Samsung Q8F 2025  TV Review

The Samsung Q8F has bad peak brightness in HDR. It's not bright enough to bring out specular highlights, and fine details are lost in large, bright areas. You can get superior HDR brightness from TVs such as the Roku Pro Series 2025.

These measurements are in the Filmmaker Mode with 'HDR Tone Mapping' set to 'Static'. Below are the results with 'HDR Tone Mapping' set to 'Active'.

• Hallway Lights: 312 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 254 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 126 cd/m²

Switching to Game Mode very slightly increases the peak brightness of some scenes, but it's not a noticeable difference. It's still far too dark to deliver an impactful HDR gaming experience.

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

• Hallway Lights: 322 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 252 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 120 cd/m²

The Samsung Q8F QLED has mediocre peak brightness in SDR. It can get bright enough to overcome a bit of glare in a bright room, but not if you have a lot of open windows or bright lights directly opposite the TV. 

Very small highlights in very dark scenes in SDR are dimmed by the TV's global dimming feature. It doesn't do this in HDR, but this feature can't be disabled in SDR.

The native contrast is poor. There's no local dimming feature, so blacks are raised whenever bright highlights are visible in the scene. It does have global dimming in SDR, though, which helps reduce black levels in easier scenes.

There's no local dimming feature, so there are no lighting zones. This means there's no haloing around bright elements against a dark background or subtitles, 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 has no impact on dark details.

The black uniformity on this TV is good. There are a few brighter patches across the screen, but they're not too noticeable.

The Samsung Q8F has passable color volume in SDR. it struggles to display saturated greens and reds at all lightness levels. There's also a noticeable decrease in saturation of all colors at higher lightness levels.

The HDR color volume is mediocre. It struggles to display saturated colors in low-luminance scenes, and colors aren't very bright or vibrant in bright scenes.

The Samsung Q8F has great accuracy in SDR out of the box. Dark scenes look the worst overall, as gamma is too high and shadow details are crushed. There's not enough blue in brighter scenes, giving the TV a slightly warm color temperature overall.

This TV is fairly easy to calibrate in moderate and bright scenes, but darker scenes are still a bit off, and shadows are crushed even after calibration. On the other hand, the overall white balance is fantastic, colors look great, and the color temperature is nearly perfect.

See our full calibration settings.

This TV has great accuracy in HDR before calibration. The white balance is a bit off in brighter shades, and there are noticeable color mapping errors across the board, but it's not too bad. The color temperature is excellent.

This TV doesn't calibrate very well in HDR. A full calibration improves color accuracy and the white balance a bit, but most of the more noticeable issues are still there.

The Samsung Q8F has great PQ EOTF tracking. The biggest issue is near blacks, which are slightly raised due to the TV's low contrast and lack of local dimming. Darker tones are displayed well, but the TV crushes midtones a bit and it starts rolling off very early. This helps maintain fine gradation in bright parts of the scene, but limits how bright that content gets.

The low-quality content smoothing on this TV is just okay. It's a lot better than the Samsung Q7F 2025, and it smooths out macroblocking and pixelization a bit, but there's a noticeable loss of fine details that gives it a slightly waxy look.

The upscaling on this TV is good overall. Fine details are preserved well, but text is still a bit hard to make out.

The gradient handling on this TV is good. There's some noticeable banding in all shades of green, but it's not terrible, and everything else looks great.

The Samsung Q8F 2025 has excellent input lag, which helps deliver a more responsive gaming experience. Unlike most TVs, the input lag is relatively low even outside of the dedicated Game Mode, so if you want to enable a few of the extra processing modes, you can do so without significantly increasing the latency.

The TV supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 144Hz on all four HDMI inputs.

This TV supports VRR with a wide refresh rate range, ensuring the image remains nearly tear-free even when the frame rate drops in challenging scenes.

This TV has a poor response time at the maximum refresh rate. Transitions are extremely sluggish, especially in or out of dark shades, resulting in significant motion blur. There's very little overshoot, though, which limits the amount of inverse ghosting you'll see.

The TV actually performs better at 120Hz than at 144Hz, but just slightly. Motion is still a very blurry mess, especially in darker shades.

The response time at 60Hz is bad. It's actually slightly faster in some transitions than at 120Hz, but motion is still very blurry.

The Samsung Q8F 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 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, it doesn't support Dolby Vision.

Thanks to the TV's relatively slow response time, there's only some subtle stutter in shots with slower camera movements. However, not everyone will be bothered by it.

The TV does a reasonable job of reducing stutter in 24 fps content with the motion interpolation setting that's equivalent to 30 fps. The hold time of frames is reduced, and the feature has good consistency, so motion is smoother and looks even.

This TV automatically removes judder from all sources, except when watching 25p content via a 60p signal, so motion only looks jittery if you're watching certain European content from an older streaming device.

The Samsung Q8F 2025 only has micro-judder present in scenes with complex motion when watching 25p content via a 60p signal, like when using an older streaming device that doesn't have a feature to match the outputted signal to the frame rate of the content.

The Samsung Q8F has a mediocre cinematic response time. Most transitions are very slow, causing more noticeable motion blur around fast-moving objects.

The Samsung Q8F 2025 does a decent job of avoiding transition artifacts overall. There are no edge artifacts at all, so the edges of fast-moving objects and people are just as clear as the center. However, there are visible intermediate colors present. For example, there's a hint of yellow around blues, which affects color consistency in fast-paced scenes and sports.

The Samsung Q8F 2025 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 it's set to, but unlike most other Samsung TVs the brightness doesn't impact the flicker frequency.

• Movie: 960Hz
• Filmmaker: 120Hz
• Dynamic: 120Hz
• Standard: 120Hz
• PC Mode: 120Hz in both 'Entertain' and 'Graphics'
• Game Mode: 120Hz

This 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 pulse timing on this model is much better than usual, and there's almost no noticeable image duplication.

The glossy coating does a poor job reducing the intensity of direct, mirror-like reflections.

Watching this TV in a bright room has almost no noticeable impact on black levels.

Unfortunately, the total amount of reflected light off the screen is disappointing. Bright lights are distracting, and although there's very little rainbow smear, there are diffraction artifacts.

The perceived color saturation in a bright room is okay. Ambient light reduces color saturation a bit, but it's not too bad.

The Samsung Q8F has a mediocre viewing angle. There's very little noticeable hue shift, but brightness drops off quickly as you move off-center, so the TV looks very dark very quickly. This makes it a poor choice for a wide seating arrangement.

The gray uniformity of this TV is poor. There are dark vertical bands running across the screen which are most likely caused by the LEDs running along the edge of the TV. There's also noticeable dirty screen effect in the center and considerable vignetting.

This TV uses a BGR subpixel layout. It doesn't affect picture quality but can cause issues with text clarity in some applications when using it as a PC monitor. The spectral power distribution shows good separation of colors, but the green and red peaks are very shallow, suggesting that the TV either makes limited use of or has low-quality quantum dot color converters.

This TV has a good selection of ports. All four HDMI inputs support HDMI 2.1 bandwidth up to 48Gbps, which is uncommon for this price point. It doesn't have ATSC 3.0, though, so you're limited to 1080p for OTA broadcasts.

This TV supports most Dolby Digital audio formats. However, like other 2025 Samsung models, it doesn't passthrough Dolby Digital Plus 7.1. Unfortunately, it also doesn't support DTS formats, which is disappointing, as many Blu-rays use DTS for their lossless audio tracks.

The Samsung 65Q8F has a more premium design than the lower-end Samsung Q7F thanks to its edge-lit backlight system. It's thin, with very thin bezels on all four sides.

The TV uses a pair of plastic feet that can be installed in either a narrow or a wide position depending on the size of your table.

The footprint of the 65-inch stand is 11.8" x 10.7" in the narrow position and 41" x 10.7" in the wide position. Both settings lift the TV about 3.1" above the table, so most soundbars fit in front of the TV without blocking the screen.

The back of the TV is made from plastic. All of the inputs are on the right side of the TV when facing the front, but they're in a recessed cutout that makes them quite hard to access if you have it wall-mounted. The back has grooves and a clip that can be attached to one of the feet to help with cable management.

The Samsung Q8F 2025 has good build quality. The stand isn't great as the TV wobbles easily, but it recovers quickly. It's mostly made of plastic, but there are no obvious issues with its construction. Note that edge-lit TVs like this one break faster under prolonged use.

The Samsung Q8F Series comes with the 2025 version of Samsung's proprietary Tizen OS.

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

The remote has a rechargeable battery that can be charged via USB-C or solar power, and the voice control gives you access to Bixby and Alexa.

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

The Samsung Q8F 2025 has an okay frequency response. Its well-balanced, so dialogue is clear and easy to understand, but it doesn't get very loud and there's little deep bass.