Samsung Q80D [Q80, Q80DD] QLED TV Review

The Samsung Q80D looks nearly identical to the Samsung Q80C QLED but with a thicker silver bottom bezel. It has a clean hexagonal stand and a clean-looking design.

The center-mounted stand is small, so the TV doesn't require a large desk or media center. There's some side-to-side wobbling and a fair amount of front-to-back wobbling, but it settles relatively quickly. The stand lifts the screen 3.1 inches above the surface of your table, so almost every soundbar fits in front of it without blocking the screen.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand: 15.35" x 11.26".

The back panel is made of textured plastic with vertical etched lines. There are grooves in the casing to help with cable management, which then get funneled into the stand. The stand has a removable cover that helps with hiding cables. The inputs are recessed and are hard to access if the TV is wall-mounted.

The Samsung Q80D's build quality is very good. There's flex around the VESA holes and inputs on the back, and the TV is pretty shaky on its stand, although it quickly settles after being pushed. On our unit there's a noticeable gap at the back of the TV where the plastic panel meets the border. It shouldn't cause any issues, and otherwise, the TV has no problems with quality control.

The Samsung Q80D has fantastic contrast with local dimming on 'High.' The TV's native contrast ratio is good, but its effective local dimming feature provides very deep blacks in a dark room, and they stay deep when bright highlights are also on screen.

The TV has only alright blooming performance. Unfortunately, there's visible blooming around bright highlights or text when they're against a black background, making blacks look less deep.

The TV has just alright lighting zone transitions. Unfortunately, the leading edge of bright highlights when they quickly move across the screen is visibly dimmer, and there's very noticeable haloing, especially with smaller highlights.

When the TV is set to Game Mode, its local dimming performance is slightly worse overall, with more noticeable blooming.

The Samsung Q80D has good HDR brightness. While it's not bright enough to make bright highlights pop in complex scenes, it's still bright enough for highlights to stand out even when watched in brighter rooms, and it provides a pleasant HDR experience overall due to its fantastic contrast.

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
• Local Dimming: High
• Color Space: Auto
• Gamma: ST.2084 (0)

Results with 'HDR Tone Mapping' set to 'Active':

• Hallway Lights: 521 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 452 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 160 cd/m²

The Samsung Q80D 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
• Local Dimming: High

Results with HDR Tone Mapping set to 'Active':

• Hallway Lights: 472 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 453 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 231 cd/m²

The Samsung Q80D has fantastic PQ EOTF tracking, as the TV follows the curve very closely until it reaches its maximum brightness. Still, it's not perfect, as, outside of some darker highlights, the TV is slightly overbrightened across the entire length of the curve. The TV behaves erratically once it hits its peak brightness with all mastered content, but it still rolls off to preserve detail in very bright highlights.

The Samsung Q80D has excellent peak brightness in SDR and easily overcomes glare in a well-lit room.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Movie
• Brightness: 50
• Contrast: 45
• Color Tone: Warm 2
• Gamma: 2.2
• Color: 25
• Local Dimming: High

The Samsung Q80D has a very good HDR color gamut. It has fantastic coverage of the commonly used DCI-P3 color space, so the vast majority of HDR content looks vibrant and pleasant to the eyes. Still, most colors are undersaturated and slightly off; greens are too yellow  and magentas too red. The TV's coverage of the Rec. 2020 color space is alright, but all colors are even more undersaturated, and the more saturated greens and cyans show noticeable color mapping issues.

Our results were done in the TV's 'Native' Color Space, as 'Auto' slightly clamps blues and greens. Still, most users should leave the TV to 'Auto' for more balanced performance across a variety of contents. Here are our results in 'Auto' mode:

• DCI-P3
• Rec.2020

The TV has great color volume. Colors are bright and vibrant, and dark, saturated colors are displayed well due to its fantastic contrast.

The TV has excellent pre-calibration SDR accuracy. Blues and greens are slightly overrepresented in most shades of gray, and reds are underrepresented in mid-tones and pure whites. Overall, this leads to the TV's color temperature being slightly cooler than our 6500K target. Gamma is off of our 2.2 target, with most scenes being a bit too bright, while bright scenes are significantly overbrightened.

Overall, color accuracy is very good, although some colors, especially greens, are too saturated, and whites have noticeable color mapping issues.

The TV is easy to calibrate, and gamma, white balance, and color temperature are all nearly perfect afterward. Color accuracy is much better now, but all colors are still a little bit off the mark, albeit barely.

You can see our full calibration settings.

The Samsung Q80D has alright gray uniformity. The sides of the screen are quite a bit darker than the middle, and there's some dirty screen effect towards the center of the screen. Its uniformity on very dark or near-black screens is excellent, but the left side is a bit brighter than the rest, and there's some barely noticeable clouding throughout.

The TV has good black uniformity overall, but there's noticeable blooming around bright highlights with local dimming enabled. With local dimming disabled, the screen is noticeably cloudy and blueish.

The Samsung Q80D 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 Q80D 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 impressive HDR gradient handling, as there's minimal banding in all color bands except dark reds and blues, which have no noticeable 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 Q80D does a very good job at upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs or lower-resolution streams. Details are quite clear, 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. This doesn't cause any issues for video or gaming content, but it can be a problem for PC monitor use as it impacts the text clarity, although not everyone will notice this.

The TV uses quantum dot color converters to produce red and green light, which can be seen in the spectral power distribution (SPD) chart.

The Samsung Q80D 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.

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 TV automatically removes judder from all sources when watching movies or shows that are in 24p, even if they're in a 60Hz signal, like from a cable box.

The Samsung Q80D 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 Q80D supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 120Hz. It displays chroma 4:4:4 properly with any signal, except 1440p @ 120Hz, as long as the input label is set to PC. 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.

All four HDMI ports support the full 48 Gbps 2.1 bandwidth, which is great for connecting multiple modern consoles or high-end PCs to this TV. The TV doesn't support Dolby Vision, but it does support the less supported HDR10+ format. Its tuner also only supports ATSC 1.0, so you can't use it to watch over-the-air 4k content. Note that the 50-inch model of the Samsung Q80D is limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth on all four 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.

The Samsung QN80D has an alright frequency response. It does produce more bass than what we usually hear from TV speakers, but it comes at the cost of audible output frequency deviations when the TV is at max volume, so it doesn't sound quite right when you crank it up. There are also noticeable compression artifacts. At moderate listening levels, the TV's sound profile is clear, making dialogue easy to understand.

The Samsung Q80D has very good distortion performance. It's very balanced at a moderate listening volume, with barely any noticeable distortion. It's even decent when you crank it up to max volume, which is good as the TV doesn't get very loud to start with.

The Samsung Q80D runs the 2024 version of the Tizen OS, and it's fast and easy to use.

Like most TVs on the market, it has ads throughout its interface, and although you can disable targeted ads, there's no option to disable them completely.

The Samsung QN80D 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 remote is slim and compact, has quick access buttons for the most popular streaming apps, and is easy to use. The remote has a built-in rechargeable battery with a solar panel on the back of the remote. You can also recharge it via USB-C if it dies unexpectedly.

The TV is compatible with the Bixby and Alexa voice assistants, and its remote has an integrated microphone for voice commands. You can use your voice to launch apps, switch inputs, ask for the weather and time, and adjust certain settings like the TV's brightness.

A single button is located at the bottom right of the TV. You can use it to power the TV on/off, change channels, adjust the volume, and switch inputs. You can control the TV hands-free with your voice using the TV's built-in microphone, but you can also turn the microphone off using a small switch located next to the power button.

• Remote control
• Power cable
• User guides