Samsung Q60D [Q60, Q60DD] QLED TV Review

The Samsung Q60 TV has inadequate HDR brightness. It gets bright enough for some dimmer highlights to stand out, but it's not enough for most highlights to pop. Combined with the TV's only okay contrast, it doesn't provide an impactful HDR experience.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Filmmaker
• Brightness: 50
• Contrast: 50
• Color: 25
• HDR Tone Mapping: Static
• Color Tone: Warm 2
• Color Space: Auto
• Gamma: ST.2084 (0)

Results with HDR Tone Mapping set to 'Active':

• Hallway Lights: 383 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 312 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 165 cd/m²

The Samsung Q60DD is slightly brighter in Game Mode, but it's less accurate.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Game
• Brightness: 50
• Contrast: 50
• Color: 25
• HDR Tone Mapping: Static
• Color Tone: Warm 2
• Color Space: Auto
• Gamma: ST.2084 (0)
• Game HDR: Basic

Results with HDR Tone Mapping set to 'Active':

• Hallway Lights: 389 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 363 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 218 cd/m²

The Samsung Q60D has alright SDR brightness and is bright enough to overcome glare in a well-lit room.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Movie
• Brightness: 50
• Contrast: 45
• Color: 25
• Color Tone: Warm 2
• Gamma: 2.2
• Color Space: Custom

Unfortunately, when displaying a 2% window, the TV automatically adjusts the backlight and APL to enhance contrast, and there's no setting to disable this automatic adjustment.

The Samsung Q60D has disappointing contrast. Its native contrast is good, but as it lacks a local dimming feature, blacks appear gray and washed out most of the time. 

The TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so there are no lighting zones. This means there's no blooming around bright elements against a dark background, but the entire image looks gray and washed out.

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 are no distracting flickers or brightness changes as bright highlights move between dimming zones.

Switching to Game Mode doesn't result in any noticeable difference in dark scene performance.

The black uniformity of this TV is impressive. There are some minor cloudy patches near the corners of the screen, but they're barely noticeable, even in nearly black scenes.

The TV has passable SDR color volume, but barely. It lacks the color volume in DCI-P3 to fully display dark colors and even less with brighter ones. Still, it displays blues, magentas, and even some reds quite well. The TV's color volume is inadequate in the BT.2020 color space, however; here it struggles with fully displaying almost all colors, and its total coverage is about half of the total color space.

The TV's color volume in HDR is passable. It doesn't display darker colors well due to its lack of local dimming, and its low peak brightness limits its ability to display bright and vibrant colors.

The TV has okay SDR pre-calibration accuracy. Blues and greens are underrepresented in darker shades of gray, reds are underrepresented in all grays, and greens are a bit overrepresented in brighter grays. The color temperature is noticeably cooler than our target of 6500K, and gamma is close to our target of 2.2, but dark scenes are too dark, and bright scenes are too bright. The TV has good color accuracy, but yellows, reds, and magentas are off the mark.

The Samsung Q60D has fantastic SDR accuracy after calibration. It's a bit tricky to calibrate and requires custom adjustments to be made to some colors, and it wasn't possible to fix anything below 30%. Nonetheless, the color temperature is much closer to our target of 6500K, and the color accuracy is outstanding, with only some small inaccuracies with reds and blues. White balance is almost perfect, but reds, blues, and greens are slightly underrepresented in dark shades of gray. Gamma is very close to our target of 2.2, but dark scenes are still too dark.

You can see our full calibration settings.

The Samsung Q60 has disappointing HDR accuracy before calibration. Reds are underrepresented, and greens are overrepresented in brighter grays. This gives the TV an extremely cold color temperature, giving everything an obvious blue tint. All colors are off-target, especially reds, blues, and greens, and there are significant color mapping issues in all colors except brighter grays.

After calibration, the TV has decent HDR accuracy. While the TV's white balance is noticeably improved, reds, blues, and greens are all very slightly overrepresented in all grays, and its color temperature is still far too cold. Color accuracy is vastly improved, however, with significantly fewer color mapping issues in all colors.

The TV has passable PQ EOTF tracking. Blacks are displayed brighter than intended, but afterward, all tones are slightly, but noticeably, darker than intended. There's a roll-off near the TV's peak brightness to maintain details in highlights. With content mastered at 4000 nits, the roll-off is even more gradual.

The TV has poor low-quality content smoothing. It does an outstanding job at preserving detail, but there's almost no smoothing actually done to the image, so there's still significant macro-blocking in dark scenes. If you need a TV that does a better job removing artifacts from low-quality content, check out the Sony BRAVIA 3.

The Samsung Q60D QLED TV does a good job at upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs or lower-resolution streams. Details are clear enough, but finer details are hard to make out.

Sharpness processing was calibrated with no over-sharpening for low-resolution content, with the following settings:

• Sharpness: 5
• Picture Clarity Settings: Off

The TV has mediocre HDR gradient handling. There's very apparent banding in greens and some noticeable banding in grays and blues. Reds fare better and have minimal banding.

This TV has low input lag at 60Hz when set to Game Mode, but it doesn't support 120Hz and above at any resolution, limiting its usability when it comes to responsive high refresh rate gaming.

The Samsung Q60D supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 60Hz. It displays chroma 4:4:4 properly with any signal as long as the input label is set to PC, which is important for reading clear text from a PC. If you need a TV that supports 4k @ 120Hz, take a look at the Samsung Q70D QLED.

This TV doesn't support a variable refresh rate (VRR) to reduce screen tearing. If you want a budget TV with VRR, consider the Hisense QD7N QLED.

The TV's CAD at its maximum refresh rate of 60Hz is passable. It performs well in a few select bright gray transitions, but almost every other transition is quite slow, leading to some noticeable blur.

This Samsung Q60D doesn't support a 120Hz refresh rate.

The Samsung Q60D's CAD at 60Hz is acceptable. It performs well in a few select bright gray transitions, but almost every other transition is quite slow, leading to some noticeable blur.

The Samsung Q60D is a 60Hz TV, so it only supports 4k @ 60Hz on the P55. It has Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM), 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, 1440p doesn't work with the PS5 and this TV.

The Samsung Q60D 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, when the Xbox is set to 1440p, you're locked out of ALLM and HDR.

Due to the TV's slow response time, there's very little noticeable stutter when watching 24p content.

The TV gives a judder-free experience with 24p sources like a Blu-ray player and native apps. Unfortunately, it doesn't remove 24p judder from 60Hz sources like most cable TV boxes and older streaming devices that lack a Match Frame Rate feature.

The Samsung Q60D Series has an inadequate response time. Most motion is blurry, and many transitions in dark scenes are slow, which results in black smearing behind dark objects. If you want a TV with a faster response time, check out the Hisense U6/U6N.

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.

It flickers at 480Hz in the 'Movie' Picture Mode at all brightness levels, but all other picture modes, including Game Mode, flicker at a much slower 120Hz, which can cause image duplications or headaches if you're sensitive to flicker. When using the 'Picture Clarity' setting, the TV flickers at 120Hz. With 'LED Clear Motion' enabled, the TV only flickers at 60Hz.

The TV 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.

This TV has an optional motion interpolation feature to improve the clarity of motion, but it doesn't work very well. Even slower-moving scenes have some noticeable artifacts and haloing present. In faster-moving scenes, it can't keep up, and there are distracting artifacts and haloing, and sometimes the TV stops interpolating altogether.

The TV's direct reflection handling is sub-par. While it does reduce the intensity of direct reflections to a small degree, they're still very obvious, leading to an unpleasant viewing experience when you have bright lights or windows shining directly on the TV.

The TV does a fantastic job retaining its black levels in a bright room. Blacks are barely raised as more light is added to your room, so you get very similar black levels regardless of your lighting. That said, it has poor black levels to begin with, so you never see deep blacks on this model.

The amount of total reflected light is sub-par. While the TV's handling of ambient lighting is passable, it does so with some obvious light banding.

The TV has okay color saturation when used in a well-lit room. Overall, there's barely any difference in the vibrancy of colors, whether you're in a dark room or a bright one, although darker colors look slightly more washed out. Still, it has somewhat limited color volume to begin with, so colors lack vibrancy regardless of your lighting conditions.

The TV's viewing angle is unremarkable, so it's not suitable for a wide seating arrangement. As you move off-center, there's significant gamma shifting, color shifting, and brightness loss, and colors look increasingly washed out as you move further away to the sides.

The Samsung Q60D has adequate gray uniformity. The sides of the screen are darker than the middle, and there's some noticeable dirty screen effect towards the center of the screen. On a very dark or near-black screen, its uniformity is excellent, but the corners and the bottom edge are a bit brighter than the rest of the screen.

The TV 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 impacts the text clarity, although not everyone will notice this.

The TV has decent separation between colors, which helps somewhat with its color purity and its ability to display a satisfactory range of colors, although they don't look vibrant.

The TV is limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth on all three ports.

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 commonly used on Blu-rays.

Unfortunately, Samsung still doesn't support Dolby Vision. However, it supports HDR10+ instead, which is similar overall but not as widely supported.

The Samsung Q60D has thin bezels and a modern design that looks premium despite the TV being an entry-level model.

The TV uses two plastic feet that support the TV well. The footprint of the 65-inch stand is 42.2" x 10.8".

The height of the feet is adjustable, and you can set them to two different positions. The lower position, which you can see in the photo, puts the screen close to the table. The other position is high enough that most soundbars fit below the screen. The height of the lower position from the table is 1.97", and the higher one is 2.95".

The back of the TV is made of plastic and has a nice brushed finish. There's a single clip included that can be attached to either foot and used for cable management. Unfortunately, the inputs are recessed into the TV, so they're hard to reach if you wall-mount it with a fixed bracket.

The Samsung Q60 Series has decent build quality. The stand supports the TV well in the lower position, but there's some wobble front to back in the higher position, although this won't cause any issues. There are no major flaws with build quality, but the TV feels cheap since it's made entirely of plastic.

The TV comes with the 2024 version of Samsung's proprietary Tizen OS but has a reduced feature set compared to more expensive models, so you don't get features like TV to Mobile or Ambient Mode+. 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.

The Samsung Q60D comes with the same minimalistic remote as the 2023 Samsung Q60C QLED. The remote has a rechargeable battery that can be charged via USB-C or solar power. It has buttons for popular streaming services, and the voice control gives you access to Bixby and Alexa. You can ask it to change settings, switch inputs, and answer basic questions, but it can't search for content within apps.

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

• Remote control
• Power cable
• Clip for cable management
• User guides

The TV's frequency response is mediocre. Like most TVs, bass is pretty much non-existent. The sound is well-balanced at moderate listening levels, so the dialogue is clear, but it sounds progressively worse as the volume increases. Since the TV doesn't get very loud, it's best suited for a quiet environment.