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Samsung 55-inch KS9500 Quantum Dot SUHD Curved TV
Price: R32 999
My husband and I have never owned our own TV. Sure, we had the boxy, 30-year-old Telefunken his grandma gave us, but that one bit the dust after a power surge a few winters ago. We’ve always just watched series off a laptop or PC in our bedroom.
Then happily last year, Samsung offered me their brand-new 55-inch KS9500 Quantum Dot SUHD Curved TV to try for six weeks, a TV that retails for a staggering R33 000.
After said unit arrived in our living room and was set up by some incredibly professional and slick Samsung installers (they even put on plastic gloves before touching any of the parts), it’s as if our whole house suddenly looked “richer”. At times, I would catch my husband just looking at the TV as he walked by, not watching it, but just looking at it standing there.
It really is a gorgeous-looking piece of electronics. From the side, the screen is about as thin as your average smartphone and it curves in slightly at the sides. The remote is a slim and oblong, space age-looking gadget.
And then, of course, there’s the actual image quality. The SUHD (Samsung ultra high definition) makes use of “quantum dot” technology, which means it has nano-sized crystals made of semiconductor materials that are extremely efficient in absorbing and then emitting light. The colour of light that quantum dots give off is stable and pure, so they can show precise colours while the light from conventional materials ends up getting mixed with the colours next to it. Quantum technology is also more economical.
The SUHD “automatically analyses the brightness of images to minimise additional power consumption while expressing ultimate contrast levels, producing images with much darker blacks and an elevated brightness up to 2.5 times brighter than conventional TVs and twice the colour adjustment points for the most accurate colour display”, says the TV’s website. In layperson’s terms: With quantum dots, everything is better.
Using the TV’s smart functions such as Wi-Fi, internet and phone mirroring was also quite easy and the operating system proved to be user-friendly and intuitive.
When we didn’t feel like watching TV, it was easy to plug a USB flash stick or external hard drive into the separate port box and watch series off it.
The TV’s sound is also awesome, boasting output of 40 watts and it has a built-in woofer.
In short, the SUHD is probably one of the best TVs on the market at the moment, albeit a pricy buy. And, if the 55-incher isn’t enough for you, you can get the 65-inch for a cool R60 000.
