Samsung Q60D [Q60, Q60DD] QLED TV Review

The Samsung Q60D has thin bezels and a modern design that looks premium despite the TV being an entry-level model.

As part of our two-year test, which has so far subjected 100 TVs to over 10,000 hours of accelerated testing, we found that edge-lit TVs like this one have significant durability issues. These issues range from warped reflector sheets and cracked light guide plates to completely burnt-out LEDs. You can read the full results of our investigation here.

The TV uses two plastic feet that support the TV well. The footprint of the 65-inch stand is 42.2" x 10.8".

The height of the feet is adjustable, and you can set them to two different positions. The lower position, which you can see in the photo, puts the screen close to the table. The other position is high enough that most soundbars fit below the screen. The height of the lower position from the table is 1.97", and the higher one is 2.95".

The back of the TV is made of plastic and has a nice brushed finish. There's a single clip included that can be attached to either foot and used for cable management. Unfortunately, the inputs are recessed into the TV, so they're hard to reach if you wall-mount it with a fixed bracket.

The Samsung Q60 Series has decent build quality. The stand supports the TV well in the lower position, but there's some wobble front to back in the higher position, although this won't cause any issues. There are no major flaws with build quality, but the TV feels cheap since it's made entirely of plastic.

The Samsung Q60D has okay contrast. Its native contrast is great, but it lacks a local dimming feature. This causes blacks to be deep in dim and dark scenes, but they become raised and washed out when bright highlights are on the screen.

The TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so there's no blooming around bright objects or subtitles during dark scenes.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so it can't adjust the backlight of individual zones to brighten up highlights without impacting the rest of the image. This means that there are no distracting flickers or brightness changes as bright highlights move between dimming zones.

Switching to Game Mode doesn't result in any noticeable difference in dark scene performance.

The Samsung Q60D has adequate HDR brightness. It gets bright enough for some dimmer highlights to stand out, but it's not enough for most highlights to pop. Combined with the TV's only okay contrast, it doesn't provide an impactful HDR experience.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Filmmaker
• Brightness: 50
• Contrast: 50
• Color: 25
• HDR Tone Mapping: Static
• Color Tone: Warm 2
• Color Space: Auto
• Gamma: ST.2084 (0)

Results with HDR Tone Mapping set to 'Active':

• Hallway Lights: 383 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 312 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 165 cd/m²

The Samsung Q60D is slightly brighter in Game Mode, but it's less accurate.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point, with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Game
• Brightness: 50
• Contrast: 50
• Color: 25
• HDR Tone Mapping: Static
• Color Tone: Warm 2
• Color Space: Auto
• Gamma: ST.2084 (0)
• Game HDR: Basic

Results with HDR Tone Mapping set to 'Active':

• Hallway Lights: 389 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 363 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 218 cd/m²

The TV has great PQ EOTF tracking, but it's not perfect. Blacks are displayed a bit brighter than intended, and mid-tones are displayed a bit darker than intended. Other than that, the TV follows the curve closely until there's a roll-off near the TV's peak brightness to maintain details in highlights. With content mastered at 4000 nits, the roll-off is even more gradual.

The Samsung Q60D has very good SDR brightness and is bright enough to overcome glare in a well-lit room.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Movie
• Brightness: 50
• Contrast: 45
• Color: 25
• Color Tone: Warm 2
• Gamma: 2.2
• Color Space: Custom

Unfortunately, when displaying a 2% window, the TV automatically adjusts the backlight and APL to enhance contrast, and there's no setting to disable this automatic adjustment.

The TV has a very good color gamut. It has outstanding coverage of the commonly used DCI-P3 color space, but yellows, reds, greens, and cyans are undersaturated. The TV has okay coverage of the less common Rec.2020 color space, but almost all colors are undersaturated and off the mark.

The TV's color volume is satisfactory. It doesn't display darker colors well due to its unremarkable contrast, and it can't display vibrant colors very brightly.

The TV has decent pre-calibration accuracy. Blues and greens are underrepresented in darker shades of gray, reds are underrepresented in all grays, and greens are a bit overrepresented in brighter grays. The color temperature is noticeably cooler than our target of 6500K, and gamma is close to our target of 2.2, but dark scenes are too dark, and bright scenes are too bright. The TV has good color accuracy, but yellows, reds, and magentas are off the mark.

The Samsung Q60D has fantastic accuracy after calibration. It's a bit tricky to calibrate and requires custom adjustments to be made to some colors, and it wasn't possible to fix anything below 30%. Nonetheless, the color temperature is much closer to our target of 6500K, and the color accuracy is outstanding, with only some small inaccuracies with reds and blues. White balance is almost perfect, but reds, blues, and greens are slightly underrepresented in dark shades of gray. Gamma is very close to our target of 2.2, but dark scenes are still too dark.

You can see our full calibration settings here.

The Samsung Q60D has very good gray uniformity. The sides of the screen are darker than the middle, and there's some noticeable dirty screen effect towards the center of the screen. On a very dark or near-black screen, its uniformity is excellent, but the corners and the bottom edge are a bit brighter than the rest of the screen.

The black uniformity of this TV is fantastic. There are some minor cloudy patches near the corners of the screen, but they're barely noticeable, even in nearly black scenes.

The Samsung Q60D has an inadequate viewing angle, so it's not suitable for a wide seating arrangement. There's significant gamma shifting, color shifting, and brightness loss as you move off-center, and colors look increasingly washed out as you move further away to the sides.

The TV's reflection handling is decent. It does an excellent job with indirect reflections, like when you have glare from a light source that isn't directly facing the screen. With more direct light sources, reflections are very noticeable.

The TV has mediocre HDR gradient handling. There's very apparent banding in greens and some noticeable banding in grays and blues. Reds fare better and have minimal banding.

The TV has poor low-quality content smoothing. It does an outstanding job at preserving detail, but there's almost no smoothing actually done to the image, so there's still significant macro-blocking in dark scenes. If you need a TV that does a better job removing artifacts from low-quality content, check out the Sony BRAVIA 3.

The Samsung Q60D does a good job at upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs or lower-resolution streams. Details are clear enough, but finer details are hard to make out.

Sharpness processing was calibrated with no over-sharpening for low-resolution content, with the following settings:

• Sharpness: 5
• Picture Clarity Settings: Off

The TV uses a BGR (Blue-Green-Red) subpixel layout instead of the traditional RGB layout. For video or gaming content, this doesn't cause any issues, but for PC monitor use, it can be a problem as it impacts the text clarity, although not everyone will notice this.

The Samsung Q60D has an unremarkable response time. Any fast motion is blurry, and transitions in dark scenes are slow, which results in black smearing behind dark objects. If you want a TV with a faster response time, check out the Hisense U6/U6N.

The TV uses pulse-width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight, which introduces flicker that can bother people who are sensitive to it. The amount of flicker varies depending on what picture mode the TV is set to and what settings you're using.

It flickers at 480Hz in the 'Movie' Picture Mode at all brightness levels, but all other picture modes, including Game Mode, flicker at a much slower 120Hz, which can cause image duplications or headaches if you're sensitive to flicker. When using the 'Picture Clarity' setting, the TV flickers at 120Hz. With 'LED Clear Motion' enabled, the TV only flickers at 60Hz.

The TV supports backlight strobing, more commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI). The feature is designed to improve the appearance of motion by strobing its backlight and reducing the amount of persistence blur. The BFI feature on the TV only flickers at 60Hz, so there's still some image duplication present.

This TV has an optional motion interpolation feature to improve the clarity of motion, but it doesn't work very well. Even slower-moving scenes have some noticeable artifacts and haloing present. In faster-moving scenes, it can't keep up, and there are distracting artifacts and haloing, and sometimes the TV stops interpolating altogether.

Due to the TV's slow response time, there's very little noticeable stutter when watching 24p content.

The TV gives a judder-free experience with 24p sources like a Blu-ray player and native apps. Unfortunately, it doesn't remove 24p judder from 60Hz sources like most cable TV boxes and older streaming devices that lack a Match Frame Rate feature.

This TV doesn't support a variable refresh rate (VRR) to reduce screen tearing. If you want a budget TV with VRR, consider the Hisense QD7N QLED.

This TV has incredibly low input lag when set to Game Mode, which ensures a very responsive gaming experience with very little delay between your actions with your controller or mouse and the action on-screen.

The Samsung Q60D supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 60Hz. It displays chroma 4:4:4 properly with any signal as long as the input label is set to PC, which is important for reading clear text from a PC. If you need a TV that supports 4k @ 120Hz, take a look at the Samsung Q70D QLED.

The Samsung Q60D is a 60Hz TV, so it only supports 4k @ 60Hz on the P55. It has Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM), so it'll automatically switch to Game Mode when the TV detects a game console as its input device, which gives you the lowest possible input lag for games. Unfortunately, 1440p doesn't work with the PS5 and this TV.

The Samsung Q60D is a 60Hz TV, so it only supports 4k @ 60Hz on the Xbox Series X|S. It has Auto Low Latency Mode, so it'll automatically switch to Game Mode when the TV detects a game console as its input device, which gives you the lowest possible input lag for games. Unfortunately, when the Xbox is set to 1440p, you're locked out of ALLM and HDR.

The TV is limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth on all three ports.

The TV has eARC support, which allows it to pass uncompressed high-quality audio from a connected source to your home theater system or soundbar. Unfortunately, it doesn't support any DTS formats commonly used on Blu-rays.

The TV's frequency response is mediocre. Like most TVs, bass is pretty much non-existent. The sound is well-balanced at moderate listening levels, so the dialogue is clear, but it sounds progressively worse as the volume increases. Since the TV doesn't get very loud, it's best suited for a quiet environment.

The TV's distortion performance is okay. Distortion is audible near and at max volume, so you need to listen at lower volume levels for clean audio.

The TV comes with the 2024 version of Samsung's proprietary Tizen OS but has a reduced feature set compared to more expensive models, so you don't get features like TV to Mobile or Ambient Mode+. Still, it's fast and easy to use and supports Samsung's popular Multi View feature.

Like most TVs, there are ads on the home screen. You can't disable them completely, although you can turn off targeted ads.

Samsung's app store has all of the most common streaming services, so it's easy to find your favorite content. It also includes a great selection of additional apps.

The Samsung Q60D comes with the same minimalistic remote as the 2023 Samsung Q60C QLED. The remote has a rechargeable battery that can be charged via USB-C or solar power. It has buttons for popular streaming services, and the voice control gives you access to Bixby and Alexa. You can ask it to change settings, switch inputs, and answer basic questions, but it can't search for content within apps.

There's a single button underneath the Samsung branding on the right side of the TV, allowing you to turn the TV on/off, change channels, adjust the volume, and select inputs.

• Remote control
• Power cable
• Clip for cable management
• User guides