Samsung QN85D/QN85DD QLED TV Review

The Samsung QN85D has a nice design, although it looks like a much thicker version of last year's Samsung QN85C/QN85CD QLED. From the front, it has thin bezels and a sleek look that'll fit in any room.

The Samsung QN85D's center-mounted stand is small and doesn't take up much space, so the TV doesn't require a large table or desk. The stand's small size doesn't stop the TV from wobbling, but it's not concerning.

Footprint of the stand on the 65-inch model: 15.2" x 11.2". The stand lifts the TV about 3.15 inches above the table, so most soundbars fit in front of the TV without blocking the screen.

The back of the TV looks good, with a nice textured design. There are slots on each side of the TV for alternate feet, but no alternate feet are included in the box. There are cable channels on the back to help with cable management. There are also cable grooves in the stand, hidden with a cover, to further channel cables towards the stand's bottom and out of the TV. Note that the TV's inputs are in a recessed inlet on its back panel. They're hard to access if you wall-mount the TV with a fixed bracket.

The build quality of the Samsung QN85D is great. The TV wobbles from front to back and from side to side due to its small stand, but it's not concerning. However, there's a large amount of flex near the TV's VESA holes and its inputs; it's pretty typical, but it's something to note. Aside from that, the TV feels sleek and is made from premium plastic.

The Samsung QN85D has a fantastic contrast ratio and is a big improvement over last year's model. Its native contrast ratio is good, but with local dimming set to high, its contrast ratio is stellar; the TV can produce extremely deep blacks that don't look gray when viewed in a dark room, and blacks stay deep when bright highlights are on screen.

There's some noticeable blooming around bright highlights and subtitles in dark scenes, but it looks good overall. If you want a TV with no blooming at all, look at the Samsung S85D OLED.

Lighting zone transitions on the Samsung QN85D are decent, but the algorithm that controls the local dimming feature can't quite keep up with fast content, so transitions are noticeable. When bright highlights move quickly across the screen, the leading edge is darker due to the TV not turning on zones fast enough. There's also a bright halo behind bright highlights that move quickly across the screen.

The TV's contrast and dark details in Game Mode are great, even if a bit worse than in the other picture modes due to lower peak brightness and more blooming around bright highlights.

The TV's HDR peak brightness is excellent. Small specular highlights stand out very well, and while large bright scenes are dimmer, they're still very bright. The TV's Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL) isn't aggressive at all, so variations in brightness are kept to a minimum, although they're still there.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: Filmmaker
• Brightness: 50 (Max)
• Contrast: 50 (Max)
• Contrast Enhancer: Off
• HDR Tone Mapping: Static
• Color Space Settings: Auto
• Peak Brightness: High
• Color Tone: Warm2

The TV's peak HDR brightness in Game Mode is slightly lower than in 'Filmmaker,' but it's still great. Highlights still pop, although with more blooming than in other picture modes.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: Game
• Game HDR: Basic
• Brightness: 50 (Max)
• Contrast: 50 (Max)
• Contrast Enhancer: Off
• HDR Tone Mapping: Static
• Color Space Settings: Auto
• Peak Brightness: High
• Color Tone: Warm2

The Samsung QN85D's PQ EOTF tracking is superb in 'Filmmaker' mode. It does behave strangely in brighter midtones, as it suddenly dips below the curve, indicating that midtones are too dark. The curve also behaves erratically after the TV hits its peak. The curve is more typical when testing with an industry-standard 10% window, as seen here. Still, this indicates that some highlights might look weird depending on the scene.

Overall, the TV follows the curve extremely closely. There's a slight roll-off with content mastered at all levels when the TV reaches its peak brightness, preserving bright detail in highlights.

The TV's SDR peak brightness is excellent. It's bright enough to overcome glare in even extremely bright rooms with lots of natural light. The TV's Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL) is not aggressive, although large, bright scenes are still dimmer than scenes with smaller highlights. However, despite the ABL, the TV is still bright enough to overcome glare.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Movie
• Brightness: 50 (Max)
• Color Space: Auto
• Color Tone: Warm2
• Peak Brightness: High

The Samsung QN85D has an excellent color gamut. It can display almost the entire range of colors in the widely used DCI-P3 color space, so HDR content is vivid and lifelike, although most colors are slightly undersaturated. It has good coverage of the Rec. 2020 color space, although some colors are notably off, in particular greens and cyans.

The Samsung QN85D has great color volume. It has bright, vibrant colors and can display bright colors very well, although it's not quite as vibrant as last year's Samsung QN85C/QN85CD QLED. If you want a TV with even better color volume, check out the Hisense U8/U8N.

The TV has excellent pre-calibration SDR accuracy. Its white balance is great, with greens barely underrepresented in most grays, while there's a bit too much red in brighter shades of gray. The color temperature is only slightly cooler than 6500K, but it's barely noticeable. The TV's color accuracy is excellent overall, with only minor errors that aren't noticeable to most people. Gamma is extremely close to 2.2, although most scenes are a bit too dark, while very bright scenes are too bright.

After retesting the TV on firmware 1201, it's confirmed that there are no longer clamping issues with the color space set to 'Auto.'

After calibration, the TV has outstanding SDR accuracy. Minor errors in white balance, color temperature, and gamma are gone. Colors are even more accurate than before, with only very minor errors that aren't noticeable with real content.

As of firmware 1201, there are no longer color space issues with the color space set to 'Auto.'

See our full calibration settings.

The TV has good gray uniformity. There's some vignetting, where the sides of the image are slightly darker than its center, and vertical banding is noticeable in content with large sections of bright colors, like when watching sports like hockey. However, its uniformity with very dark colors is excellent.

The TV's black uniformity is amazing. With local dimming set to 'High,' there's some noticeable blooming around bright elements, but the image is pitch black outside of that. If you turn off local dimming, the entire image will be blue or grayish when bright highlights are present.

Unfortunately, the Samsung QN85D has a significantly worse viewing angle than any other QN85 series TV in the past three years. There's very noticeable color washout and brightness loss in the image when viewed at an angle.

The TV has good reflection handling. Its semi-gloss coating diffuses reflections across the screen, making them bigger but less bright. Look at the Samsung QN90D/QN90DD QLED if you need better reflection handling.

The Samsung QN85D has excellent HDR gradient handling. However, there's very noticeable banding in dark blues and minor banding in dark grays, reds, and greens, as well as in brighter blues. Light grays and reds are free of any banding.

The TV's low-quality content smoothing is alright. It does a good job of preserving details, but it does just an okay job when smoothing out any macro-blocking in dark scenes.

The TV has good sharpness processing when upscaling content. It's good enough that low-resolution content looks sharp, although you lose some fine details in the process.

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

• Sharpness: 5
• Picture Clarity: Off

If you need a mini-LED TV with better upscaling capabilities, check out the Panasonic W95A.

Unlike past models in the QN85 series, the Samsung QN85D uses a VA panel instead of ADS/IPS. This gives it better contrast at the cost of a worse viewing angle. Furthermore, the QN85D has a Blue-Green-Red (BGR) subpixel layout. For multimedia usage, this doesn't cause any issues, but it causes text clarity issues when you use this TV as a PC monitor. There are easy workarounds for these issues, however, and you can read about them here.

The TV has a great response time, and most transitions are very fast. However, it struggles in very dark scene transitions and has a lot of overshoot in those, causing inverse ghosting behind dark areas.

The Samsung QN85D uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight, so unfortunately, it's not flicker-free. The flicker frequency varies between picture modes and at different brightness settings. Below max brightness, 'Movie' mode flickers at 960Hz, while 'Game' Mode and 'Filmmaker' mode flickers at 120Hz. At max brightness, all three are flicker-free. Standard, Eco, and Dynamic flicker at 120Hz at any brightness setting.

The TV has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI). The feature helps reduce blur caused by the TV's fast response time, otherwise known as persistence blur. It works at both 60Hz and 120Hz, which is great, but unfortunately, its timing is off, and it causes a duplicate image when enabled.

The Samsung QN85D has a feature to increase the frame rate of low frame-rate content up to 120Hz. As is typical of this feature, it works very well with slow panning shots and other slow-paced scenes but shows a lot of artifacts once the action ramps up.

Due to the TV's great response time, low frame rate content, like movies, stutters a bit. It's mainly noticeable in slow-panning shots, and motion interpolation or backlight strobing features can mitigate this to some degree, but they come with their own problems.

The Samsung QN85D automatically removes judder from any source, with no additional settings needed. As a result, motion appears smooth, making it great for watching movies.

The Samsung QN85 series is compatible with all three variable refresh rate (VRR) formats, and it works across a very wide refresh rate range, which ensures that your games remain nearly tear-free when gaming. It also supports sources with Low-Frame-Compensation (LFC), which ensures your games remain nearly tear-free even when your frame rate drops very low.

Unfortunately, there's an issue when using AMD graphics cards where the LFC doesn't activate when the frame rate drops below 48fps.

The TV has extremely low input lag in Game Mode. It results in a very responsive gaming experience, with very little delay between your inputs and the on-screen action. Unfortunately, the input lag outside Game Mode is too high for gaming or PC use.

The TV supports most common resolutions up to 4k @ 120Hz. All supported formats display chroma 4:4:4 signals properly, which is essential for clear text from a PC. There are no resolution-halving issues on this TV at any resolution.

The TV doesn't natively support 1440p @ 120Hz when connected to an NVIDIA graphics card (GPU). If the card's scaling features are enabled, then the card scales the 1440p input to the TV, but with scaling disabled, the TV just displays a windowed version of 1440p with black bars around it. No such issue happens with AMD cards, as the TV natively supports 1440p when connected to these cards.

The Samsung QN85D is fully compatible with everything the PS5 offers, like 1440p @ 120Hz and 4k @ 120Hz, as well as HDMI Forum VRR. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about switching to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag.

The TV is fully compatible with almost everything the Xbox Series X|S offers, including 4k @ 120Hz, HDMI Forum VRR, and FreeSync Premium Pro. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about switching to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag. Unfortunately, the TV doesn't support Dolby Vision.

The Samsung QN85D supports full HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on all four HDMI ports, making it very flexible for users with multiple HDMI 2.1 devices. Unfortunately, Samsung still doesn't support Dolby Vision; instead, it supports the less widely used HDR10+ format.

This TV supports eARC, which lets it pass uncompressed high-quality audio from a connected source to your receiver without sacrificing audio quality. Sadly, it doesn't support DTS audio formats, which is disappointing as many UHD Blu-rays and DVDs use DTS for their lossless audio tracks.

The TV's frequency response is okay. There's a bit of bass on the TV, and it sounds sharp and clear at moderate volume. However, when you raise the volume near or at max, the TV's sound reproduction shows noticeable compression, with dialogue not sounding as clear.

The TV's distortion handling is okay. While its performance is very good at moderate volume levels, distortion is more noticeable at higher volumes.

The Samsung QN85D runs the 2024 version of Tizen OS, which is easy to use. Unfortunately, at times, the interface is slow to open for no obvious reason, and sometimes, the TV doesn't register when you change the input label, requiring you to do it again.

Like most TVs on the market, there are ads throughout the TV interface, and although you can turn off targeted ads, you can't turn them off entirely.

The TV has a great selection of apps, so it's easy to find your favorite content. You can also cast content from your phone onto the TV or play videos from a USB stick.

The TV comes with a slim remote that is easy to use. It's minimalistic, with few intuitively laid-out buttons. It has a built-in rechargeable battery, which you can charge through USB-C, with a port on the bottom of the remote or through the solar panel on the back of the remote. The TV is compatible with Bixby and Amazon's Alexa, and both the remote and TV have integrated microphones. The voice commands work well; you can tell the TV to change inputs, ask it to open apps, or even change the brightness. Unfortunately, you can't search for content within apps using voice.

The button is under the Samsung branding on the bottom right of the TV. With it, you can turn the TV on and off, change the channel and the volume, and switch input sources. There's also a small toggle to turn the internal microphone on or off if you're worried about privacy.

• Power cable
• Remote control
• User guide
• Plastic covers for alternate stand (feet not included)