Samsung DU6900 TV Review

The Samsung DU6900 is a thin TV with slim bezels on three sides and a thicker one on the bottom. It won't stand out in any room, but it's functional.

The TV uses two adjustable plastic feet. You can set them to two different height positions and two width positions. Their footprint in the narrow position is 11.9" x 10.6" and 40.3" x 10.6" in the wider setting.

As for height, the lower position puts the screen about 2.6" from the table. The higher position pushes the screen to about 3.6" from the table, high enough that most soundbars fit below the screen.

The photo above shows the feet in their high and narrow position, but here are photos in the narrow and low, wide and low, and wide and high positions.

The TV is made entirely out of plastic and has etched vertical lines. The inputs are in a cutout on the right side of the TV, and there are channels on the back to funnel cables through. The TV comes with a clip that can be attached to either foot for cable management.

The Samsung DU6900 has okay build quality. It's made entirely of plastic, and there's some wobble from front to back, but the TV recovers quickly.

The Samsung DU6900 has poor contrast. Its native contrast is mediocre, but it lacks a local dimming feature, so blacks are raised and washed out when bright highlights are on the screen.

If you want a Samsung model with better contrast, check out the similar Samsung DU7200/DU7200D.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so it can't adjust the backlight of individual zones to brighten up highlights without impacting the rest of the image. This means that there's no distracting flicker or brightness changes when bright highlights move between dimming zones, as it doesn't have any. 

Switching to Game Mode doesn't result in any noticeable difference in dark scene performance. While our local dimming transition video looks different here than it did outside of Game Mode, this is due to a bug; the TV maxes out its brightness whenever you turn on VRR.

The Samsung DU6900 has disappointing peak brightness in HDR. Its low peak brightness combined with poor contrast results in a very flat HDR experience, and bright areas of the scene don't stand out at all.

Switching to the 'Game' Picture Mode makes no noticeable difference in the HDR brightness.

This TV has fantastic PQ EOTF tracking. Its near-blacks are noticeably raised due to its poor contrast, but afterwards, it hugs the curve throughout, meaning that all content is almost exactly as the content creator intended. Of course, the TV isn't bright enough to display very bright highlights, but it rolls off in all mastered content to try and preserve as much bright detail as it can.

The peak brightness in SDR is okay. Its bright enough that it can handle some glare in a moderately lit room, especially with its good reflections handling.

Unfortunately, the color gamut on this TV is just decent. It does have great coverage of the widely used DCI-P3 color space, but it has very noticeable color mapping issues throughout. Its coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space is disappointing, and all colors are still off the mark.

Our results are done with a 75% stimulus, but the TV performs much better with a lower 50% stimulus in the DCI-P3 and Rec. 2020 color space, as it doesn't tone map as aggressively. Colors are still off the mark, but with significantly less color mapping errors.

The Samsung DU6900 has mediocre color volume in the 'Movie' Picture Mode, as it suffers from the clamping bug as detailed in the Color Gamut section, on top of having low peak brightness in HDR and poor contrast.

This TV's pre-calibration accuracy in SDR is very poor. Its white balance is terrible, with reds being massively underrepresented in all shades of gray, greens being overrepresented in brighter grays, and both greens and blues being underrepresented in darker shades. Overall, this makes the TV`s color temperature lean too cold. There are noticeable color mapping issues in all colors, especially undersaturated ones. While gamma is close to our 2.2 target, dark scenes are too dark while bright scenes are too bright.

This TV looks vastly better after a full calibration, with a few issues remaining. Unfortunately, the calibration system itself is a bit buggy, as some of the settings don't adequately register, requiring more finagling with settings than there should be.

See our full calibration settings.

The gray uniformity on this TV is okay. There's some noticeable dirty screen effect in the center, and the corners of the screen are noticeably darker than the center. On a very dark or near-black screen, the sides are noticeably brighter than the center.

The TV has decent black uniformity overall, but large areas of the screen are noticeably cloudy and blueish.

The Samsung DU6900's viewing angle is sub-par, so the TV isn't a good choice for wide seating arrangements. There's significant color shifting and brightness loss as you move off-center, and the image looks increasingly washed out as you move further away to the sides.

The TV has satisfactory reflection handling overall. Its semi-gloss screen finish does an excellent job of reducing the intensity of indirect reflections, like when glare from a ceiling light isn't directly facing the screen. The TV's handling of direct reflections is not as competent but still okay overall, so reflections caused by something like a lamp positioned in front of the screen are still noticeable.

The TV's gradient handling is alright. There's significant banding in dark grays and noticeable banding in dark reds, greens, and blues. All other colors have minimal banding.

The low-quality content processing on this TV is nearly non-existent. It doesn't reduce macro-blocking and pixelization when watching low-bandwidth streaming services, but there's no loss of fine details, either.

The TV's upscaling and sharpness processing is satisfactory overall. Fine details are upscaled well for the most part, but hardcoded text is a bit hard to make out.

The Samsung DU6900 uses a BGR (blue-green-red) subpixel layout instead of the traditional RGB layout. For video or gaming content, this doesn't cause any issues, but for PC monitor use, it can be a problem as it can impact text clarity.

Its spectral power distribution shows that the panel doesn't use any KSF phosphor or Quantum Dot enhancement film to achieve better color separation.

The Samsung DU6900 has a good response time. Fast motion is clear, but there's still some noticeable blur behind very quick-moving objects. Unfortunately, transitions in dark scenes are slow, which results in black smearing behind dark objects. There’s also significant overshoot when the TV transitions from a dark state, resulting in noticeable inverse ghosting in shadow details.

The TV uses pulse-width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight, which introduces flicker that can bother people who are sensitive to it. The amount of flicker varies depending on what picture mode the TV is set to and what settings you're using.

• In 'Game,' 'Dynamic,' 'Standard,' 'Eco,' 'Entertain,' and 'Graphics' modes, the backlight flickers at 120Hz with the brightness at '19' and below, and it is flicker-free at all brightness levels above that.
• In 'Movie' mode, the backlight flickers at 480Hz at all brightness levels.
• In 'Filmmaker' mode, the backlight flickers at 120Hz at all brightness levels.
• With BFI enabled, the TV flickers at 60Hz.

The Samsung DU6900 supports backlight strobing, more commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI). The feature is designed to improve the appearance of motion by strobing its backlight and reducing the amount of persistence blur. The BFI feature on the TV flickers at 60Hz, so there's still some image duplication present.

The TV has optional motion interpolation to help smooth out low frame rate content. It does an okay job with smoothing slower-moving scenes, but it struggles with sudden motion in otherwise slow scenes.

Due to this TV's relatively slow response time, it does a good job with stutter in 24 fps content like movies.

The Samsung DU6900 removes judder from native 24p signals, like DVD or Blu-ray players, as well as from native apps. Unfortunately, it doesn't fully remove judder from 60i or 60p sources, so movies played from satellite/cable boxes aren't judder-free.

This TV supports variable refresh rate technology to help reduce tearing. Due to its narrow refresh rate range, however, it can't take advantage of sources that support low frame rate compensation, so you'll see tearing in games that can't maintain close to 60 fps.

The TV has incredibly low input lag when used in Game Mode and also surprisingly low input lag outside of it. To have low input lag while transmitting a chroma 4:4:4 signal, you'll need to set the input to 'PC' and enable Game Mode.

Unfortunately, 1440p @ 60Hz doesn't work while in Game Mode, so the 1440p @ 60Hz results are done with it off, although the input was still set to 'PC.'

The TV supports all common resolutions at 60Hz. Unfortunately, 1440p doesn't work in Game Mode, even though 1440p works fine outside it.

The Samsung DU6900 is a 60Hz TV, so it only supports 4k @ 60Hz on the P55. It has Auto Low Latency Mode, so it'll automatically switch to Game Mode when the TV detects a game console as its input device, which gives you the lowest possible input lag for games. Unfortunately, the TV doesn't display 1440p properly inside of Game Mode, so you can't game in 1440p with the lowest input lag possible.

The Samsung DU6900 is a 60Hz TV, so it only supports 4k @ 60Hz on the Xbox Series X|S. It has Auto Low Latency Mode, so it'll automatically switch to Game Mode when the TV detects a game console as its input device, which gives you the lowest possible input lag for games. Unfortunately, the TV doesn't display 1440p properly inside of Game Mode, so you can't game in 1440p with the lowest input lag possible. It also doesn't support Dolby Vision gaming.

The TV has eARC support, which allows it to pass uncompressed high-quality audio from a connected source to your home theater system or soundbar. Unfortunately, it doesn't support any DTS formats, which are commonly used on many Blu-rays.

The TV's frequency response is mediocre. Like almost all TVs, it sounds well-balanced at moderate levels but sounds progressively worse as the volume increases. At maximum volume, which isn't very loud, the TV doesn't sound great, so it's better suited for a quiet environment. Like most TVs, it lacks bass.

The TV's distortion performance is unremarkable. Distortion is audible near and at max volume, so you'll need to listen at lower volume levels for no distortion.

The TV comes with the 2024 version of Samsung's proprietary Tizen OS but has a reduced feature set compared to more expensive models. Still, it's fast and easy to use and supports Samsung's popular Multi View feature.

Like most TVs, there are ads on the home screen. You can't disable them completely, although you can turn off targeted ads.

Samsung's app store has all of the most common streaming services, so it's easy to find your favorite content. It also includes a great selection of additional apps.

The Samsung DU6900 comes with a simpler remote than the Samsung DU8000. It requires external batteries—though some are included—and lacks solar charging. It still has buttons for popular streaming services, but it doesn't have an integrated microphone for voice controls. Overall, a very simplistic, but functional, remote.

There's a single button underneath the Samsung branding on the bottom right side of the TV. You can use it to turn the TV on/off, change channels, adjust the volume, and select inputs.

• Remote control
• Power cable (Not in picture)
• 2x AAA batteries
• Clip for cable management
• User guides