Samsung QN85D Neo QLED 4K Smart Tizen TV

I’ve had the Samsung QN85D for a few days now, and it has exceeded all my expectations. Initially, I purchased a Hisense U8N, which was impressive, but it had a problem I couldn’t live with: inconsistent black levels and distracting fluctuations in letterbox bars. My next choice was going to be the TCL QM851, but I read that it also struggles with letterbox bar consistency, though to a lesser extent. Because of this, I started exploring other options.

After checking specs, I was put off by the QN90D due to its poor native contrast ratio and lackluster color gamut coverage. However, I decided to check out the QN85D, the junior flagship model, and I’m glad I did. It offers a great native contrast ratio—something I’ve come to realize is very important—and great color gamut coverage. In many key areas, it actually outperforms the QN90D. Samsung seems to have a strange habit of making their junior flagships superior to their actual flagships. They often take a panel with average color gamut coverage and poor native contrast ratio, make it extremely bright, and label it as the top dog.

Initially, I didn’t consider the QN85D despite liking many of its specifications, mainly because it only has 160 dimming zones. However, I remembered my 2018 Q8FN, which had only 40 zones but still offered excellent black level performance and consistent letterbox bars. So, with somewhat low expectations, I decided to give the QN85D a try.

To say it surprised me is an understatement. Its black level performance is amazing—zero blooming in real content, inky blacks, and fantastic shadow detail. The letterbox bars are inky black and never visually brighten or experience blooming. I actually think having fewer zones to control has its own advantages; it seems to allow for more precise control aka a better algorithm because it is less taxing on the processor.

The new 2024 NQ4 AI Gen2 Processor on this TV is amazing. The local dimming algorithm is incredibly effective, and the HDR Remastering feature for SDR (not available on OLED), which I didn’t think I’d care about, is actually fantastic. It delivers stunning highlights in SDR without messing up the color accuracy. It hits over 1,000 nits in Filmmaker mode and 1,500 nits in standard mode, with nearly 700 nits in a full window. I’m really impressed with how well it performs.

The native contrast ratio on this panel is very good, and with local dimming engaged, it exceeds 160,000:1 which is insane, so the color production / baseline black level is top quality. Motion handling is also excellent, reminding me a lot of plasma TVs (Samsung seems to handle motion possessing differently from most other brands). Another highlight is brightness stability—there’s almost no ABL on this set, it’s the best I’ve ever seen in this regard. While its peak brightness isn’t on par with the U8N or QM851, it’s still brighter than most people would ever need, and the HDR impact is fantastic.

The build quality is solid, featuring a thick, high-quality plastic back and a nice metal screen border. I’d put this TV up against any of the big players in the LED category. It delivers impressive performance across the board, offering exceptionally refined picture quality in both bright and dark rooms.

This TV deserves the 2024 sleeper award, its so good.

DO NOT BUY

I’m very disappointed in this TV and in Samsung. First off: my badge may say “Vine customer review of free product”, but there is a cost associated with both receiving and reviewing this product and even at the discounted price I pay, I’m extremely dissatisfied with both the product itself and the brand.

The TV arrived and the first thing I noticed on unboxing it was that there was a scratch on the screen (that couldn’t have happened during shipping, based on the scratch location and condition of the shipping box). Thankfully it wasn’t deep and I was able to rub it out, but I’m worried that the scratched pixels on the TV will die soon(er). (See picture – picture is of scratch on screen and also shows the extreme reflectivity of the screen – more on that below.)

Next I got it set up on the stand and tried to plug it in and noticed that the power cord is relatively short. I have a normal size TV stand and it barely reaches across the back of the TV and down to an outlet. The shorter cord might be nice if you’re wall mounting the TV, but if you’re having it sit on the stand it’s short, almost too short.

After powering the TV on I tried, unsuccessfully, to go through the setup process. Again and again and again. My day job is a very tech-heavy position, so I’m definitely technically inclined and it was still frustrating. There are two options – try via app or via remote control. I tried multiple times via the app and the process always “hung” when trying to connect to the TV. What’s frustrating is that this was after I had to provide all my personal info and register, create an account, allow the app to access my precise location to connect to the TV, etc. I finally gave up on the app and tried the remote control setup and it still struggled to “contact the server” and it took multiple times exiting and reentering the setup to finally successfully make it through. A very poor/frustrating experience.

Once the setup was finally complete I was able to use the TV a little and quite frankly was appalled at how basic the remote control is. Yeah, it has voice control but it lacks many basic buttons for a TV – like a keypad to put in channel numbers, or a quick-input selector (or even an input selector button period – you have to go into a menu to switch to a connected device). The volume and channel buttons feel cheap and like the might break off easily.

I switched over to a new (as of the end of 2023) Apple TV to use that remote and forego the clunky app experience built into the TV. It was working well until I tried to adjust the volume using the Apple TV remote. I pressed the “volume up” button and the volume went up. And up. And up. All the way to the max, like my remote was stuck pressing “up” or something. So, I quickly pressed “volume down” and it went down. And down. And down. All the way to the minimum. Trying it again I discovered that the TV doesn’t communicate properly with the remote, so there’s no way to get a volume other than 0 or 100 using the Apple TV remote. Very frustrating for a product costing the better part of $2000 after taxes.

After taking a break from the frustrating experience for a bit, I came back a few hours later with renewed energy. I turned the TV on with the included remote and watched as the volume went all the way to 100 without my interaction. Well, that was weird. I turned it down to a reasonable level and browsed the apps on the TV. Turned the TV off to do something real quick and came back and turned it on and the volume went up to 100 again. I turned it back down and missed the sweet spot so tried turning it back up and nothing happened. The “volume up” button on the remote no longer was working/responding. I turned the TV off and on again – volume up to 100 without interaction, volume down works but not volume up. Incredibly frustrating for a “new”, expensive TV.

Needless to say, if I had paid full price this would be an instant return and I would only do an exchange for another “working” TV of the same brand/model if I was forced to. Where this is a review of a semi-free product for community benefit, I’ll go the support route and update as appropriate.

General observations relevant to someone who makes the crazy decision to purchase this TV:

The screen is very reflective – like a dull mirror. While it has reasonable brightness, if you have any lights on behind you that glare on the TV you’ll be left feeling like there’s a blind/dead spot on the TV where the light is which is very annoying.

The base does not swivel. Not necessarily something I can fault it for, but something that is nice to have. I have another much less expensive TV of similar size that came with a freestanding swivel base which is very nice for trying to connect cables, adjusting based on where you’re sitting in the room, etc.

The cable management on the back of the TV doesn’t allow for very thick cables – there’s one spot that’ll fit a standard size coax cable, so my HDMI cable that’s about the same diameter is just kind of free floating and looking bad behind the TV since there’s nowhere to route and “hide” it.

I mentioned this above, but it’s worth mentioning again – the remote is quite basic. Not having a keypad on a TV remote is, bad. Not having input buttons on a TV remote, again bad. Having buttons that protrude for volume/channel (and are thus more prone to breaking), again bad. That being said, I do appreciate that there’s a small solar panel on the remote to charge the internal battery.

The sound quality is good – better than I’m used to (though I’m used to the sound quality on a no-name 15 year old TV).

Overall, I would strongly recommend against purchasing this TV. I’ll be in touch with support to see if the TV I got is just a very bad dud, but it’s going to take a great support experience to make up for all the frustrations I had with this TV so far. DO NOT BUY.

Purchased this TV specifically for watching sports because of how high it was rated for clarity. The picture is great when watching 4k content. Picture also great on most channels. Tends to be a little grainy at times with older TV shows but that is to be expected. Where it fails immensely is watching sports, specifically football, where any fast motion becomes completely blurry. I tried watching YouTube to solve these issues and found a ton of content on this because apparently this is a problem that they said could be cured in picture settings. I must have tried at least a dozen recommendations. I talked to Samsung product support and they couldn’t fix it either. They kept saying it was likely a cable signal problem. I have two other Samsung TV’s including an older one and their pictures are better. I also did a signal test for cable and it was very strong. Also tried hooking the TV up directly to the cable modem with a high quality Ethernet cable and the picture did not improve.

I would not recommend this TV if you want your sports to be clear. It is good for most other things.

The tv itself is great. It is very easy to set up – immediately integrates all of your smart tv preferences and accounts. My only complaint is that the stand does not provide enough support and the tv leans back as it sets on the stand.

Samsung has produced another winner with the affordable Neo QLED 55′ I’ve been watching non stop since I received it a week ago. While I will be updating this review with thoughts on its durability and any potential issues that arise, out of the box Samsung has delivered a solid set in every way. Here are my first impressions:

-The color reproduction, brightness, accuracy of this set is terrific. Literally you just press FILMMAKER MODE and all of the motion processing options are turned off. No need to spend all day doing recalibration, and straight off the color looks dynamic across all kinds of content. I did push the sharpness up a bit but that’s “season to taste” as they say.

-I previously owned a Samsung Quantum Dot LCD that was pretty high end for its time but was also an “edge lit LED” that had its inherent shortcomings. Here you get, obviously, the benefits of full array local dimming and the brightness is impressive. This will scorch your eyes if you’re not careful!

-Viewing angles are OK, though not on the level of an OLED. The Neo QLED need to be looked at straight on or you will experience some variance in color/brightness if sitting off to the side/at an angle.

-Samsung sets have HDR10+ but not Dolby Vision due to licensing. However, all the HDR content looks good though, really good, be it over UHD or Vudu stream (anything in Dolby Vision obviously will play fine here with basic HDR)

-For the TV and its apps, the Samsung uses its own, in-house UI and it’s pretty intuitive. ESPN, Hulu, Youtube TV, all the apps you expect to find are available and they seem to run really well thus far. Folks used to running Android TV or similar interfaces will get used to it quickly.

-The remote is solar charged! And it works! Alas, I’m not crazy about the limited amount of buttons — you’ll have to get used to pulling off “tricks” to access things like the volume, etc., but it’s functional.

-The sound is the weakest component on the TV — like most TVs, the picture quality is most important and you can enhance your sound with external speakers, an AVR, soundbar, etc. The TV’s sound is just decent when “amplified” but I wouldn’t recommend using it for anything other than an emergency.

-Set-up was a breeze. From unpacking to plugging in components and getting apps up and running, you’ll be there in a matter of minutes. The stand is actually very easy to configure and doesn’t even need a screwdriver — it’s like two puzzle pieces that interlock, more or less. That said I was a little confused by the provided visual instructions — I “figured it out” on my own.

On the whole, this is a terrific set showing QLED’s color reproduction and overall quality is a great value on the TV market today. It doesn’t approach the deep blacks and wider viewing angles of an OLED, but for the right room and the price, I strongly recommend it.

I am so happy about my new Samsung smart tv. I got this for my living room as I am upgrading the decor. Samsung is such an amazing product and I simply love their products. Will update.

I already own last year’s QN85C model, so this review will include differences between that model and this one – 2024’s QN85D. TL:DR this year’s model is substantially thicker with a slightly worse look and feel, has greatly improved midrange audio, has a new tool-less stand that’s a bit sloppy, and improves slightly on switching speeds and an already excellent picture quality.

Your experience starts with an easy open box, perforated half way down so you don’t need to fight a 55″ tv out of a slim side of the box. This also allows for the removal of the heavy stand before the packaging protection is removed, and failure to do so could easily damage the TV. The stand comes in two pieces and attaches to itself and to the tv with a nifty tool-less design. This is much easier to install than the stand included in 2023’s QN85C (which needed to be screwed into the TV). You can have the QN85D safely on the floor or a stand in about a minute or two with the help of one or two people. The downside to this simple stand is that it introduces a fair amount of slop that the screwed in version didn’t have, though not enough for the TV to feel unsafe (just a bit less premium). Though the stand is well designed it is ultimately very basic, with no tilt or swivel abilities. I have wall mounted my QN85D, and I suspect the majority of owners will do this as well.

The physical appearance of the TV is a bit underwhelming for this price range. This TV is substantially (double or more) thicker than last year’s model, and the back panel has a less premium feeling material. The back panel does include the same great built in cable management channels. The front has the same sleek thin bezel and minimal onboard control interface bump as the previous model.

A minimalistic, solar charging remote is included (the same remote included with last year’s model). While this remote requires more button pushes to access certain features, at least you can navigate to the features. The complex remotes from a few years back were outpacing logical icons with feature buttons, so many users didn’t know how to access some features. As far as minimalistic remotes go, I strongly prefer the tracking directional pad of the Siri remote or even the motion tracking LG remotes to this Samsung remote. CEC minimizes the need for the OEM TV remote, so it’s not a big deal that this TV doesn’t have the best remote.

The QN85D has an impressive array of connectivity options. 4 HDMI 2.1 ports, one of which supports eARC, two USB ports, Wifi, a coax port, and an honest to goodness ethernet port. The eARC HDMI port is necessary if you are going to connect or at some point upgrade to a high end soundbar. Despite being around for a few years now, many low end tv’s still omit eARC (probably as an upgrade driver rather than a technical limitation). Connecting an Atmos or TrueHD soundbar to optical, analog, ARC, or bluetooth will have limited bandwidth. TVs that lack an eARC connection commonly also don’t support bitstream Atmos effects. The eARC port on this tv will allow for uncompressed Atmos or TrueHD on supported soundbars.

After taking the protective film off the screen and turning the TV on, I was immediately blown away by the contrast and black levels. It took a while to get through the initial setup, mainly since the option to use smartthings to set up the TV doesn’t work… it just times out after a few minutes after smartthings connects. This also happened when setting up my 2023 model. I recommend ignoring the TV’s suggestion to scan the qr code to setup and just set up the TV manually, followed by the obligatory disabling of motion smoothing (Samsung changed the name of this awful feature to “flutter” in the menu of this tv)

The micro dimming QLED display is a game changer. Local dimming in lower tech passive LED displays can get confused by unevenly lit scenes, and change some dark levels to grays or wash out colors. Bright backlights in some passive LED TVs can bleed through the black areas in blotches (my awful 2023 77 in LG in my living room does this, and it drives me crazy). In the QLED based QN85D, these issues are non existent. The result is great dynamic contrast, even in complex dark scenes. OLED screens (and Plasma screens of yesteryears) have excellent contrast as well, but can’t match the brightness of the QLED based QN85D. If your TV is in a sunlit room, this TV will not disappoint.

Last year’s QN85C had a similar picture quality, but very bright white areas within a pure black screen appeared to reflect (not bleed) on to the black areas more than this model does. The 2024 QN85D doesn’t appear to have the flaw the 2023 model had where bright areas of the screen seemingly tricked the auto brightness into dimming the screen slightly in a dark room (or I was just imagining this issue all along).

I’m not sure whether this QN85D has a different panel than last years model or the AI is significantly better, but the overall picture quality of the QN85D seems marginally sharper, a bit clearer, and has even darker blacks than last year’s model. The QN85D is miles ahead of most TVs in this price range.

This TV has stellar clarity and depth. The depth I believe is attributed to the excellent contrast ratio, and gives media with high production value a slight 3D effect… sometimes appearing more like through a window than looking at a screen. Despite an advertising claim that the QN85D has AI enhanced depth enhancement, this aspect of the tv is similar to last year’s QN85C. Also like last year’s version, the clarity is so pristine that you will notice the exact frame at which a movie switches to CGI. I can’t imagine anyone would be disappointed… or any less than blown away with the picture quality of the QN85D (after disabling flutter, of course).

Built in audio on the QN85D represents a massive upgrade from last year’s QN85C. Both models claim to analyze the sound and offer some sort of virtualized Atmos effect (though neither will compete with an Atmos soundbar with satellite speakers). Last year’s QN85C wastes this advanced processing by producing only tinny, high treble sounds, requiring elevated listening volumes just to decode human voice. While not excellent, the QN85D adds quite a bit of midrange to the built in audio. This allows the viewer to hear dialogue at quieter levels and it even produces a small amount of bass and thump. The added midrange frequencies may be the reason why this year’s model is twice the thickness, and if so it’s a welcome trade off.

I don’t use the smart features of any tv, as I prefer AppleTV’s interface. That being said it loads slightly faster and changing the input is slightly faster than the model this tv replaced. This tv also adds alexa functionality to the smart suite.

The QN85D is an excellent TV at a fair price. Samsung fell out of favor as my TV brand of choice due to a slew of poor products with bad build quality a few years back. The QLED line of Samsung TVs have gone a long way towards earning my trust back. That combined with LG (my current brand of choice) currently producing poorly made TVs with bad picture quality means my next TV will likely also be a Samsung.

The Samsung NEO QLED QN85D 55-inch Smart TV is a 4- or 5-star TV. The picture quality is excellent, and it has some great features, but whether it is 4 stars versus 5 stars depends on how you plan to use it within your home network.

What I like and where it excels: excellent picture quality; four HDMI inputs, all supporting 4K input; Samsung TV Plus that has the has many, many channels, several of which I could not get without a subscription of some type; auto-discovery of over-the-air (OTA) channels without prompting; support for most popular smart TV applications (Disney+, Discovery+, Netflix, Amazon Prime, HULU, etc.); and Amazon Alexa support for voice commands.

What I dislike: minimalist remote that makes some navigation cumbersome; lack of support for common OTA network-based tuners and associated applications; overly long initial setup process.
I am rating the TV 4-stars rather than 5 due to the lack of support for my HDHomeRun OTA network tuners and for the Channels application that I use to manage the tuners and network video storage. (I do not actively use Plex, but also did not see that in the list of applications shown by the TV.) I was able to download and install the needed applications on all my other smart TVs and on my Amazon FireTV sticks. But the applications are not included in the applications accessible with this Samsung TV. I did find information on the web that an application for the HDHomeRun could be downloaded if you set up a developer’s account with Samsung, but the comments around this indicated getting the application to work was problematic. To get past this, I connected an Amazon FireTV Stick to one of the TV’s HDMI ports and I am using that for accessing the Channels application, but that does require the use of a second remote to control the FireTV Stick. I would have rated the TV 5-stars had I been able to directly install the Channels application on the TV.

The TV is a smart hub for devices that can be managed as part of the Samsung universe of products. I do not have many other devices on my network that qualify, so this feature simply added more time to the setup process from my perspective. The smart hub did ask if I wanted to add my Arlo cameras to the smart hub, which I skipped during setup, and have not subsequently been able to figure out how to add. The smart hub would be a very nice feature if your network has more devices the smart hub can manage.

As noted above, Samsung TV Plus is a very nice feature, particularly if you are using an OTA rather than cable or satellite TV, as it provides Internet-based access (clean reception) to local channels, as well as many of the major news and entertainment channels. Depending on what you watch, it might allow you to forgo using any of an OTA antenna, satellite TV, or cable TV.

In a time when you can find low end 4k tvs for cheap, it’s great to see top brands like Samsung continuing to produce nice looking TVs with a ton of features. This samsung does a great job of producing a beautiful picture while packing in a ton of smart features.

This Samsung 55-inch QN85D replaces a four year-old mid-priced Vizio 4K full array LED TV in my family room. In my living room remains an eight year-old but high-end Sony 4K edge-lit LED TV. The Vizio TV suffered from my blooming issues with the picture and no HDMI eARC (just ARC) so I more than willing to to let the Samsung replace it. With the QN85D’s better picture quality and having almost no issues with sending audio (including Dolby Atmos) through eARC to my Onkyo TX-RZ50 AVR…this Samsung TV is a definite improvement over other past and present TVs I’ve owned.

This TV give you the option of using the provided TV stand or an optional wall mount stand. I chose the provided TV stand and found assembly pretty easy with no additional tools required. When moving/placing the TV where you want it to go it is highly recommend you get a second person to assist you.

This QLED 4K TV QN85D sits at that sweet spot between Samsung’s more budget friendly TVs and higher end premium TVs. The picture quality on this TV is amazing with its Quantum Mini QLEDs producing a large contrast in lighting and color especially with HDR formatted video sources. While I use an AVR and surround speakers for my normal listening, I was impressed with the TV’s built-in Dolby Atmos speakers and object tracking sound. This is the first TV in 15 years that I would say one can do without a soundbar or AVR. I wish more TV manufacturers started paying attention to audio and I’m impressed with what Samsung has done here for built-in sound with the QN85D.

For all the positive, there is some room for improvement. Perhaps some of this will be fixed with later firmware updates (be sure and update to the latest version). If a firmware upgrade comes along to address my concerns, I’ll revisit my review and examine my original ranking of this product.

On top of my complaints, I an not too impressed with the AI features this TV proclaims to have. For instance, the TV is supposed to have auto HDR remastering that is supposed to convert non-HDR content into HDR-like quality. This feature as well as Intelligent Mode seems at times to cause the picture to be over saturated in light, or over-dark, or color saturated. This isn’t an issue all the time but enough to remind me that Intelligent Mode isn’t always wise. Luckily, there does seem to be some “AI learning” going on over time as Intelligent Mode seems to be doing better than when I first turned on this TV. Yet, there are a number of times I find myself turning off Intelligent Mode and manually switching the picture mode to either Movie or Filmmaker. My final impression of Samsung AI is that I’m disappointed that these enhancement features as they still seem like they’re experimental and not yet something that just works all the time.

While I can appreciate the SolarCell Remote Control being solar rechargable, it is too simple of a remote if you want to use this TV for something beyond streaming. If all you want to do is stream apps from the Samsung Home Screen than this remote will be fine for you. But if you actually want to use the TV to watch over-the-air TV broadcasts or switch between multiple devices you’re going to wish you had a better remote. I ended up purchasing a traditional compatible Samsung TV remote so I can get to where I want to go with fewer steps than when using the SolarCell remote. Some will say I’m making a bit deal about the remote here…but as a physical remote is the primary way to interact with the TV I don’t think so. I don’t get Samsung’s use of simple remote to access the the various features found on this TV.

Finally, I’m not a fan of Samsung’s Tizen OS. It seems a few steps behind from Android TV and I have a feeling Roku and Apple TV users prefer will prefer their favorite streaming player over Tizen to. Having said that I do find myself using the built-in apps from time to time on the Samsung home screen. But for the family as a whole with different brand TVs, we will continue to use Chromecast with Google TV over this smart TV’s own operating system.

Despite my wish list of improvements, this TV is still a very good TV. The picture quality is amazing and I plan on keeping this TV for the next decade. For those that want something more than a budget TV but not quite ready to go with 4K OLED or 8K QLED…I highly recommend the Samsung QN85D as it will likely be a step up from where you are now.