Samsung unveiled its newest gigantic television, the 115-inch Q90F, at an event in New Jersey this week. The $27,000 TV appeared alongside the company's other 115-inch Micro RGB TV, which costs even more: $30,000. But what do these LCD TVs give you that smaller, cheaper models can't? I saw both TVs on display, and this is what I think.
The QN90F is the largest model in Samsung's flagship QN90F range, which starts in a 42-inch size. This 4K TV boasts the company's top technologies -- one it shares with the Micro RGB TV -- but there is one big difference between the two.
Why do they cost so much?
Ty Pendlebury/CNET
The short answer: Most TVs sold are 65 inches or smaller. Display factories can economically produce TVs of certain sizes, but as the size increases, the cost also increases. TVs bigger than 100 inches are a novelty right now, and so are priced accordingly. Samsung currently has not one but two 115-inch TVs, and their closeness in price is likely due to the production cost of the large panel itself.
Apart from an identical 115-inch size, these two TVs have another costly feature in common: the QN90F and Micro RGB TV both feature the company's Glare Free technology. In the QN90F room, I stood between a wall and an opaque window -- an environment that would be hell for most TVs. In addition, these gigantic TVs feature Samsung's Supersize Picture Enhancer, which is a sharpness algorithm designed to fill those screens with detail and reduce artefacts.
The most significant difference between the two LCD TVs, though, is the backlighting: the QN90F has an LED backlight with a Quantum Dot color filter, while the Micro RGB, as the name suggests, uses a micro-RGB backlight. Samsung wouldn't tell me specifics such as the number of backlighting zones on either model, but the QN90F has Quantum Matrix Technology, which has the "most precise lighting control for enhanced contrast and clarity."
The other TV's micro-RGB backlight is much smaller, and it allows both finer light control and the ability to remove the color filter layer. Samsung says this has benefits for its color reproduction, too, with 100% coverage of the BT.2020 color space. If this is accurate, it's the first consumer TV to hit this HDR-related reference target.
I have $30,000 to burn. What should I get?
The Samsung Micro RBG TV had impressively bright colors. Kerry Wan
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