Not counting Hisense’s Laser TVs, which actually use ultra short throw projectors and a projection screen to try and replicate a TV effect, Samsung’s 98-inch QE98Q80C is by far the biggest TV I’ve tested since a Panasonic 103-inch plasma was lifted into place in my house by a crane back in 2007.
The fact that it’s taken so long for me to find myself back in front of such a TV behemoth is a sorry symbol of how slow progress has been in making such massive screens more mainstream. This, though, is precisely what makes Samsung’s 98Q80C so interesting. For as well as being monumentally mammoth, it’s also part of a Samsung mid-range TV series rather than being priced in the five or even six figure stratosphere.
I’ll come back to the 98Q80C’s pricing shortly. Right now, though, I want to stress that however much you might stand in front of king-sized TVs like the 98Q80C on vast showroom floors at AV industry events, there’s really no underestimating how colossal a near-100 inch screen looks when you’re looking at it in a normal, domestic environment. Even the occasional 85-inch screens that have headed my way in recent years look puny by comparison, and the shift in experience entering the near 100-inch club gives you from just watching TV to feeling like you’ve truly got a cinema in your home is irresistible.
While bigger is always better from this home cinema perspective, though, going so big with your TV often comes with strings attached beyond the mere practicalities of handling such a huge expanse of screen. In particular, maintaining at such vast screen sizes the same sort of picture quality (especially with relatively affordable LCD technologies) you might get on a 65 or 75-inch screen is challenging to the say the least. Issues such as pixel pitch (unless the screen is 8K) and the need for backlighting systems to work across so much screen acreage can and do present makers of king sized TVs with some major challenges.
The specification bit
As a first step to nailing down how well the 98Q80C handles these challenges, let’s drill down into its key specifications. Starting with the fact that it’s a 4K rather than 8K TV, and is built on panel tech that places it roughly in the middle of Samsung’s 2023 QLED TV series. Which means, more specifically, that it sits at the top of Samsung’s range of non Mini LED Quantum Dot colour TVs, with those so-called ‘Neo QLED’ Mini LED models only kicking in from the Q85C upwards.
While the extra light controls and precision mini LED TVs provide might well have helped the 98Q80C in its battle against the key issues king-sized LCD screens can face, though, it does at least use a direct full array panel design with local dimming (where different zones of its LEDs can be set to output different light levels with any given frame, independent of the other LED zones).
Samsung describes the 98Q80C’s dimming engine as Supreme UHD Dimming – which, despite how grand it sounds, actually sits a step down from the top level Ultimate UHD Dimming engine Samsung saves for models that have the highest number of dimming zones. A status that boils down to a total dimming zone count on the 98Q80C of 120 (as confirmed by a visit to the TV’s service menus).
I can hear the sharp intakes of breath from here. Surely, some will shout, in a year where we’ve seen much smaller TVs – including from Samsung – sporting literally hundreds more dimming zones than the 98Q80C carries, 120 just isn’t going to be enough to deliver a great picture on a 98-inch screen.
Even before getting into the 98Q80C’s performance, though, I’d counter this argument by saying that there’s been plenty of first-hand evidence over the years to show that while having gazillions of dimming zones can certainly class as a ‘good start’, it’s not the be all and end all of a great TV picture. To abuse a common phrase, it’s not always the number of dimming zones you have that counts, but what you do with them.
It will surely help the 98Q80C’s light control that it uses a VA type of LCD panel rather than an IPS one. IPS panels can offer slightly wider effective viewing angles, but find it notoriously difficult to control the amount of light that seeps through them during dark scenes.
The Quantum Dot color engine, meanwhile, should enable the 98Q80C to deliver a more vibrant color palette capable of handling more brightness without tones and shades starting to look thin. Talking of brightness, I measured the 98Q80C to be capable of delivering a peak brightness output of 1173 nits on a white HDR window covering 10% of an otherwise black screen. This was achieved in Dynamic mode, with the TV’s local dimming set to ‘high’.
Not that I’d recommend that anyone actually use the Dynamic preset for real-world viewing. It’s designed, basically, for in-store conditions, not your living room. Happily, though, the other much more effective Standard, Movie and Filmmaker Mode presets all turned in figures comfortably above 1000 nits on the same 10% window. Brightness dropped around 300 nits with each of the most useful three presets using a 1% white window – a pretty natural result of a 98-inch TV driven by 120 local dimming zones.
It’s worth mentioning, too, given the 98Q80C’s clear desire to offer a viable cut-price alternative to king-sized OLED TVs, that it achieves between 700 and 770 nits across the picture preset board with a full-screen white HDR signal. That’s nearly twice as bright as even the latest premium OLED TVs can go with full-screen bright images.
I couldn’t help but wonder how much brighter Samsung might have been able to go with the 98Q80C if it wasn’t having to work within the EU’s latest draconian TV power consumption regulations. The TV ships in a dark-looking Eco preset that I’d recommend you switch away from right away (before you then also turn off the ambient light adaptive picture controls tucked away in the Eco section of the ‘General’ TV menu), and Samsung has hinted to me that the new EU rules really have been a challenge. There’s not really much point dwelling on hypotheticals at this point, though – and anyway, actually the sort of brightness figures I got out of the 98C80C actually look perfectly respectable for a mid-range model.
All of the 98Q80C’s picture elements are powered by Samsung’s Neural Quantum 4K processor. This is the same one found on Samsung’s 4K mini LED premium TVs, with an added bonus: a new Supersize Picture Enhancer that apparently uses AI-driven techniques to deliver upscaling, noise reduction, sharpness and and black enhancement techniques specially optimized for the TV’s colossal images.
As ever with a king-sized screen, the most important question once you’ve decided you can handle one is how much it’s going to cost. And here I think the news is pretty exciting: in the US you can pick up a 98Q80C for a cent under $8K (in fact at the time of writing it’s actually $7k at via a limited time promotion), while in the UK the set is currently going for £6,499. That’s a fraction of the price such a massive TV would have cost you just a couple of years ago – and is still a fraction of the price you need to pay for similar sized self-emissive screen technologies. LG’s upcoming 97-inch OLED97M3 OLED TV, for instance, is set to retail for just under $30,000.
Just as importantly, the 98Q80C’s price makes stepping up to such a colossal screen not nearly as significant a financial leap from one of Samsung’s much smaller high-end mini LED TVs as it has always been before. The 75-inch Mini LED 75QN900C, for instance, costs £6K in the UK, and $5,000 in the US. That is an 8K rather than a 4K set, but that doesn’t really alter the core fact that the 98Q80C’s price now gives you a genuine choice between Samsung’s most premium picture technologies and truly cinematic screen sizes.
That said, I’m duty bound to point out that at the time of writing the 85-inch Q80C is available for £2,799 in the UK, and $2,500 in the US. So while the 98Q80C is remarkably cheap by 98-100in TV standards, its extra 13 inches over its 85-inch sibling still work out at around £/$285 an inch. So while, as I’ve said, the shift up to 98 inches is transformative in terms of the experience it delivers, you’d still better be sure you really want that extra home cinema oomph over and above the 85-inch Q80C before you get your order in.
Picture quality
Since it’s the area where a bright king-sized LCD TV with local dimming is most likely to struggle, let’s kick this assessment of the 98Q80C’s picture performance off with its handling of black levels, contrast and backlighting.
Right away I was seriously impressed by how deep the 98Q80C’s black levels can get. There’s hardly any general low-contrast greyness hanging over scenes and parts of the picture that should look predominantly black, despite my fears of what I might find in this respect with only 120 zones working a 98-inch screen.
Even in a blacked out room black levels look remarkably and consistently convincing. Especially, for reasons I’ll detail later, when using the Standard preset.
Even more surprising than the simple depths of black the 98Q80C can hit, though, is how consistent and natural these black levels are. For one thing, shadow detail is remarkably well sustained – better in some really dark scenes, in fact, than it is with some Samsung TVs that deploy far more dimming zones. Especially, again, when using the Standard preset. It’s almost as if the larger areas of ‘shared light’ you get with fewer dimming zones to work with has actually helped the 98Q80C’s light control processing achieve a better balance between black tones and subtle low-light details.
Also, though, and perhaps most importantly of all, in the Standard picture preset at least, backlight blooming is unfeasibly well suppressed – even with high dynamic range content. Particularly tough stuff for locally dimmed LED TVs to handle, such as the torch that glows through Georgie’s pocket in Andy Muschietti’s first ‘It’ film as he retrieves the wax for his boat from the dark cellar and the constant aggressively mastered mix of light and dark areas during the debauched mansion ‘party’ that opens Babylon (both on 4K Blu-ray) appear on the 98Q80C in Standard mode with only the faintest traces of blooming. So you don’t really notice the ‘jumping’ between dimming zones that Georgie’s torch moving can cause, while the Babylon sequence avoids the general mistiness that can creep in with less impressive local dimming systems.
I was very happy to see, too, how in Standard mode precious little backlight blooming slipped into the black bars above and below films and TV shows that use a wider aspect ratio than the TV’s 16:9 shape. I can’t say for sure that Samsung has specifically configured its dimming zone layout to isolate screen areas occupied by widescreen black bars, but the limited stray light creeping into them is certainly welcome given how particularly distracting it can be.
A pet niggle of mine with most if not all of Samsung’s otherwise excellent FALD TVs – Mini LED as well as standard LED – is that they’re so focused on avoiding backlight blooming that they can at times take quite a chunk of light out of small bright objects that appear against dark backgrounds. With the 98Q80C, though, this sort of high-level dimming is surprisingly minimal – again a possible unexpected benefit of Samsung’s local dimming engine actually having fewer zones per inch to balance light across.
This relative brightness consistency is a strength, too, that applies to all of the 98Q80C’s picture presets, not just Standard. This may come as a relief to fans of picture accuracy (especially when it comes to colour tones) who might have become alarmed by all my talk of the Standard picture preset delivering the best blooming controls (and, as a result, black levels), rather than the ostensibly more accurate Movie and Filmmaker Mode presets.
There’s still no denying, though, that both of those non-Standard presets make the workings of the 98Q80C’s dimming engine much more noticeable. So, for instance, using the same It and Babylon film examples, in the Movie and Filmmaker Mode presets blooming becomes so much more noticeable around Georgie’s torch that you can clearly see the 98C80C switch between two different backlight zones as Georgie flinches from seeing the two ‘eyes’ starting at him from the corner. There’s also more greyness and noticeable backlight zone ‘handovers’ as the beam from Georgie’s torch waves around as he legs it from the cellar. And in Babylon’s opening epic party scene there’s a generally cloudier look to proceedings.
There’s also markedly more evidence of light blooming into the black bars above and below wide-ratio films in the Movie and Filmmaker Mode presets than there is in Standard.
The slightly strange thing about the difference in backlight clouding between the Standard and Movie/Filmmaker presets is that I couldn’t precisely replicate the Standard mode’s results by playing around with the 98Q80C’s local dimming and Contrast Enhancer settings. It’s as if some of the different preset modes’ backlight behaviour has been placed out of reach in the TV’s service menus.
For instance, if when using the Movie preset I switched the Contrast Enhancer option to Low from its more aggressive default setting, while blooming reduces, the picture starts to look a bit flat versus the Standard preset, and noise tends to become a bit too exaggerated in dark scenes. Trying and failing to solve the Movie preset’s backlight handling to my satisfaction also highlighted this preset’s tendency to suffer with a little detail crushing in very dark shots of the sort that’s absent with the Standard and Filmmaker Mode settings.
Going back to the appeal of the 98Q80C’s Standard picture preset, with HDR content (which is almost always accompanied by wide colour gamuts) its relatively punchy approach to color also typically works very well, giving images a bit more punch and vibrancy than you get with the Movie and Filmmaker Mode while looking closer to mastering standards than Samsung’s Standard presets typically do.
There are a trio of problems with the Standard preset, though. First, its light controls can cause some slightly noticeable ‘jumps’ in brightness during scenes that cut very abruptly between very dark and very bright shots (such as Georgie’s chat with Pennywise in the drain in It Chapter One). Second, it can very occasionally cause color to leach from very isolated picture highlights, such as the word ‘Replicant’ when it appears in isolation near the start of Blade Runner 2049. Though this will happen so rarely under regular viewing conditions that it’s barely worth mentioning.
Third, very aggressively mastered HDR titles, such as the 4K Blu-rays of Pan and, especially, Babylon, can cause the Standard preset’s color punch to tip over into looking quite over-wrought. All those writhing bodies in the low-lit Babylon party, for instance, appear with a very unnatural, over-cooked reddish tone, while some of the skies and sunset-bathed faces in Babylon’s opening desert scenes can suffer with hints of clipping (lost shading details) in their brightest areas.
Feeding in an HDR10+ signal, with its extra scene by scene picture data, helps colors retain a little more naturalism in Standard mode (making us wish for the millionth time that Samsung also supported the Dolby Vision HDR format). What fully solves any color issues, though – quite beautifully, actually – is switching to the Filmmaker Mode preset, which reveals a much more natural, balanced, three-dimensional and subtle image. Albeit at the expense of more backlight clouding.
The Movie mode tends to leave colors looking a little jaundiced unless you put the time in to calibrate this inflection out, so most people will find themselves looking at a choice between the Standard and Filmmaker modes depending on how aggressively a particular source has been mastered.
If, understandably, you don’t really want to have to judge from title to title which 98Q80C picture preset is the best one to go for and would rather have just one setting that works well for everything, then I’d actually recommended using the Standard preset as your starting point and slightly toning down its colour saturation, rather than starting with the Filmmaker Mode and trying to solve its more fundamental clouding problems.
If you’re lucky enough to still have a few hundred dollars or pounds left after forking out for a 98Q80C, despite it being only a mid-range TV in spec terms (apart from its colossal screen) it still has a wide enough range of colour and light controls to make a professional calibration possible. Though I’d hope a calibrator would take this monster panel’s quite specific characteristics into account rather than perhaps just slavishly following every calibration ‘number’.
It’s worth saying on the back of all this discussion of the 98Q80C’s mostly very impressive (if handled with care) backlighting and colour performance that its pictures also look engagingly bright with HDR sources. This applies to both the general look of full-screen bright content but also, as noted earlier, the punch of small bright highlights in both mostly dark and mostly bright HDR images.
I mentioned back near the start of this review that screens as big as the 98Q80C are the best argument for 8K resolution. And it is indeed the case that if you get close enough to the 4K 98Q80C screen – within around 2m – you start to become aware of visible pixel structure, especially with bright shots. Unless you’re the sort of person who always has to sit on the front row at the cinema, though, I wouldn’t imagine that most 98Q80C buyers will want to sit closer to it than the 3m Samsung recommends. And at that distance, aside from some very marginal jaggedness when presenting bright arced edges, I didn’t feel aware of pixel structure distractions at all.
What I did feel aware of was how sharp and detailed the 98Q80C’s pictures are. It feels more like the screen’s enormity is helping to get more value out of the sharpness and detailing of good quality 4K resolution sources than like it’s stretching 4K to a point where you start to feel strongly aware of its non-8K limitations.
Having tested one or two high end 85-inch 8K TVs I would say those can deliver a denser, slightly more three-dimensional-looking image – especially with native 8K content if you’re able to find any. Anyone worrying, though, that a 98-inch 4K TV might somehow look soft or ‘gritty’ with 4K content is fretting over nothing provided they watch from a sensible viewing distance.
The Standard preset which, for reasons discussed already, I found myself drawn to on the 98Q80C slightly over-sharpens pictures in its default setting, causing some glowing double edging around high-contrast edges. You can resolve this, though, just by nudging the sharpness setting down a few notches.
With native 4K still disappointingly rare in the broadcast world, it’s great to find the AI-driven upscaling system the 98Q80C applies to HD sources exceeding expectations, remapping HD content to the screen’s much higher pixel count without the results looking soft, noisy or off color. The quality ‘gap’ between upscaled HD and native 4K is a little more noticeable at this sort of scale than it is on 55 and 65-inch TVs, but the difference is far less extreme than expected.
Standard definition broadcasts look a bit soft when blown up to 98 inches, but this is pretty much inevitable really – and I’d like to think that most people spending thousands of pounds on a massive TV like the 98Q80C will be set up with a good roster of HD and, ideally, 4K sources.
The hugeness of the 98Q80C’s screen does mean there’s no hiding place for problems that might be baked into a source. For instance, while I’ve noticed before on other TVs some strange speckling noise over the roof of the church behind Mike as he describes the fire in which he lost his parents in It, I hadn’t previously noticed until I saw it on the 98Q80C that there’s also some fizzing noise in Stanley’s white socks as the camera tracks in towards Mike.
It’s hardly fair to blame the 98Q80C for exposing the failings of others, though! The 98Q80C is just brutal about revealing what’s in a source – which for the most part is exactly what AV fans want from a TV.
The nice sharpness and clarity of the 98Q80C’s pictures holds up well when a source contains camera pans or moving objects. Provided, anyway, that you make sure you turn off the Auto mode for the TV’s Picture Clarity settings, which causes too much ‘soap opera effect’ and routinely throws up lots of distracting, unwanted processing effects. Instead I’d suggest choosing Custom and setting the judder and blur reduction systems to around their three or four strength levels.
Gaming
Provided you’re (very much!) not the sort of gamer who likes gaming on small monitors so you can take the whole image in slightly faster, the 98Q80C delivers a mostly sensational gaming experience. The brightness, colour, and clarity associated with good game graphics these days are all perfectly suited to the 98Q80C’s aggressive picture approach – with the considerable added bonus that you feel like you’re gaming at life size! If you’re a fan of immersive exploration-based games in particular, you’ll go gaga for the 98Q80C.
The only downside to gaming on such a high resolution massive screen besides the slight human sight response time point mentioned earlier is that judder can be quite jarring with titles that struggle to get up to 60Hz. So if a game offers a choice between higher resolution graphics and higher frame rates, I’d strongly recommend (even though it perhaps sounds counter-intuitive) that you choose the high frame rate option for the most immersive results.
It’s worth noting in this regard, too, that the special Game Bar menu you can access when the 98Q80C detects that it’s receiving a game source includes an option to sacrifice a little input lag (the time the screen takes to render image data) speed in return for some gentle judder-reducing processing – a handy option for role-playing or exploration-based games rather than games based on twitch reaction speeds. To put some numbers on this, in its fastest response Game mode the 98Q80C takes 10.7ms to render its images, and this increases to 27.1ms with the Game Motion Plus judder reduction setting in play.
The 98Q80C’s HDMI ports are capable of handling 4K graphics at up to 120Hz, with variable refresh rates and auto low latency mode switching. The only cutting edge gaming feature missing is Dolby Vision support.
Sound quality
The 98Q80C’s sound doesn’t achieve the same scale as its pictures. It can’t get as cinematically loud as I’d ideally like with such a huge TV, and the sound doesn’t escape far beyond the confines of the TV’s bodywork, either sideways or forwards. Occasionally a seriously deep bass sound can cause the TV’s bodywork to buzz a bit, too.
On the upside, the speakers don’t distort easily, trebles even at high volumes hardly ever become harsh, and there’s a reasonable amount of bass to underpin proceedings. Dialogue appears reasonably well locked to the screen, too, rather than sounding as if it’s coming from below the picture – especially if your seating position is slightly lower than the screen’s centre.
While the 98Q80C’s sound doesn’t have the headroom or raw volume to move through as many gears with growing action scenes as the best sounding TVs, it also doesn’t collapse in on itself under severe pressure. And finally in the plus column, placement details in a movie mix (especially with Dolby Atmos tracks) sound quite precisely positioned on or even just off the screen.
Verdict
The 98Q80C is a literally massive surprise – in all the right ways. While I’d long been intrigued by the idea of a mid-range and therefore relatively affordable 98-inch TV from a brand as accomplished as Samsung, I’d honestly had my doubts that such a model could really deliver the performance goods. It turns out,, though, after a little fine tuning and experimentation, that the 98Q80C exceeds my expectations in just about every way – especially, most importantly, when it comes to its contrast and local dimming performance.
While the 98Q80C is unusually affordable for a 98-100in TV, there’s no getting round the fact that it’s more than twice as expensive as the 85-inch model in the same Q80C range. So you will probably need to be a seriously dedicated home cinephile to be prepared to cough up so much more for that extra 13 inches. If that sounds like you, though, you can rest assured that the 98Q80C is a far better TV than it arguably has any right to be. And in being so, it breaks new ground in our ongoing and ever-growing obsession with equipping our homes with bigger and bigger sTVs.
Final score: 9/10
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