Verdict

Pros

• Stunning native UHD pictures
• Content-rich Smart TV engine
• Detailed 3D pictures

Cons

• Slight 3D crosstalk
• Audio delay with Netflix UHD playback
• Care needed with setup to avoid backlight clouding

What is the Samsung UE85HU7500?

The UE85HU7500 is an 85-inch LCD TV with a native 4K/UHD resolution. Which means it’s potentially every AV fan’s dream come true – especially as its £8000 price tag is a hell of a lot cheaper than similar-sized UHD TVs from last year. Let’s just hope its huge size doesn’t prove a step too far for Samsung’s current LED panel technology…

SEE ALSO: Best TVs Round-up

Samsung UE85HU7500 – Design and Features

Not surprisingly the first thing that hits you about the UE85HU7500 is that it’s big. Though actually, while the screen is enormous, the TV as a whole doesn’t feel as monumental an imposition on your living room as you might expect, thanks to the way its screen acreage is somehow held inside an impressively trim frame.

What there is of this frame looks good, if not especially original, with a glossy black finish and transparent extension along the bottom edge. We remain fans of Samsung’s latest understated but beautifully built metal desktop stands.

Connectivity is everything you’d expect of a high-end modern TV. Its four HDMIs provide version 2.0 support so they can receive native UHD at 50/60 frames per second, while multimedia playback can be enjoyed via three USBs or DLNA media streaming via LAN port or Wi-Fi. Samsung’s big boy also supports direct Wi-Fi and MHL connectivity for easy phone or tablet connection.

Needless to say, the network ports additionally let you take the UE85HU7500 online to access Samsung’s latest Smart TV platform. We’ve covered this extensively in a previous feature, so all we’ll say here is that it deserves kudos for providing the catch-up apps for all of the UK’s main broadcast channels and the Netflix 4K UHD service, but that its interface is startling to feel a little cumbersome.

Also, strangely, there’s no sign yet of support for Amazon’s recently launched UHD streaming service. Even though Samsung promised before the 2014 IFA show that its TVs would be the first with Amazon UHD playback.

It’s important to add here, too, that the HU7500 series is compatible with Samsung’s Evolution Kit, whereby you can add in future years external boxes that upgrade your TV with not only potentially updated connectivity, but also Samsung’s latest processing and Smart TV systems.

The UE85HU7500’s native 3840×2160 resolution is backed up by a local dimming system that can adjust the light levels output by separate sections of the screen’s LED lighting array to deliver a much better contrast performance. This local dimming should be particularly welcome on the UE85HU7500 given the potential for normal LED lighting systems to cause backlight clouding on such vast screens.

Also helping pictures – as well as the speed of its smart features – should be the UE85HU7500’s Quad Core Plus processing engine, while motion handling should benefit from a 1000Hz-emulating combination of a scanning backlight, native 200Hz panel and frame interpolation technology.

One final noteworthy feature of the UE85HU7500 is its audio system. It uses no less than six drivers – front tweeters, front mid-range drivers and two woofers – to pump out a whopping 90W RMS of power.

Samsung UE85HU7500 – Setup

Although Samsung’s picture presets are slowly improving, they still tend to be pretty unhelpful thanks to their over-aggressive stance on backlighting and sharpness. A few more picture presets would be appreciated too, as would a more sophisticated ‘auto’ picture adjustment system like that now employed on Sony’s high-end TVs.

Fortunately you can usually greatly improve the picture quality of Samsung’s TVs with some relatively easy adjustments, and so it proves with the UE85HU7500.

Your starting point – especially if you’re about to watch a film in a fairly dark room – should be to drastically drop the backlight level. We’d suggest using the 7 or 8 setting.

You should also make sure you’ve got the Smart LED local dimming feature active on its Low or even Mid setting, since otherwise dark scenes have a quite marked grey look to them.

Sharpness should be set to around its 40 level for native UHD content and slightly lower for upscaled HD. You should make sure all noise-reduction systems are turned off for native UHD and, we’d argue, upscaled UHD, too. Finally we’d recommend using the motion processing on its Clear level or a Custom setting with Judder and Blur Reduction set to around 3 each.