Samsung Q70/Q70A QLED TV Review

Samsung’s 2021 QLEDs are all very thin and sleek-looking, and this one is no exception. It’ll look great in any living room. The stand has a new design that's different from other Samsung TVs like the Samsung Q60/Q60A QLED and the Samsung Q80/Q80A QLED. It's center-mounted, so it can also fit on smaller tables.

The stand looks a little cheap, but it supports the TV well for the most part. It's center-mounted, so you can place it on a smaller table if you like. Also, it's flat so you can place a soundbar on top of it, but the soundbar won't block the screen if you place it on the table in front of the stand.

Footprint of the stand: 11.9" x 9.8"

The back is plastic with fine horizontal etchings to give it a brushed aluminum look. There are tracks along the back of the TV and the stand for cable management. As the inputs are side-facing, they're easy to access if the TV is wall-mounted.

The TV is very thin, and it will sit flat against the wall if you wall-mount it. Unlike the Samsung Q80/Q80A QLED, there's a slot to put the power cable so that it won't stick out.

The Samsung Q70A has good build quality. It feels well-built overall, despite some wobble due to the thin profile and narrow stand. The stand feels somewhat cheap, but it has a plastic cover that slides in to cover the two feet. Sadly, the bezels don't feel like they're flush around the screen, and there's a small gap.

Note: The tested unit arrived with some slight damage, as the bottom-left part of the border pops out a bit in a way it shouldn't, making it feel less solidly put together. This is just a defect with this unit alone, though, so it doesn't affect scoring, and it isn't a standard issue.

The Samsung Q70A has a fantastic contrast ratio. It’s among the highest native contrast ratios we’ve tested on an LED TV, which is a good thing considering it doesn’t have a local dimming feature. This means that it displays deep blacks when viewed in the dark. Contrast varies between units and considering it's such a high native contrast, there's a possibility your unit will have a lower native contrast, but it will still display deep blacks.

The Samsung Q70A QLED has excellent peak brightness. It gets very bright, and even though you won't get the same peak brightness as with Mini LED TVs like the Samsung QN90A QLED, it’s able to overcome glare in most lighting conditions.

These results are from after calibration, using the ‘Movie’ Picture Mode, with Brightness set to max, and Color Tone set to ‘Warm2’.

To get an ever brighter image, you can try setting the Picture Mode to ‘Dynamic’, Contrast Enhancer to ‘High’, Color Tone to ‘Standard’ and have Brightness and Contrast at max. It measured 631 nits using those settings, although it results in a less accurate image.

This TV doesn't have local dimming. We still film the videos for reference, so you can see how backlight on this display performs and compare it to a similar product with local dimming. If you want a large TV with a full-array local dimming feature, check out the TCL R745 QLED.

The videos are for reference only, so you can see how backlight on this display performs and compare it to a similar product with local dimming.

The Samsung Q70 has decent HDR brightness. It’s quite consistent across various scenes, but without a local dimming feature, small highlights don't stand out against the rest of the screen.

These measurements are from before calibration, using the ‘Movie HDR’ Picture Mode, with Brightness and Contrast set to max, Color Tone set to ‘Warm2’, and all additional picture processing settings disabled.

If you find HDR too dim, you can make it brighter by setting Contrast Enhancer to ‘High’ and ST.2084 to max. These settings result in this EOTF, which makes the image appear brighter, but it doesn't change the luminosity.

The HDR brightness in Game Mode is okay. Most highlights are slightly brighter than outside of Game Mode, except for small highlights, which are dim due to frame dimming. This means that small, specular highlights in games don't pop. Also, the EOTF in Game Mode is much worse than outside of Game Mode, so the entire image appears darker than intended.

The PQ EOTF is decent, but it over-brightens scenes for most content mastered under 4,000 nits.

The gray uniformity is okay. The edges and corners of the screen are noticeably darker, and there's some dirty screen effect in the center. This is noticeable if you want to use the TV as a PC monitor or you watch sports with large areas of bright colors, like hockey or basketball. The uniformity is a bit better in near-dark scenes, but there's still some slight clouding or unevenness.

The Samsung Q70A has excellent black uniformity. There’s very little noticeable clouding throughout, and blooming around bright objects is fairly minimal, so bright objects in movies aren't distracting. While it's uniform, the entire screen has more of a blue-ish hue, but that's due to the lack of a local dimming feature.

The Samsung Q70A has narrow viewing angles, despite being advertised by Samsung as having a wide viewing angle. The image quickly starts to look washed out as you move off-center, and it's not ideal for wide seating arrangements. If you want a TV with wide viewing angles, then check out the LG NANO85 2021.

The Samsung Q70 has decent reflection handling. It does well with ambient light, but it struggles more with strong light sources as the reflections can get distracting. Combined with its high peak brightness, visibility won't be an issue in well-lit rooms.

The Samsung Q70A has excellent out-of-the-box accuracy. Most colors and white balance are accurate, and the color temperature is very close to the target. However, the gamma doesn't really follow the target. Most scenes, and very bright scenes especially, are over-brightened.

After calibration, the accuracy is incredible. Remaining inaccuracies aren't noticeable to the naked eye. The gamma and color temperature are almost perfect.

You can see the recommended settings here.

DVDs and other 480p content are upscaled without issues.

720p content looks fine with no upscaling issues.

1080p content looks good.

The Samsung Q70A displays native 4k content perfectly.

The Samsung Q70A can't display an 8k signal.

The Samsung Q70A uses a BGR subpixel layout. It doesn't affect image quality, but it can affect text clarity when using the TV as a PC monitor. You can read more about that here.

The Samsung Q70A has a very good color gamut. It's wide enough for HDR content, with excellent coverage of the common DCI P3 color space and fair coverage of the wider Rec. 2020. While its DCI P3 coverage is good enough for the large majority of HDR movies that use this color space, the Rec. 2020 coverage is more limited, so this TV isn't exactly future-proof because more movies will use the wider Rec. 2020 color space instead.

The color volume is okay. It handles dark, saturated colors pretty well thanks to its high contrast ratio, but it struggles to display bright blues like most LED TVs.

The Samsung Q70A has decent gradient performance, although it's worse than the Samsung Q70/Q70T QLED. There's visible banding in the grays and greens, which is noticeable in scenes with gradients, like a sunset. If you notice banding with real content, you can enable Noise Reduction to help smooth out gradients, though you will lose fine details in some scenes in high-quality movies.

The Samsung Q70A shows no signs of temporary image retention. This varies between units, but it's rarely an issue.

VA panels like this one appear to be immune to long-term burn-in according to the long-term test.

The TV has an impressive response time, so motion looks smoother. However, like other VA panel TVs, it has a slow response time with dark transitions, which results in black smearing. It's noticeable with fast-moving content in dark scenes.

The Samsung Q70A uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight. In 'Movie' mode, it flickers at such a high frequency that most people won't notice it. In the 'Dynamic', 'Standard', 'Natural', and 'Filmmaker' Picture Modes, or with Picture Clarity enabled, the flicker drops down to 120Hz, which creates image duplication.

The flicker is inconsistent in Game Mode, and the flicker is noticeable with the Xbox Series X with VRR enabled, because it's flickering between 60-120Hz with the backlight at any setting, and this can become distracting. However, with VRR disabled on the Xbox, the flicker disappears. With a laptop with an RTX 3060 graphics card, it flickers at 960Hz with G-SYNC enabled and at 120Hz with G-SYNC disabled. Also, on a PC with a Radeon 6600 XT graphics card in Game Mode, it flickers at 480Hz with VRR both on and off.

This TV has an optional backlight strobing feature, also known as black frame insertion, that can help reduce persistence blur. It can flicker at 60Hz or 120Hz, depending on which setting you're using, both in and out of Game Mode. It looks good overall, but there's a bit of image duplication. The BFI score is based on how many frequencies the feature can flicker at and not how well it performs.

The Samsung Q70A can interpolate motion up to 120 fps. It's also called the 'Soap Opera Effect'. It doesn't look particularly good on this TV, resulting in many duplications and artifacts, especially during busy scenes.

Due to the TV's quick response time, low frame rate content appears to stutter because each frame is held on longer. If you notice stuttering, you can try enabling motion interpolation.

The TV removes 24p judder from any source without enabling additional settings. This helps with the appearance of motion in movies.

The Samsung Q70A supports FreeSync VRR, which is automatically enabled in Game Mode to reduce screen tearing. It's not officially supported by NVIDIA to be G-SYNC compatible, but G-SYNC compatibility works without any screen tearing throughout the entire refresh rate range as long as the firmware is updated to version 1904 and above. However, at times with G-SYNC enabled 4k @ 120Hz signals would flash a black screen and would randomly stop working until the TV was reset. Still, if you don't experience these issues, VRR works fine.

The input lag is low, as long as you enable Game Mode, so gaming feels responsive. As with the other 2021 Samsung TVs we've tested, like the Samsung QN85A QLED, we couldn't get accurate input lag measurements with VRR enabled. We're looking into the issue, and we don't expect VRR to significantly affect input lag.

The TV supports most common resolutions, including native 4k @ 120Hz, with no issues. It can display proper chroma 4:4:4 as well, which is important for text clarity, but 4:4:4 doesn't work properly in 1440p. It works with 1080p and 4k signals, so text looks sharp when you're using it as a PC monitor.

The Samsung Q70A supports all resolutions for the latest consoles. It also has an Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM) that automatically switches the TV to Game Mode for the lowest latency.

As this TV doesn't support Dolby Vision, if you stream Dolby Vision content, it will be limited to HDR10 instead. This TV only supports HDMI 2.1 on one input, and if you want something that has HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on all four ports then check out the Samsung Q80/Q80B QLED.

The Samsung Q70A can pass Dolby Digital and Dolby Atmos audio formats to a compatible receiver to enhance your sound experience. It doesn't support DTS:X or DTS formats, so if you tend to watch content with those formats, this TV isn't ideal for you.

The TV has a poor frequency response. It's worse than other Samsung models, including the Samsung Q70/Q70T QLED. The bass is especially bad, and it doesn't get very loud. There's barely a difference in volume between 60 and 100. There's a room correction feature called Adaptive Sound+, and there wasn't a significant difference in the frequency response with it enabled or disabled. If you want a TV with better built-in speakers, check out the Samsung The Frame 2021.

The distortion performance is passable, but there's some distortion at moderate listening levels, and it gets worse at max volume. However, distortion depends on the content, and not everyone will hear it.

The Tizen OS interface is smooth and easy to use. In 2021, it performs even more smoothly than in previous years, and there weren't any bugs during testing.

We couldn't get a photo of ads, but as with other Samsung TVs, ads appear on the home page and in the app store with no way to disable them.

There are many apps built-in and available to download, and they run smoothly.

The remote is Samsung's new 'Solar Cell' remote, which ditches batteries for a solar panel on the back. It can also be charged through USB-C, though it doesn't come with a cable. It includes shortcut buttons to popular streaming apps and to access voice control, with which you can adjust settings, change inputs, and perform searches but not within apps.

The controls are located under the Samsung logo on the bottom right side of the TV. There's a single button that lets you power On/Off and change channels, inputs, and volume.

• Power cable (not pictured)
• Remote control
• User guide