Review: Samsung UE65JS9000

Introduction and features

While other brands are still struggling to get their "normal" 2015 TVs out, Samsung has already launched not one but two groundbreaking models capable of playing High Dynamic Range (HDR) content. What's more, both of these TVs – the previously tested UE65JS9500 and the UE65JS9000 under consideration here, really are extraordinarily good.

HDR, for those of you not familiar with it, delivers images containing expanded luminance and colour ranges, resulting in much more dynamic, punchy picture quality. For HDR, a TV needs to be able to deliver more brightness and a wider colour range than normal LCD TVs, as well as being able to 'parse' HDR sources through its HDMI inputs.

For yes, a full HDR experience depends on a source being mastered with the extra luminance and colour range, as well as a screen to see it on. Which is something of an issue given that at the time of writing there are quite simply no HDR sources available for public consumption.

Netflix is intending to launch a few HDR streams this year, and the Ultra HD Blu-ray format will also support HDR when that emerges (hopefully by Christmas).

But if you buy a UE65JS9500 or UE65JS9000 right now, you'll just have to accept that it's going to be months before you'll be able to experience it firing on all cylinders. Mind you, as we'll see, even a half-cocked UE65JS9000 leaves the competition floundering.

Joining HDR playback on the UE65JS9000's formidable spec sheet is a native UHD (4K) resolution, and a new Nano Crystal colour system capable of producing a claimed 93% of the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) colour system usually reserved for professional cinemas.

The screen's capable of delivering up to 1,000 Nits of brightness, versus just 300-500 with typical LCD technology, while the edge LED lighting system is driven by local dimming – where areas of the lighting can have their output controlled individually to boost contrast.

While this latter feature is always good to find, experience suggests that a locally dimmed edge LED system is no replacement for the flagship UE65JS9500's direct LED system – where the LEDs are mounted directly behind the screen – when it comes to delivering localised brightness, punch and substantially more contrast; two things, of course, which are key to the HDR experience.

I also couldn't help but worry before firing up the UE65JS9000 about the way many edge LED TVs I've tested over the years have tended to suffer with backlight clouding, where areas of dark scenes suffer with unnaturally differing levels of brightness. The potential for such clouding is surely greatly increased by the huge amounts of extra brightness the UE65JS9000 introduces to the TV scene.

Less headline-grabbing picture features of the UE65JS9000 include a powerful video processing system, driven by an Octa-Core processor; a curved screen design (more on this later); and a seriously impressive suite of picture set-up options that include control over all the most important parts of the processing functionality.

One concern with a TV that's as far ahead of the technological curve as the UE65JS9000 is the possibility that its connections and processing may soon become outdated as formats evolve.

But the UE65JS9000 cannily dodges such problems by placing both its connections and brains inside an external box that can simply be replaced with an upgraded version in future years. This is a really great future-proofing touch that gives buyers much-needed extra confidence at this time of seemingly continual TV change.

Wrapping up the UE65JS9000's truly formidable feature list is Samsung's new smart TV system. Powered by the Samsung-owned Tizen engine, this strips back all the clutter and over-bearing menus of Samsung's 2014 TVs in favour of a much cleaner, more streamlined and content-focused onscreen interface, which resembles strikingly closely the groundbreaking webOS system introduced by LG last year.

The Tizen TV OS feels a little unfinished right now – for instance, it can feel slow and unresponsive at times, and will require a future update to add Samsung's previously impressive learning and recommendations system. But it's certainly a big step in the right smart direction.

Picture quality

Unlocking the UE65JS9000's full potential right away with HDR UHD clips of The Life OF Pi and Exodus supplied on USB for my tests, my first thought was that somehow Samsung really has managed to recapture the HDR glories of the UE65JS9500 at a far lower price point.

For starters, its pictures when using the provided presets are incredibly bright by LCD standards. The overall impact of this hits you right away, grabbing your attention and pulling you into the image like no edge LED TV before.

Colours are phenomenally vibrant, as fearsomely intense saturations and a huge dynamic colour range (courtesy of the Nano Crystal technology) are driven out of the screen by the UE65JS9000's extreme brightness.

That's just the most instantly obvious of the UE65JS9000's colour attractions, too. Longer examination reveals beautiful subtlety in the screen's rendering of colour blends and tonal shifts – something that underlines the screen's UHD resolution, creating an almost 'Super UHD' sensation at times.

Just as importantly, while stunningly bold, the UE65JS9000's colours never look unbalanced or unnatural. On the contrary, the richness of the colours on show feels more natural than the much flatter tones we've become used to with pre-HDR TVs.

Also making a stellar first impression is the UE65JS9000's contrast performance. It delivers incredibly punchy, pure whites at one end of the light spectrum, but also, more crucially – and, to be honest, unexpectedly – delivers strikingly deep, inky blacks. Often within the same frame.

This is particularly important in 'selling' HDR as a technology, and leaves the same Exodus/Life Of Pi clips on a non-HDR TV looking almost miserably flat and compressed by comparison.

The UE65JS9000's 65-inch screen is plenty big enough, meanwhile, to easily display the benefits of its UHD resolution – in fact, with the higher-than-usual brightness output you can feel the extra detailing even more clearly.

The UE65JS9000's thirst for detail even extends to dark scenes in a way you just don't get with less bright LCD TVs. In short, the UE65JS9000 proves that HDR and UHD are a match made in AV heaven.

Fortunately, though, given the current painful lack of native HDR and even UHD content, the UE65JS9000's visual splendour isn't restricted to native HDR UHD material.

The groundbreaking brightness and colour potency Samsung has installed in its latest TV to service HDR can also boost the look of normal Blu-rays and broadcasts. Colours look more richly saturated and vibrant, brightness levels are much higher, and the sense of contrast is far more defined and expansive.

To be clear, the richness and dynamic range of non-HDR images falls substantially short of the intensity delivered with native HDR content.

But it's equally clear that the UE65JS9000 can reproduce standard video signals with way more punch than normal TVs, so you do get some genuine extra picture quality for your money, even ahead of real HDR content heaving into view.

There are occasionally problems associated with the processing required to 'turn up' non-HDR content. If there's noise in a source, it can sometimes become rather amplified, some colours (especially oranges) occasionally look a little dominant and forced, and occasionally some shadow detail can get crushed out of dark scenes.

But the positives comfortably outweigh the negatives – and anyway, if you're one of those people who just has to stick with the Rec 709 standard with non-HDR content, fear not: the TV carries settings that deliver exactly that. Though my suspicion is that even the most die-hard of AV purists may find this Rec 709 mode starting to look painfully flat once they've tried the UE65JS9000's more dynamic options.

Another key strength of the UE65JS9000 concerns its upscaling to UHD of the HD sources that will make up the majority of a typical user's content right now.

Samsung delivered a strikingly effective upscaling solution last year, but this year it's moved things forward again, managing to add just as much detail and texture to HD sources, while at the same time reducing the potential for object edges to look stressy or images to tip over into grittiness.

In other news not directly associated with the UE65JS9000's HDR or UHD properties, motion is strikingly natural in its appearance without the need to introduce any motion processing higher than the relatively low-powered Clear mode.

Also, if you're sat relatively close central to the UE65JS9000's images the curved screen can help to create a sense of depth in pictures that really makes you feel more involved in the action.

The UE65JS9000's hugely impressive performance continues with 3D. Interest in 3D at home appears to be pretty niche these days, but if every TV gave as good a 3D account of itself as the UE65JS9000, 3D's popularity would surely rise again.

For instance, the extra brightness and colour intensity of this Samsung's pictures helps 3D images enjoy a superb sense of solidity and depth, suggesting that the new generation of ultra-bright, HDR-friendly LCD panels is going to be even more of a friend to 3D than 2D.

Also, the UE65JS9000's use of the active rather than passive 3D system means that 3D Blu-rays are upscaled to UHD, which helps the 3D world look more densely textured and, as a result, more tangible and immersive.

There is a small amount of crosstalk ghosting noise in the UE65JS9000's 3D images, but this is far less aggressive and common than I'd feared it might be, considering how bright the TV is.

While the UE65JS9000 strikes me for the most part as a spectacular early taste of the future of television, it does have a couple of limitations you need to be aware of.

First, if you stick with Samsung's picture presets and/or you feel inclined to drive the screen with its backlight set almost to maximum, then you'll find dark scenes afflicted by some quite distracting backlight clouding areas.

You'll need to reduce the backlight setting to around its 13-14 level before the clouding really starts to reduce, and even get down to around the 10 setting – about 50% of maximum brightness – to solve the issue if you're watching in a very dark room.

While this fix is relatively easy to accomplish, it does have wider implications. Namely that by reducing so much brightness from the image you no longer get as much impact from HDR content as you do with the UE65JS9500, which thanks to its direct backlighting can be run on a much higher level of brightness without suffering major backlight clouding problems.

The other things to be wary of both concern the UE65JS9000's curved screen. First, if your seating position finds you watching from an angle down the side of more than 30-35 degrees, the curve can cause the shape of the picture to look distorted.

Second, if you have a bright light source or some reflective furniture in your house, the reflections these can cause on the TV screen tend to distort across more screen area than they would with a flat TV. However, the obviousness of such reflections has thankfully being reduced compared with Samsung's 2014 curved TVs.

Usability, sound and value

Usability

Samsung's 2014 TVs were a little unwieldy to use, thanks to the presence of too many over-bearing, full-screen menus and too much focus on relatively unimportant content. The smart remote control was a faff, too, as it put too many different control systems into too small a physical space.

This year, things are much better. Samsung has shifted to a graphical user interface based around its Tizen operating system, which does a much more economical (in terms of screen real estate and structure) job of putting the content you actually want right at your fingertips.

The Tizen system looks remarkably similar to LG's webOS engine, but there's no shame in that.

The new smart remote control, meanwhile, is far more intuitive to use than its predecessor. The separate cursor button and point and click options are nicely separated now, and the fiddly touch pad of 2014 has been removed.

There's still an issue whereby the onscreen cursor for the point and click system doesn't always feel as if it's in the place on the screen where you're actually pointing the remote, and the menus do sometimes run a bit sluggishly. But, overall, Tizen has made Samsung's smart TVs a lot more approachable and friendly than they were before.

Sound quality

While the UE65JS9000 isn't remotely as cutting edge with its sound as it is with its video, it sounds decent enough. Effects – even subtle ones – are rendered clearly and positioned accurately in the frame despite the speakers firing down rather than directly out.

Voices generally sound convincing and stand clear of the soundstage, even during raucous action scenes, and the speakers don't tend to distort even under fairly serious distress.

Bass levels are only fair to middling compared with those delivered by some rival brands, though, and the soundstage never achieves the sort of scale you can get with the best Sony and LG models.

Value

It's a tough one to judge, this. On the one hand, the UE65JS9000 delivers the same groundbreaking features as the UE65JS9500 for a whole £2,000 less.

And while having to reduce the backlight to combat backlight clouding does certainly lead to a reduced HDR performance versus the UE65JS9500, arguably only people with very healthy bank balances will feel that the difference in picture quality is worth paying £2,000 for.

On the other hand, you'll probably be able to get good-quality non-HDR 4K/UHD 65-inch TVs this year for as little as £2,000, so even though it's substantially cheaper than the UE65JS9500, the UE65JS9000 is still a substantial investment for an HDR feature that won't have much native support until Christmas at the very earliest.

Verdict

The UE65JS9000 is potentially the most important TV in Samsung's new range, thanks to the way it offers genuine HDR playback, native UHD resolution and the new Tizen operating system for £2,000 less than the previously tested UE65JS9500.

It has to be said that the UE65JS9500 is a better TV, especially when it comes to delivering the maximum impact from High Dynamic Range content. It's true, too, that for now there's no HDR UHD content around to help you unlock the UE65JS9000's full potential.

Nonetheless, so long as you exercise a little care with its set-up the UE65JS9000 is simply streets ahead of typical LCD TVs in both picture performance and future-proofing terms.

We liked

With a little care during set-up, the UE65JS9000 can give you jaw-dropping picture quality with truly next-generation levels of brightness and colour. Native HDR UHD content is like nothing you've ever seen before.

The use of an external upgradable connections/processing box is great for peace of mind in today's fast-changing times, too, and this set costs two grand less than the UE65JS9500.

We disliked

Although substantially cheaper than its flagship sibling, the UE65JS9000 is still expensive by UHD TV standards generally. The curved design may be divisive and can cause reflection distortions, and finally backlight clouding concerns mean you can't run the TV at full brightness, reducing the impact of HDR playback.

Final verdict

As well as being the most feature-rich, future-proofed TV I've seen – apart from Samsung's own luxurious UE65JS9500 – the UE65JS9000 sets new picture-quality standards for the edge LED market.

The edge LED system does require some compromise of the TV's HDR ambitions, but many AV fans will surely find these compromises easy to live with in return for saving £2,000 on the price of the flagship UE65JS9500.

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