Can Samsung’s Mini LED technology deliver with small TVs, too?
NEO QLED TELEVISION
£999
Samsung clearly puts LCD at the heart of its TV world, and its ongoing LED focus sees it extend its uncompromising back-lighting technology down to even relatively small screen sizes, such as this 50in set.
There are many 50in LCD TVs out there that cost way less. Some even offer Quantum Dot technology. Those cheaper models, though, will not give you Mini LED technology or Samsung’s AI-bolstered picture processing system.
The QE50QN90B looks and feels a cut above. Its jet black frame is ultra thin and crisply finished, and its black stand is both robustly crafted from brushed metal and centrally mounted, making the TV easy to place on even quite narrow pieces of furniture.
Samsung’s smallest Mini LED TV is also surprisingly slim considering it is using direct LED lighting – though the LEDs here are, of course, much smaller (barely one fortieth as big, in fact) than those found in regular LCD TVs.
Impressive feature count
The Mini LED lighting system crams far more and much smaller LEDs into the 50in screen than is possible with regular LEDs. This enables it to deliver more local light control and, potentially, more contrast and brightness than regular LED TVs can. Especially when partnered as here by a local dimming system.
Shape Adaptive Light Control can tweak the way the light from each dimming zone addresses its part of the image. So, for instance, more light can be pushed to where a bright highlight of a dimming zone needs to be, while simultaneously reducing brightness at the zone’s edges if the highlight is appearing against a dark backdrop. It has the potential to both increase contrast and reduce the issue of backlight blooming around stand-out bright image areas that local dimming can so often cause.
Samsung describes the QN90B as a Neo QLED model, alerting us to the fact that it uses Quantum Dots to generate its colours rather than colour filters. This should result in a wider and more subtle colour gamut well suited to the extra colour range that typically accompanies HDR content.
Comprehensive connections
The QN90B’s high-end picture features are marshalled by the latest version of Samsung’s Neo Quantum 4K video processor, with improved upscaling.
Connections are impressively comprehensive. All four HDMI ports are capable of handling the 4K/120Hz feeds, and support VRR (including the AMD Freesync Premium Pro system), and ALLM. Input lag is an impressive 9.6ms.
The QE50QN90B supports the HDR10, HLG and HDR10+ HDR formats,
