medium. I think that's it. Okay. You know what? There is a little bit of green in the Samsung. Just a touch. Now I kind of want to play around with this one too. There we go. That is damn close. Holy crap. So off axis over here, it still looks pretty green to me. Oh, okay. Well here, let me move for a sec. Okay. Holy crap. Okay. So sitting straight on, wow, they are very similar. Now this one looks too green. At least in this scene. I think we're at the point now where we're splitting hairs finely enough that it's pretty clear that either of these TVs with 15 seconds in the menu, you could get to whatever look you want. But it's like, what I'm trying to look at is the contrast. And like in this scene, you can see that sort of metal structure in the back. You can see more in the darks in this TV. And I think that's just the additional brightness that this TV has. But in terms of like blacks, like even the bottom bar looks totally black. Cause I have an older QLED that doesn't have very many dimming zones. And when I'm watching a movie like this, you will see the black bars on the bottom. It's awful. It's awful. Honestly, it's one of the reasons that regardless of everything else, I made the switch to OLED as soon as I could because sitting especially in a dark room and seeing that bloom around the image on ultra wide content is very distracting. Okay. So this room is very bright. Like more bright than your living room would be. But I think this TV is acceptable. And this one is just like maybe 10% darker than I want it to be. So maybe the next generation would be enough. It might actually, it might be enough. Wow. Look at this. Look at that. That's insane. Yeah. And you, but you don't lose any of the detail in the darks too. Like I've seen in the past. Like in look at his face, you see more in his face for sure. Yep. What does it feel like off axis though? It's fine. It's fine. Yeah. I mean, one thing I noticed when it, when it was on the test bench before, when we just had it on the floor, was that standing above it is not as good. But if Samsung's smart, they would have tuned this thing to watch from either level or below. And the reason for that is a lot of people mount these on their fireplaces. Oh, for sure. They're monsters, but they do it. So Samsung's got to be ready for it. I'm like actually shocked. I'm pretty surprised too, because I was not expecting them to perform this similarly side by side. I was like beaten on it before when we had it set up that it was below us, because the bloom was bad off axis, but now it looks, it looks great. Yeah. Wow. For PC use, I would still go OLED regardless. Yeah. Because when you've got a mouse cursor moving around or whatever, there's no amount of dimming zones that you can have that's going to deliver a perfect experience there. Okay. But should we try them in a dark room? We definitely should. Now it's time for the real test. LTTstore.com, by the way. We're in a dark room now. All we've got is the bare minimum amount of light we need for filming and... This is where you would see more bloom. Yeah. There's no ambient light to hide it. Yeah. I am really impressed. I was kind of expecting this to just be kind of a blowout, pun intended. Yeah. Not only can I still see a ton of detail in extremely dark parts of the scene on the QLED, which means that they haven't just turned the backlight off basically in those areas. Like we're, we're still getting light through, but I can see the difference between the black bar and almost black. Like bottom left. Like the black a camera captured. You know what I mean? Which is not quite black. Look at the bottom left. Yeah. I can totally see it. I can see the line. And I'm off axis. All the way across. I'm very far off angle and it looks pretty damn good. This is good for an IPS display. Like there's not much backlight bleed. I was kind of expecting a different conclusion today. You were, you were a bigger downer. I told him, I was like, I want to try this TV. And he's like, ehh. I was so sure this was going to end up as a manufacturer say, and we were so wrong. It's almost like Samsung went and bought some LG TVs. And when they were working on the pricing for this, they were like, we know what this is competitive with. Should I buy one of these? If we did a blind taste test of this, pick the OLED. I don't think people could figure it out accurately. Do you think you could? I don't think I could. Not without getting really close. If I, okay, you know what, let's try it. Yeah, if I get in here really close, I can see the bloom. But that's only if I use my hand to block the brighter parts of the image. Cause what you got to understand is the way your eye works, you've got a fixed amount of dynamic range. That is the brightest or darkest things you can perceive at a time. But just like a camera, you can actually close the iris so that that range moves up to perceive differences in brighter objects or open it up, your pupil, remember? And you can see a greater range of things that are dimmer. So bottom line, as long as there's enough contrast, almost black will look black. We just hadn't gotten there yet. So long answer, yes, I could tell. Short answer, no, not from an actual reasonable viewing distance. Well, we had a scripted kind of outro where we summarized everything, but I'm probably gonna have to kind of wing it at this point. Before we conclude, I want to come back to the question of dimming zones though. Samsung hasn't officially released information on how many zones the 75 inch QN85A has. Samsung Supreme is not a number. Just release proper spec sheets. But other reviewers have painstakingly counted 1,320 on the 85 inch variant and just under 800 on the 65 inch. That puts us at around a thousand for the 75, which sounds a lot less impressive when you compare it to the iPad, especially when you consider the size, but it's about double what Vizio was able to do with normal LEDs last year. And so while it might not be an earth shattering increase in zones, we have to consider that this is their first mass market display making use of this technology. And that, see this is where I got to ad lib, the result is actually really, really good. Enough about video though. I want to talk about audio for a bit. As a soundbar pleb, another feature I wanted to check out is Samsung's Q Symphony. And it's basically a way for your TV and your soundbar to work together using the speakers from both to enhance the audio experience. It actually launched with Samsung's last year QLEDs, but I haven't gotten a chance to try it yet. So I figured, what the, hey, we're all set up anyway. Actually they didn't send a soundbar, so I had to go buy one. But other than that, it was very little effort. Hmm. Well, that's really unfortunate. I was really hoping to compare just the TV to just the soundbar to the two of them working together. And I just don't think I'm going to be able to do it. Our tings did say that this soundbar has trouble in environments with a lot of interference, like our office. And there's like constant hiccups. It's kind of unusable actually. Soundbar aside, my expectations were subverted today. And having seen the 85, I'm now pretty curious about the 90, which uses a VA rather than an IPS panel and is rated for even higher brightness, though it does have the same number of zones. With that said, there's a lot of competition on the market. LG has their basically monopoly on OLED panels, at least high end ones. Samsung is pushing towards micro LED themselves. And there's other players like Hisense with those sweet like dual cell displays. They have a second 1080p monochrome LCD layer that does almost pixel level lighting control. So get subscribed so you don't miss our review of that as well. And if you're looking for something else to watch, why not check out the Intel Extreme Rig upgrade that we did for our camera guy, David. He actually used this same C10 48 inch as a gaming monitor because he's a mad lad like that. Just like I'm a mad lad. I'm going to tell you all about Micro Center. Get the best prices and best selection on computer hardware and everything else technology at any one of Micro Center's 25 locations in the US. You can check out Micro Center's custom PC builder to spec out the best PC for your budget. It'll ensure all your parts are compatible, find stock available at your nearest Micro Center location, add it to your cart, and then you can arrange same day in-store pickup. For a fee, you can check the box marked same day pro assembly and Micro Center's expert technicians will assemble the PC for you. If you want help deciding what parts to put in your custom gaming PC, join the new online Micro Center community. It's a great place to discuss tech with other enthusiasts. So check out the link below to learn more about Micro Center and find details on getting a free pair of wireless Bluetooth headphones, valid in-store only, no purchase necessary. Okay, if you're still here, go watch David's Intel Extreme tech upgrade. It was fun. Yeah, best one. Oh, oh.