Introduction and features
If the spectre of 'another curved TV' isn't welcome, the appearance of this, the most affordable TV from Samsung's SUHD line-up, certainly is. For the UE48JS8500 – available in the US and UK selling for $1,499 and £1,649 respectively – represents the latest and greatest LCD tech, pointless curve not withstanding.
I don't hate curved TVs. They actually work really well in the corners of a room, maximizing the space really well. However, look at them head on and I find the effect frankly bizarre.
Why would you want a curved screen in a home cinema (which is where this TV is headed), or any other situation where you will be staring at the screen from the sweet spot? It serves no purpose, and no amount of popularisation will convince me otherwise.
Luckily there's a lot more to like about the Samsung UE48JS8500.
Features
Rather confusingly, SUHD doesn't really mean anything.
Is Samsung hoping we all presume it means 'Super Ultra HD'? Perhaps so.
At the heart of the UE48JS8500 is an Ultra Clear Pro panel – an Edge LCD-backlit LCD, to be precise – whose slice of nano-crystal quantum dot tech promises to produce a brighter, more colourful image. In fact, that's '64 times more colour expression than conventional UHD TVs' according to Samsung's website, though it also gives a more conservative figure of 1.2!
It also promises twice the black levels from its Precision Black Pro processing, though the key figure is the eight million pixels it gets from its 4K Ultra HD 3840 x 2160 resolution.
Also lurking inside the UE48JS8500 is an all-new Smart Hub suite of apps built for the first time on Samsung's own Tizen OS, which is a mostly successful attempt to stop Google's Android TV in its tracks. Though initially promised to dominate its phones, Samsung has produced only one Tizen phone so far.
Other features include a quad core processor, built-in twin Freeview HD and Freesat HD tuners, record TV to USB, Wi-Fi, active shutter 3D (though weirdly no 3D specs are included), and – of course – HEVC decoding for 4K video streaming from Netflix and Amazon.
Design
The UE48JS8500 performs some balancing act, perching (solidly) on a T-shaped stand whose curved column reaches under and behind the TV, where it attaches. The main piece of the stand curves slightly, too. It's all a brushed metallic design, of course, with excellent construction quality – as with the TV itself, which has a super-slim bezel. As usual with curved TVs, you can't swivel the TV.
Ins and outs
The UE48JS8500 comes with a separate box for the majority of connections.
That's understandable for TVs that are so darned slim and space-efficient that they just don't have room for the electronics, but as a curved TV the UE48JS8500 actually takes up quite a lot of space already.
The box itself – which houses four HDMI inputs (all HDCP 2.2-compliant), two USB slots and an optical digital audio output – connects to the UE48JS8500 via a proprietary cable.
Next door is an Ethernet LAN slot, a USB slot, a headphones slot, RF ins, and slots for component video/composite video adaptors.
Also available
Alongside the 48-inch UE48JS8500 in Samsung's 8 Series is the 55-inch UE55JS8500 and 65-inch UE65JS8500. There are also two non-curved versions, the 50-inch UE50JU6800 and 60-inch UE60JU6800.
Further down are the non-SUHD JU7000 Series and the curved JU7500 Series, which are otherwise identical. All have Ultra HD 4K panels.
A slight step-up from the UE48JS8500 are Samsung's flagship TVs for 2015, the 48-inch UE48JS9000, 55-inch UE55JS9000 and 65-inch UE65JS9000, which all have curved panels, as do the 65-inch UE65JS9500T and two sizes that only those who've never heard of the concept of a home cinema projector could countenance, the 78-inch UE78JS9500T and 88-inch UE88JS9500T.
Picture quality
An Edge LED-backlit TV with a native 10-bit LCD panel rated at 120Hz and an Ultra HD 4K resolution, the UE48JS8500 is – thanks to its quantum dot nano-crystal layers – nevertheless all about colour.
That excellent colour performance is boosted in no small part by brightness, which the UE48JS8500 has in spades thanks to its native energy-harvesting tech, Peak Illuminator.
An episode of Marco Polo from Netflix 4K is treated with incredible subtly, with Kubla Khan's stately pleasure-dome featuring carefully blended colour that shape-shifts in real-time, creating an image of immense realism.
The gloomy areas of the palace are left an enticing jet-black, but Polo's dark coat suffers from black crush, with little detail within. It's the same story with black suits in a showreel from Amazon Instant 4K, which all suffer from the same trade-off. In this regard, the UE48JS8500 proves that the SUHD concept is good, but it's no OLED.
Is a 48-inch TV big enough to tease-out enough 4K detail to make streaming in 4K worthwhile? Actually, yes it is – the image is near immaculate with bags of detail and impressive depth, which is more than you can say for a Full HD image on a TV of this size.
It's worth subduing the backlight by half for movies, to around 10 (only the Movie preset, at 13, gets anywhere near taking the backlight off maximum), for which the reward is superb contrast and excellent local dimming.
That takes the eye-popping edge from colour, but it's definitely worth doing. As Marco Polo rides out into the desert, the big sky is pure white, and though it dominates the image, the dark silhouette of a tree remains profoundly black.
As an Edge LED-backlit LCD, the UE48JS8500 doesn't have any native local dimming, instead using digital trickery to create Smart LED. However, it works pretty well, mostly getting rid of patchiness when used on the highest setting to create a panel of mostly consistent brightness.
Mostly…when the city lights go out in a 4K clip of Chicago at night, the UE48JS8500 doesn't go completely and utterly black, as OLED TVs do. I noticed a few patches of brightness, and a touch of haloing around brightly-lit white text when set against a black background. But this is nit-picking in the extreme.
Moving down the scale to Gravity on 2D Blu-ray, the UE48JS8500 retains that highly detailed, consistently bright and awesomely coloured image, and matches it with a judder-free performance.
Okay, so there's still some crushing in dark areas of the image, but the blackness of space remains profound and camera pans are smooth. Things do get a tad frenetic when the satellite debris hits the Space Shuttle, and in sequence like this it's wise to engage Auto Motion Plus to reduce motion blur. It's best kept on its 'standard' setting to avoid any artefacts creeping in.
Get to broadcast HD channels and the good work continues, with images from the World Athletic Championships from Beijing on BBC One HD containing far more detail than I had expected. Even the standard definition broadcast, while very soft, is plenty clean enough to watch.
Usability, sound and value
The main difference between the UE48JS8500 and the pricier models in Samsung's range is this TV's lack of an Octa-Core processor.
And it shows.
TVs are now being asked to do so much more than they did the previous year – especially with the advent of 4K – and the UE48JS8500 is sometimes visibly encumbered. Okay, so it's not as slow as a Virgin Media TiVio box I had it connected up to, but the UE48JS8500 definitely does take a bit of patience when trawling through its user interface and launching apps.
Part of the reason for using the new Tizen OS is that the UE48JS8500 can re-connect far quicker than previously to external devices when already paired via Bluetooth, though the focus on Samsung-only smartphones makes this feature fairly pointless for most people.
What the UE48JS8500 does have is a slice of second screen action, with some screen mirroring and streaming. Key here is Samsung's Smart View 2.0 app for Android and iOS, which allows the pushing of images and video to the TV, and the pulling-in of live TV thanks to the UE48JS8500's twin TV tuners.
It's reasonably slick, but it did crash twice during my tests, suggesting that there is a bug or two.
Software
You can read an in-depth review of the new Tizen OS-driven Smart Hub user interface in our review of the UE55JU6400. Suffice to say that apps include the BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4OD, Demand Five in the UK as well as the likes of Netflix, Amazon Instant and YouTube.
The UE48JS8500 does reasonably well with digital media, supporting 4K files, too. Video files like MKV, AVI, AVC HD and MP4 were all played by the UE48JS8500's ConnectShare software, as were both MP4 and TS files containing 4K material.
Sound
Rather unusually, the UE48JS8500 is fitted with a couple of subwoofers as well as the left and right speaker, creating a 2.2 Channel system that's actually quite impressive.
Okay, so music and vocals can get lost slightly during movies, but there's significantly more bass, midrange and volume than on most TV speakers.
Value
Since the UE48JS8500 has more or less the same picture tech as the far pricer JS9000 and JS9500 Series, it's got to be considered decent value.
However, the UE48JS8500 doesn't include any active shutter 3D glasses, which is a shame since arguably the arrival of 4K resolution is at last making the 3D format highly impressive.
Verdict
We liked
There's so much to like about the UE48JS8500, from its blistering colours, scorch-your-eyes-out brightness and deep blacks to its scintillating detail and depth. Motion is smooth, while judder is successfully removed from Blu-ray discs.
This 48-incher also happens to have some of the best audio we've heard on the TV this price, as well as some excellent second screening options, and an app-packed smart TV interface.
We disliked
Although the Edge LED system is very well executed, there are a few patches within the panel of uneven brightness, though they're only visible during very dark sequences.
It's also not the easiest TV to set-up, offering only a few basic picture presets, none of which are particularly easy on the eye.
A tweaking session thus ensues, which won't be welcome for many. Its high brightness is something to be wary of, and while contrast is impressive, there's significant black crush.
Other gripes include a lack of processing speed, which hampers the likeability of Smart Hub, and the need for a separate connections box, which will only add to the mess of cables on an AV rack for most users.
Verdict
If you're in the market for a Samsung SUHD, the 48-inch UE48JS8500 – considerably cheaper than the step-up UE48JS9000 and UE65JS9500T models – is worth a long, lingering look.
The UE48JS8500's superb colour, awesome 4K detail and sublime depth make this one special TV, though some black crush takes the edge off. Excellent usability features – from second-screening a TV channel and hosting all UK catch-up TV apps to supporting Netflix/Amazon 4K and playing-back 4K video files – are welcome but slightly under-powered in terms of processing speed, but the UE48JS8500 remains a good value way to sample Samsung's impressive SUHD TVs.
Also consider
Taking on and beating the UE48JS8500's SUHD suite of tech is the LG 55EG960V, a 55-inch TV using OLED technology that Samsung appears to have given up on, for now.
However, OLED TVs are enormously pricey, s instead consider the likes of the Panasonic TX-50CX802, the Japanese brand's best LCD TV to date whose pictures also have plasma-like colour and black levels as well as HDR, Firefox OS-driven smart TV, and even Freeview Play.
from TechRadar: Technology reviews http://ift.tt/1K2QIYC
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