Thanks for the informative website, it was invaluable for making recent purchasing decisions. There are so many TV specifications to look through and retailers’ websites are so ill-maintained that it’s very difficult to make an educated purchasing decision even if you know exactly what you want. My goal was non-OLED 4K120, 4:4:4, 120hz, sub-10ms input latency, and vendor-agnostic VRR. A shockingly narrow selection of products meet this criteria, which I consider the minimum acceptable high-end PC gaming spec in 2022; if you made a page that lists products meeting this specification I think it could get a lot of traffic. Now, onto the issue:

I understand normally you want to turn sharpness “”“enhancement”“” off since it tends to look awful, but on QN90A/Q70A it induces artificial blurring when you go below “10”. I’ve tried the 55" QN90A and 55" Q70A and found that on both of them your recommended “0” sharpness setting would more accurately be called a “-10” sharpness setting. The neutral unsharpened setting on these screens is actually “10”, not “0”. This may not apply outside PC mode, I don’t know.

See my photo evidence here: https://imgur.com/a/7h3MRfd

I think a note should be added so people don’t wrongly configure their TVs according to your specs and get a blurry picture. In the future maybe you should double-check the behavior of this setting on Samsung TVs; if the Q70A and QN90A both have the same sharpness setting behavior, it’s logical the Q60 and Q80 series probably do as well.

I wonder if your (assumed) use of effectively “-10” sharpening during testing might’ve influenced your notes about the “BGR” subpixel pattern. With Cleartype properly calibrated, I haven’t found any applications with text clarity issues even while running in 100% scale in Windows 10. It’s exactly as readable as on my old midrange Dell IPS monitor.

Off-topic, some notes about using 55" QN90A and Q70A (or similar displays) as a PC monitor in case anyone’s curious:

I first purchased a QN90A and regrettably I quickly decided it wasn’t right for me. It’s a fine general-purpose TV, and also great for gaming, but I became frustrated by its backlight zone dimming behavior in regular Windows applications. The backlight dimming has to be set to “low” to somewhat counteract the technology’s problems, and I soon realized this basically turns a $2000 QN90A into a $1000 Q70A. In fact with “low” backlight dimming, QN90A is slightly worse in both SDR and HDR 100% window brightness and greatly inferior in native contrast according to Rtings. Based on my testing so far I’d say this is accurate. Notably, Q70A also handles screen reflections FAR better than QN90A. The tiniest light shining on my QN90A would cover half my screen in rainbows, it was horrendous.

Q80A seems like just a QN90A with worse local dimming, so it’s out of the question. Q60A doesn’t support 120hz or VRR so it’s not acceptable either. Q70A was the only remaining non-OLED candidate and I had to act fast because they seem to be going out of production, with no direct Samsung replacement for 2022 and onward as far as I can see - probably too much competition from TCL and Hisense.

The first Q70A I received from Best Buy was destroyed by Purolator and the second has a stuck pixel near the middle of the screen. Fortunately the pixel density is such that from my 3-foot sitting distance it’s virtually invisible except on an all-black screen. I have to lean closer and search for it, and even then it takes a few seconds to find.

With roughly 3-4 feet between my eyes and the screen, 55 inch is almost, but not quite, too large. It’s right at the limit, in my opinion. Pixel density is just low enough and the screen just large enough that Windows is still usable without scale adjustment (“100%”). Due to the limited viewing angle, when I sit in the middle, 20% or so on either edge of the screen is slightly dimmer than the center area. It’s not enough to be a problem at all, but it’s noticeable. Most of the time I only use the central area of the screen, but when I’m working on a complicated job I use Windows 10’s edge snapping feature to put four “1080p screens” in each corner and it works incredibly well.

I only use SDR mode currently, and at just 13/50 brightness for all-day eye comfort in a moderately-lit room. HDR is still a bit rubbish in Windows 10 and also complicates screen calibration. It seems like some/most games are able to automatically trigger HDR mode even when it’s disabled in Windows, and I don’t watch HDR movies/TV, so there’s no downside to running it in SDR mode by default.

Q70A’s calibrated color vividness might be very marginally weaker than the QN90A’s but not enough to harm my experience at all. I might even be imagining the difference since I unconsciously expect it to be worse; both screens have >99% sRGB coverage. I’m using the TV for SDR sRGB video production and so far my results have been out of this world compared to the old “gaming monitor”, a 27" 165hz 1440p Asus with a (surprisingly decent FWIW) TN panel. As you can imagine, Q70A’s an enormous step up in brightness, contrast, and especially color fidelity.

The only area I’ve noticed Q70A to be visible worse than QN90A is black smear. QN90A’s fault lies with its sluggish backlight response while Q70A’s fault is its slow (black) pixel response. When you set QN90A’s dimming to “low”, it seems to raise the minimum brightness (black level) of the whole screen slightly so that black pixels have less of a transition to make, greatly reducing the amount of black smear. You can scroll text on a black background and I remember it remaining very legible, for example. However, the backlight is too slow to respond to changes in brightness, so the leading edges of any bright moving objects on a dark background turn brownish and “chunky”. It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. Q70A’s black smear is generally less offensive than the backlight issue (to my eyes) and comes with the benefit of better black levels and the TV costing half as much. For me, the choice is a no-brainer.

Assuming nothing goes wrong with it, I hope to stick with this Q70A until the next generation of display technology matures - whether that’s QD-OLED, MicroLED, or something else. Transitional technologies like OLED and LED with backlight dimming zones have too many unacceptable compromises; I don’t want to worry I’m using a monitor “wrong”, and dimming zones are a crude half-measure.