Samsung Q70D [Q70, Q72D] QLED TV Review

The Samsung 65Q72D has the same design as last year's Samsung Q70C QLED, with a clean and simple look.

The center-mounted stand is mostly made of plastic and feels a bit flimsy, but it does a good job of supporting the TV with minimal wobble. The stand lifts the TV about 3.19", so most soundbars fit underneath without blocking the screen.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand: 13.54" x 11.8".

The back of the TV is plastic with fine horizontal etchings, and it feels solid overall, without excessive flex around the VESA holes or inputs. There are grooves on the back of the TV and the stand 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 65Q72D has good build quality. The TV has an all-plastic build that makes it feel a bit cheap, but it still feels pretty solid overall. The stand holds the TV well, and there's minimal wobbling when pushing or moving the TV. There are no major flaws with build quality and no issues with quality control.

The Samsung Q72D has adequate contrast. Its native contrast ratio is good enough that blacks are somewhat deep during purely dark scenes, but since it lacks local dimming, blacks become raised and grayish when brighter highlights are also on screen.

The TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so there's no blooming around bright objects or subtitles during dark scenes.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so it doesn't adjust the backlight of individual areas 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 across the screen.

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

The Samsung Q72D has good HDR brightness. Unfortunately, the TV doesn't provide a very good HDR experience since its contrast isn't good enough to have brighter highlights stand out very much against a darker background.

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: 503 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 403 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 194 cd/m²

The Samsung Q72D 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
• HDR10+ Gaming: Basic

Results with HDR Tone Mapping set to 'Active':

• Hallway Lights: 507 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 481 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 253 cd/m²

The TV has excellent PQ EOTF tracking, but it's not perfect. Blacks are displayed a bit brighter than intended, while mid-tones and highlights are displayed a bit darker than intended. Other than that, the TV follows the curve closely until 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 impressive 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

The TV has a good color gamut. It has excellent coverage of the commonly used DCI-P3 color space, but all colors are undersaturated and/or inaccurate. The TV has okay coverage of the less common Rec.2020 color space, but all colors are even more undersaturated and off the mark.

The TV's color volume is decent. It doesn't display darker colors well due to its only adequate contrast, and it doesn't display vibrant colors very brightly.

The TV has very good pre-calibration SDR accuracy. Blues and greens are underrepresented in darker shades of gray, and reds are underrepresented in all grays. The color temperature is cooler than the 6500K we aim for, and the gamma is a bit off of 2.2, with most scenes being displayed darker than they should be. Color accuracy is very good overall, but saturated reds and magentas, lighter yellows, and whites do have some noticeable inaccuracies.

The TV has fantastic accuracy after calibration, and it's easy to calibrate. The color temperature is much closer to 6500K, and the white balance and gamma are now almost perfect. Color accuracy is better now, but there are still some minor inaccuracies with reds.

See our full calibration settings.

The Samsung Q72DD has decent gray uniformity. The sides of the screen are quite a bit darker than the middle, and there's noticeable dirty screen effect towards the center of the screen. On a very dark or near-black screen, its uniformity is very good, but the corners and the bottom edge are a bit brighter than the rest of the screen.

The TV has good black uniformity overall, but sections of the screen are noticeably blueish and cloudy.

The Samsung Q72DD has an inadequate viewing angle, so it's not suitable for a wide seating arrangement. There's significant gamma shifting, black level rise, and brightness loss as you move off-center, and colors look increasingly washed out as you move further away to the sides.

The Samsung Q72D has satisfactory reflection handling. Its semi-gloss screen finish significantly reduces the intensity of indirect reflections, like when glare from a ceiling light isn't directly facing the screen. Unfortunately, the TV's handling of direct reflections is only alright, so reflections caused by something like a lamp positioned in front of the screen are distracting.

The TV has mediocre HDR gradient handling. There's some noticeable banding in almost all color gradients. Brighter reds fare better and have minimal banding.

The TV has just alright low-quality content smoothing. It removes some artifacts in low-bitrate content, but there's still noticeable macro-blocking in darker scenes and a loss of details.

The Samsung Q72D 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 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 uses a quantum dot enhancement film (QDEF) to achieve a wide color gamut, which can be seen in the spectral power distribution (SPD) chart.

The Samsung Q72D has a satisfactory response time. Fast motion has noticeable blur behind it, and it's slower when coming out of dark states, so there's some black smearing in dark scene transitions.

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 a very fast 960Hz in the 'Movie' picture mode at all brightness levels. In all other picture modes, it flickers at a slower 120Hz at all brightness levels. With 'LED Clear Motion' enabled, the TV flickers at 60Hz, and with the 'Picture Clarity' settings enabled, it flickers at 120Hz.

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. The BFI feature on the TV only flickers at 60Hz, and there's still some minor image duplication present.

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.

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

The Samsung Q72D automatically removes judder from the native apps. Unfortunately, it doesn't remove judder from any external sources.

The Samsung Q72D is compatible with all three variable refresh rate (VRR) formats, and it works across a very wide refresh rate range, which ensures that your games remain nearly tear-free when gaming. It also supports sources with Low-Frame-Compensation (LFC), which ensures your games remain nearly tear-free even when your frame rate drops very low.

This TV has incredibly low input lag when set to Game Mode, which ensures a very responsive gaming experience with very little delay between your actions with your controller or mouse and the action on-screen.

The Samsung Q72D supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 120Hz. It displays chroma 4:4:4 properly with any signal as long as the input label is set to PC, but sometimes 4:4:4 doesn't work properly, and the TV requires a power cycle. 1440p @ 120Hz @ 4:4:4 is not supported.

The TV is fully compatible with everything the PS5 offers, like 1440p @ 120Hz and 4k @ 120Hz, as well as HDMI Forum VRR. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about manually switching to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag.

The TV is fully compatible with almost everything the Xbox Series X|S offers, including 1440p @ 120Hz, 4k @ 120Hz, HDMI Forum VRR, and FreeSync Premium Pro. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about manually switching to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag. Unfortunately, Dolby Vision isn't supported on the TV, so gaming in Dolby Vision isn't possible.

Although the TV supports HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on all four HDMI ports, all four ports are limited to 40 Gbps. In practice, this doesn't cause any issues or limitations with any current source. Unfortunately, Samsung still doesn't support Dolby Vision. However, it supports HDR10+ instead, which is similar overall but not as widely supported.

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.

The TV's frequency response is sub-par. 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 unbalanced as the volume increases. Since the TV doesn't get very loud, it's best suited for a quiet environment.

The TV's distortion performance is okay. There's some minor distortion at lower volume levels, and the amount of distortion increases as you raise the volume.

The Samsung Q72D runs the 2024 version of the Tizen OS, and it's fast and easy to use.

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 Q72D Series has a great selection of apps, so it's easy to find your favorite content. You can also cast content from your phone onto the TV or play videos from a USB stick.

The TV comes with the same minimalistic remote as the 2023 Samsung Q70C 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
• User guides