Never mind OLED, Samsung’s new TVs are all about QLED

While most of us are still lusting after LG’s excellent OLED displays, Samsung’s announced its taking the fight to its compatriots LG (and its award-winning OLED TV range) with its new QLED TV range. The company unveiled three new devices — the Q7, Q8 and Q9 — in Las Vegas ahead of CES.

Samsung’s promising improved colour, with the new QLED TVs capable of reproducing “100% colour volume”, which means they’re able to “express all colours at any level of brightness”, according to a press release sent out on Tuesday night. And on the topic of brightness, the new devices are now capable of a peak luminance of between 1,500 and 2,000 nits — quite a step up from the 1,000 nits its last generation of devices offer.

In order to make this new colour reproduction and boosted brightness possible, Samsung’s adopted a new metal Quantum Dot material. Which, for end users like us, is a bit like saying it’ll use aircraft-grade aluminium for a phone case instead of regular aluminium, or some such — consumers don’t tend to care about the materials, only the results. The proof, as they say is in the , um, viewing.

The company’s also taken steps to make wall mounting easier and reduce cable clutter. The new sets can be mounted flush on a wall with all peripherals connected to an external box. For those who don’t want to mount the units, there are two new stands, one that looks like an easel and elevates the display and another, more conventional one, for popping on a TV stand. There’s also a new all-in-one “invisible cable” that connects the peripherals box to the TVs.

While it’s at it, Samsung’s overhauled its Smart Hub and updates its Smart View app that lets users use their Samsung phone or tablet to choose content and adjust TV settings. The updated Hub also includes new sports- and music-focused features that keep track of favourite teams and does Shazam-like identification of songs from live TV. An updated TV remote also includes voice recognition.

There’s no word on pricing for the new QLED displays, but we’re expecting that even the cheapest unit will cost well over R50,000 going on current pricing of Samsung’s top-end TVs.