Samsung J6300 review (UE32J6300)

32in TVs can typically be bought for less than £150, so when Samsung pitches a £349, 32in Full HD, internet-connected set, it’s making a statement: clearly customers without much space still want all the features of a big TV.

The J6300 is also available in larger sizes, 40in (UE40J6300), 48in (UE48J6300) and 55in (UE55J6300) models. Usually we’re happy to extend a recommendation from one set to those of similar sizes, if the panel used is essentially the same. However with 4K sets now widely available, the Full HD resolution here may not translate up to larger models in terms of value for money or image quality.

Design, image quality and audio

The curved screen makes an immediate impact, with angled bezels drawing your eyes into the screen, but the rest of the TV doesn’t look or feel particularly premium. The plastic stand has a pleasing, curved shape but it lacks the refined design of some of Samsung’s higher-end models. The whole set is very chunky, too, and really doesn’t feel like a high-end TV.

It’s a shame, because it performs like one. Samsung has always managed to nail out-of-the-box image quality and does even better with a selection of excellent presets to suit all tastes. We found the Dynamic preset mode to be the best one-size-fits all for brightly lit broadcast TV. It’s perhaps a little bright for watching at night, so you’ll want to drop the brightness a little. We found Natural a better fit for atmospheric movies with dark scenes.

There’s a dedicated Sports button on the remote that boosts brightness and contrast and gives everything a bit more colour, particularly enhancing grass. It looks a bit artificial but does wonders for making moving objects stand out, and it also boosts the volume on commentary and crowd noise, too. We found it worked well on both football and motor racing, although it’s either on or off; it would have been nice to have a little more control over exactly what it does.

For those who like to tweak things a little, there’s an Advanced Settings menu that lets you make changes to blacks and flesh colour, white balance and contrast. You can also configure image enhancement options including colour temperature, digital noise reduction and frame interpolation. Noise reduction isn’t so important on smaller TVs unless you’re sitting very close, and we’re not entirely convinced the noise reduction on this TV is particularly effective. Playing around with the settings, we were never really able to make SD content look much better than with noise reduction switched off. All the settings you make can be applied to just one source or to every source; we’d recommend the former as it means you can make fine adjustments without ruining your other input sources.

Out of the box, colour coverage is great at 91% of the sRGB gamut, while contrast is very high at 3434:1. Reasonably low black levels of 0.6cd/m2 mean darker scenes in games and films are still easily viewable with plenty of detail, even if your lights are switched on. The only thing we missed was the ability to tweak individual colours to absolutely perfect the TV’s performance. It’s a shame, although not entirely unsurprising to see on a cheaper TV.

Viewing angles are very wide, and while we’re not entirely convinced the curved screen adds a lot to its performance, we couldn’t find a reasonable angle where we weren’t able to watch the TV happily.

Samsung’s Auto Motion Plus frame interpolation is highly configurable, with three presets and a Custom mode that lets you balance between blur or judder reduction and LED brightness. We found little need for the most configurable options; the Smooth preset was able to iron out the most obvious juddering in our Blu-ray test footage.

If you’re planning on hooking up a games console to one of the four HDMI ports, you’ll want to make sure Game Mode is switched on. It’s hidden in a hard-to-find menu in the System area of the Settings area, and even though it’s not linked to any of the picture quality settings, switching it off will only turn it off for the source you currently have selected. WIth Game Mode off, input lag is a disappointing 127ms, but with it switched on it drops to 48ms. This still isn’t ideal and isn’t the lowest lag figure we’ve seen, but for most games it will be fine.

The speakers, meanwhile, are very impressive. While a proper soundbar or speaker system will eclipse it, if you’re going to be using it as a secondary TV, you’ll be impressed with how well bass is served up, while dialogue, music and sound effects all get room to breathe. Broadcast TV sounds great, and while complex audio arrangements in films will sound a little flat, this TV’s audio performance is extremely creditable.

Ports and connections

There are four HDMI ports and a set of composite and component connectors on the back of the set. You get an optical S/PDIF port for speaker systems and there’s also a 3.5mm port for wired headphones. Three USB ports are also included, and they’re all on the right-side of the TV, so you can easily connect and disconnect peripherals like USB sticks and keyboards. Three of the HDMI ports are on the side, too, making them easily accessible.

Smart TV content

As we’ve come to expect, Samsung’s Smart TV interface is excellent. It comes pre-loaded with a few apps including BBC iPlayer and All 4. There’s an app store full of video and radio catch-up applications including Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Instant and ITV Player. Plex is also available if you want to set up a DLNA server at home.

The interface isn’t the smoothest we’ve come across, despite the set using a quad-core processor. Slight stutter and lag is manageable though, and it wouldn’t put us off buying the TV.

The Samsung UE32J6300 is very expensive for a 32in TV, but if it’s going to be your main TV – or you really want a great bedroom TV – it’s worth every penny. It’s easy to set up and get great image quality out of the box, while also allowing you to tweak enough settings to get exactly what you want out of each input source. For other options see our Best TVs and buying guide. Buy Now from Amazon