Samsung gets some of its budget TV mojo back
55in 4K TV | £529| whf.cm/SamsungCU8000
Given that the CU8000 series sits towards the bottom of a huge Samsung TV range, we should start off with a list of things the CU8000 doesn’t have. Namely Mini LED lighting, Quantum Dot colours, direct LED lighting with local dimming, or any sort of OLED action.
The 55in CU8000 is, though, built on a VA rather than IPS LCD panel, which experience suggests will help it produce relatively good contrast at the expense of potentially limited viewing angles. It lights its screen using LEDs mounted around its edges, rather than using LEDs placed directly behind the screen. Experience also shows that edge lighting can struggle to deliver as much contrast and light consistency as direct lighting, but Samsung has repeatedly got better results from edge lighting than arguably any other brand over the years.
There’s no attempt to apply a local dimming system to the edge lighting. There’s just whole frame dimming, where the edge LEDs are all dimmed or brightened together to optimise brightness to the changing demands of the images you’re watching. This is actually a sensible call by Samsung, given that combining local dimming with edge lighting typically creates distracting bands of backlight clouding.
The CU8000 does get Samsung’s PurColor engine and Crystal Color system, the latter of which serves up a wider colour gamut (Samsung claims more than a billion hues) than ‘basic’ LCD TVs. The Crystal Colour system, other picture processing attributes and OTS Lite sound system (which uses processing to try to place effects in the right place on the screen) are all controlled by a Crystal 4K Processor designed for the CU8000 range.
The 55in screen carries a native 4K resolution and supports the HDR10, HLG and HDR10+ high dynamic range formats. As ever with Samsung TVs, though, the HDR support doesn’t include Dolby Vision.
The CU8000’s screen is only 60Hz, so there is no support over its three HDMI ports for 4K/120Hz gaming. Nor is there support for VRR or the HDR10+ gaming options found on more premium Samsung TVs. There is an HGiG option, where the TV deactivates its own HDR tone mapping so as to not interfere with HDR settings defined by HGiG-capable devices, while support for ALLM enables the CU8000 to automatically switch into its fast-responding Game preset when a game source is d
