Topic: Is 4K Worth It?

I have a 60-something inch 4K HDR whatever television, and honest to God, I can't really tell any difference between it and our normal HD one which is actually in the same room so it's easy to compare. I've never been particularly tech savvy though.

@BAMozzy Hey man, I’m hoping you can help me with a little Buyer’s remorse. Based on both rtings.com and digital foundry’s recommendations I went with a samsung Q80T, 65” (currently unopened in my house). They said that the q90t “performs a bit better than the Q80T, but it's not worth the price difference”.

But then I went and watched more videos and read more, and several comments and sites have said that the q90t is way better than the q80t, because of the better local dimming and the hdr peak brightness.

So now I’m not sure if I made a poor choice.... I’m tempted to find a way to fit the q80t into my car and return it, so I can upgrade to the q90t.... but frankly the box is heavy and I’m concerned about breaking it in the process. I’m also not sure how crazy I’m being.

FWIW I’m upgrading from a Samsung UN60H7150.

So, I guess what I’m hoping you can help me with is simply if I’ll really notice a difference between the Q80T and the Q90T, or if I should chill out my nerdy number-crunching brain and be happy with the q80t which I assume is still going to be a big upgrade over the current TV.

I've had my Samsung KS800 65inch for 3 years and I must say it really has transformed my gaming and film watching, In some scenes it's so bright I have to squint and in some games like GoW it really feels like Kratos is going to jump out of the TV!

As an aside i recomend everyone uses the rtings.com site for TV settings, they really do make quite the difference as well!

@Mega-Gazz Its difficult to say whether you would notice or not - people are different and some will see a noticeable difference and others may say its not enough of a difference to worry about so I can't really say how you will feel. There is no doubt the Q90 models are better than the Q80 models but would probably need to view each side by side to see when the differences actually make any difference - and that's usually where things are breaking down - which TV's image has the least issues, doesn't bloom as much in HDR? has slightly less smearing in motion? etc. Some differences may be just numbers that you can't actually see your self from across the room (Pixel response is a bit better, smearing is a few pixels shorter as a result - but too small to see) and some may be more noticeable - the bloom around bright object on a dark background being a lot more noticeable in HDR. However, that situation may not crop up much.

The Q80 is a 'better' TV than my KS8000 in a some areas - mine is an edge lit TV so it has even fewer dimming areas but the only time its an issue is in HDR where you have sharply defined bright objects on black backgrounds - like text, logos, space suits (Gravity film for example) and to make those bright, its very difficult to keep the blacks 'black' and the dimming, the brightness and screen quality etc all affect the amount of bloom/bleed. However, in SDR, when the backlight is much lower, you will probably see no difference between the Q80 and Q90. If you are OK with some more light bleed in HDR when the end credits roll, when logo or loading screens (not that the PS5 will have many that last for too long), very specific situations where the differences actually make a noticeable difference, then you can save a bit of money and stick with what you have. If that is going to matter to you, then perhaps it is worth going for the Q90.

I can't tell you what you should/shouldn't do. There is a difference and that difference will mainly show up in very specific types of content where the differences will be noticeable in a side by side comparison but for the vast majority of time, the content you watch would look very similar on both TV's. It depends on how much that will matter or whether you can live with it - the vast majority of content will be equally as stunning and even SDR will look much better with much deeper blacks than you are used to...

@BAMozzy Thanks. Your knowledge and ability to put it in context really helps.