Samsung Q80D review: All things bright and beautiful

There’s no better testament to the breadth and scale of Samsung’s TV offering than the fact that TV sets as rich in features as the Samsung Q80D sit in the range’s lower half.

Despite its relative affordability, the Q80D uses quantum dot colours, direct LED backlighting with local dimming and is powered by Samsung’s latest Neo Quantum 4 Gen 2 processor. Add to that extensive gaming support, Samsung’s Object Tracking Sound audio system and the latest Tizen OS smart system and you’ve got a force to be reckoned with.

All that’s missing versus Samsung’s higher-end sets are mini LEDs and some of the explosive brightness that Samsung’s premium LED TVs delight in. In short, the Q80D looks to have the potential to be among 2024’s biggest TV bargains. Unless that is, Samsung’s budget-based corner-cutting has introduced some unexpected brickbats along the way.

Samsung Q80D review: Key specifications

Samsung Q80D review: What you need to know

The Q80D is the most premium series in Samsung’s current TV range before you get into its Mini LED models. Or to look at it from the top down, they’re the cheapest models you can get before you lose Samsung’s quantum dot colour and local dimming technologies.

The Q80D also still benefits from the same Neo Quantum 4 Gen 2 processor that Samsung’s premium LCD TVs use, along with Samsung’s content-rich Tizen smart system and a remarkably fulsome set of gaming features.

Samsung Q80D review: Price and competition

Doing away with Mini LED lighting and a few hundred nits of brightness has allowed Samsung to get the Q80D down to a price level that offers great value for money.

The 55in model I’m reviewing only costs £689 at the time of writing, while the 50in option costs £614, the 65in costs £938, the 75in costs £1,372 and the 85in costs £1,749.

Similarly specified competition at this sort of price is hard to find, though the TCL C855K merits a mention. It uses a Mini LED backlight and the smallest screen size is 65in (£1,140), with the 85in my colleague Stephen Withers tested priced at a very reasonable £1,877.

The Philips OLED759, meanwhile, is an excellent OLED option if you’re willing to pay an extra £150 or so more for each comparable screen size. The OLED759’s screen delivers pixel-level light control, while the design is backed up by Philips’ unique Ambilight technology – though the TV can’t get as bright as the Q80D.

Samsung Q80D review: Design, connections and control

The Samsung Q80D is rather more substantial than many of Samsung’s more premium models. The screen sits within a slightly wider frame, and the rear sticks out significantly further. None of this means the Q80D isn’t easy on the eye, though. Its brushed metallic finish looks crisp and high-end, and while the rear may be chunky it does at least enjoy a fairly stylish striped finish.

The TV sits on a weighty single pedestal-style stand if you’re not wall-mounting it, meaning you can rest it on a quite narrow piece of furniture. The stand’s neck features a detachable cover on its back, too, so that you hide your cables in it. A thoughtful cable-tidying touch that’s backed up by grooves cut into the TV’s rear for channelling your cables to the TV’s inputs.

These inputs impressively include four HDMIs, two USBs, an optical digital audio output, a CI slot, an Ethernet port and a tuner input – plus, of course, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless options any mid-range TV these days is expected to carry. All four of the HDMIs are equipped to cope with almost the full range of HDMI v2.1 gaming features, too. More on this later.

The Q80D ships with two remote controls. One relatively basic, button-packed one, and one streamlined smart one with a stripped-back button count. The latter became my main control option of choice, though the other handset is also easier to use than it looks. The TV also supports control by voice using Samsung’s Bixby or Amazon’s Alexa systems, with a far-field mic in the TV meaning you can issue instructions without having the remote control to hand.

It’s also possible to control the TV via Samsung’s SmartThings app for iOS and Android. I didn’t find the level of functionality or touchscreen navigation system available through this approach particularly helpful, though.

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Samsung Q80D review: Smart TV platform

The Q80D uses Samsung’s Tizen smart system. This is a very good thing, partly because Tizen’s Bixby voice recognition system is one of the most comprehensive control systems around, and partly because the amount of content sources Tizen covers is prodigious. In fact, the only significant service the Q80D doesn’t carry is Freeview Play, but all of the UK terrestrial broadcaster catch-up apps are present and correct.

The Tizen interface is pretty sophisticated too, especially when it comes to its AI-driven support for separate user profiles and content recommendations based on each user’s viewing habits.

The Q80D’s layout and navigation system can feel a little overwhelming and unintuitive at times but this has got better with each new generation since Samsung first switched to a full-screen interface from overlaid menus a few years back. In any case, the voice control support I mentioned earlier can often enable you to circumvent the Tizen OS menus altogether.

Samsung Q80D review: Image quality

Unlike Samsung TVs of old, the Q80D continues the new Samsung way of supporting both very accurate ‘as the director intended’ images and engagingly vibrant and punchy preset options for bright rooms (or for people more into enjoying what TV hardware can do than tracking established video standards).

On the accuracy front, the Q80D goes so far as to carry a Filmmaker Mode. This mode is designed by UHD Alliance to give consumers a shortcut to images that track as closely to the video standards used in the video mastering world as the TV can manage. Measurements taken using Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate analysis and calibration software, G1 signal generator and C6 colorimeter show that the Q80Ds’ Filmmaker Mode doesn’t quite manage to keep within the Delta E error of three that’s considered to be imperceptible to the human eye.

In truth, though, the 3.2 and 3.6 average error values measured on colour gamut and multipoint greyscale tests are probably still close enough not to register as looking ‘out’ to all but the best-trained eye – especially as the colour point checker and saturation sweep tests all get within the sub-three error target.

I saw nothing out of place with the Q80D’s Filmmaker Mode pictures. On the contrary, the core qualities of the panel when it comes to such fundamentals as contrast, brightness and colour control ensure that the Filmmaker mode’s pictures look beautifully balanced, nuanced and subtle. There’s no succumbing to the sort of black-level problems or drab-looking colours that lesser screens can suffer from in the same mode.

Personally, though, while the Q80D handles Filmmaker Mode exceptionally well, I’d recommend that fans of relatively accurate pictures go for the TV’s Movie preset instead. This injects a bit more of the brightness, contrast and colour vibrancy the Q80D is capable of into proceedings, while only marginally increasing the average Delta E 2000 errors. The Movie mode actually scores better than the Filmmaker Mode on the saturation sweep test.

The Standard preset, meanwhile, is the option to go to if you want to enjoy a much more contrast-rich, heavily saturated and sharpness-enhanced image. And while it might not hit accurate measurements, it’s so well done by Samsung, making such strong use of the TV’s innate panel qualities, that the picture still looks balanced and believable. It’s also more eye-catching, as well as being much easier to watch in a bright room.

The Q80D’s startlingly powerful picture processor for such an affordable TV also does a brilliant job of upscaling HD content to the screen’s native 4K resolution.

The only major flaw with the Samsung Q80D’s SDR pictures is that the default motion processing options in its Movie and Standard presets cause the image to look too smooth and processed. So either turn the processing off or choose a Custom setting and turn the blur and judder removal elements down to around level three or four.

Samsung Q80D review: HDR picture quality

While the Samsung Q80D’s pictures are good – and varied – with SDR, it’s in HDR mode that they stand out from the crowd. Thanks to a combination of brightness peaks of just above 1,000cd/m2 (very high for the price point) and excellent black levels, HDR sources enjoy a level of intensity and life-like boldness far beyond anything we typically see on such affordable TVs.

Excellent contrast feeds into exceptionally rich, bright, voluminous colours, too, particularly in the extremely enjoyable Standard and rather over-blown Dynamic presets. But it’s also a treat to find the more accurate Movie and Filmmaker Mode presets naturally saturated, avoiding the slightly dull look that relatively affordable TVs often succumb to in such deliberately subdued modes.

My Calman tests reveal coverage of a very respectable 85.6% of the UHDA-P3 colour gamut used for most of today’s HDR mastering, and 62.9% of the full BT.2020 colour range. The significantly expanded light range of HDR content makes it easier to appreciate how sharp and detailed the Q80D’s pictures are.

Even on screen sizes like the 55in model I tested, you’re never in any doubt at all that you’re watching a 4K image. Yet at the same time, this extreme sharpness feels organic. The Neo Quantum 4 Gen 2 processor adds a bit of sharpness in the Standard mode but cleverly enough to leave images full of texture and three-dimensionality, rather than forced or noisy.

The Q80D’s local dimming system is well-implemented, too. It does an outstanding job of making dark scenes look properly dark without leaving any small, bright highlights feeling dull or faint and it ensures that the darkest corners contain plenty of shadow detail.

The excellent brightness of the Q80D’s HDR pictures can cause some 24p images to look slightly strident if you leave the set’s motion processing turned off. So with HDR movies, I would recommend choosing the Custom Picture Clarity setting and adjusting the blur and judder elements to somewhere between levels three and five.

The extra strain HDR images put on the Q80D’s backlighting and local dimming systems can occasionally reveal a faint bloom of light around a particularly bright highlight. These halos are much fainter and rarer than I’d have expected with such a bright lower mid-range TV, however.

The Standard preset can also cause some slightly distracting jumps in the image’s overall brightness during sharp cuts between dark and bright HDR shots. Not that this is a major price to pay for the glorious intensity of the Standard mode pictures. Plus it’s less noticeable than it is on Samsung’s more premium LCD TVs.

One last HDR limitation is Samsung’s customary lack of any Dolby Vision support. But the Q80D does so much better with the HDR10, HLG and HDR10+ formats than most rivals that I found myself much less bothered by this limitation than I expected.

To test the Samsung Q80D we used Portrait Displays Calman colour calibration software.

Samsung Q80D review: Gaming

The Samsung Q80D is a brilliant gaming TV. All of its HDMIs can take in 4K/120Hz signals and support variable refresh rates (including the AMD Freesync flavour supported by the latest Xbox consoles).

The brightness, vibrancy and sharpness of the Q80D’s HDR pictures chime particularly well with 4K game graphics too, while the Game Bar onscreen menu allows you to call up information on your settings, and access a few handy gaming aids.

Input lag in the Q80D’s Game preset gets down to a fantastically low 9.8ms. There’s also an option to increase input lag a little in return for mild motion smoothing processing if the game you’re playing isn’t dependent on split millisecond reactions.

Last but not least is the Gaming Hub: a dedicated page in the Tizen OS where the TV brings together all of your gaming sources, be they a game streaming service or a console connected to one of the TV’s inputs.

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Samsung Q80D review: Sound quality

While the Q80D doesn’t have as many speakers or as much audio power at its disposal as Samsung’s step-up TVs, it sounds more than good enough for the money. But as always, you can up the audio by pairing your TV with a soundbar.

Its Object Tracking Sound system helps to paint a startlingly detailed soundstage where sound effects and voices seem to be coming from more or less the right place in the picture.

The OTS effect from the Q80D’s 2.2-channel, 40W speaker configuration isn’t as precise as it is with Samsung TVs that carry more speakers, but it’s good enough to make movies and TV shows sound busy and clear.

There’s enough power to project the soundstage a fair distance beyond the screen’s physical boundaries, too, including above the screen when you’re listening to Dolby Atmos soundtracks. There’s also enough volume to ensure a soundtrack dominates your room on movie nights.

Low-frequency sounds are rendered cleanly and with enough depth and consistency to sound convincing, even during action scenes. In addition, high trebles avoid sounding harsh or shrill under all but the most extreme pressure.

Samsung Q80D review: Verdict

While Samsung has lost its touch a little lately with its entry-level TVs, the Q80D is a fantastic mid-ranger. Its bright, colourful pictures get more value out of HDR than pretty much any other models in its class. Its gaming features humble many TVs costing significantly more, its smart features are comprehensive and its sound is surprisingly robust and detailed.

In a perfect world, the Samsung Q80D would have added Dolby Vision to its HDR charms and would handle motion a bit better in its out-of-the-box settings. Aside from these pretty puny niggles, though, the Q80D is the best-value model in Samsung’s entire 2024 TV range.