Verdict
The QE55Q80D may lack a few of the bells and whistles of Samsung’s high-end TVs, but it’s still a brilliant mid-range option.
Pros
- Excellent picture quality
- Extensive gaming features and strong gaming performance
- Strong smart features and processing
Cons
- No Dolby Vision HDR support
- Some out of the box colour errors
- Some minor backlight inconsistencies
-
Full Array Local dimming panelFeatures lights positioned directly behind the screen, and where clusters of LEDs can be controlled to boost contrast -
Quantum DotsTVs that use Quantum Dots can usually produce wider colour ranges and volumes than traditional colour filters -
Tizen OS smartsOffers a huge range of video streaming content backed up by a gaming hub
Introduction
After being wowed by a run of excellent premium Samsung 2024 Mini LED and Quantum Dot OLED TVs but then swiftly cowed by the sorry state of our bank balance, it’s high time for something rather more affordable from Samsung’s current range.
To which end the QE55Q80D seems the perfect option, combining a still promising feature count with a price that puts it squarely in mid-range rather than premium territory.
Availability
The QE55Q80D launched in summer 2024 across multiple (but not all) territories around the world. It’s positioned at the top of Samsung’s ‘mass market’ TV range, with a price tag of £1,199 in the UK and $1,099 in the US. The Q80D range is not showing any availability in Australia.
The QE55Q80D’s use of a normal LED lighting engine helps it sell for a hefty £500 / $700 less than Samsung’s most affordable 55-inch Mini LED model, the QE55QN90D.
Design
- Good build quality
- Centrally placed desktop stand
- Chunky by Samsung standards
After the gleaming, ultra-slim designs of Samsung’s premium TVs, I couldn’t help but notice how relatively chunky the QE55Q80D is. The frame around the screen is a little wider, and while the outer sides of this frame don’t extend back much further than those of Samsung’s premium QN95D Mini LED TVs, there’s a pretty substantial extra rear-end bulge that you don’t get with the QN95D.
The bezel’s light silver brushed metal finish is attractive and opulent, and it ties in handsomely with the finish applied to the centrally placed desktop foot. The chunky black rear panel enjoys a striking corrugated effect, too, and there are channels cut into it into which you can tidily push all your source and power cabling.
The back of the TV’s desktop stand neck also clips on and off so that you can run your cables through it, rather than have them hanging messily from the 55Q80D’s bottom edge.
The build quality of both the TV and its stand is excellent by mid-range TV standards, and while the screen and stand don’t enjoy the innovative screwless set up of some of Samsung’s premium sets, the finished article feels pleasingly stable and robust.
Features
- Full array with local dimming panel
- Expansive gaming support
- Quantum Dot colours
The QE55Q80D is built around a FALD panel hat uses a full array LED arrangement, where the LEDs lighting the TV are placed directly behind the screen, and driven by a local dimming system that can independently control the light output of different LED zones.
The LEDs in the QE55Q80D are not the tiny ones used in Samsung’s Mini LED TVs, so there aren’t as many of them tucked into the 55-inch screen. And the 55Q80D’s local dimming zone count is a neat 100, rather than the multiple hundreds used with Samsung’s Mini LED TVs. So inevitably the 55Q80D can’t deliver such fine light control as Samsung’s premier LCD TVs.
This is only to be expected given the 55Q80D’s relative affordability. And in any case, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from testing huge numbers of LED TVs over recent years, it’s that the cleverness of dimming systems can actually be more important than the raw number of dimming zones at their disposal.
The 55Q80D uses a VA 4K LCD panel, which bodes well for its potential contrast performance, while its wide colour gamut is delivered by a Quantum Dot system rather than the more basic, less expressive old RGB filter approach.
While the 55Q80D inevitably loses some of the premium features of Samsung’s high-end LCD TVs, it does, surprisingly, retain the Neo Quantum 4 Gen 2 processor deployed by the step up models. As well as hopefully helping the 55Q80D get the most effective results out of its local dimming system, I’d expect to see this powerful, AI-driven processor also having an impact on colour, motion and, especially, the upscaling of sub-4K sources.
The 55Q80D is extremely well connected for a mid-range TV. In particular, each of its four HDMI connections can handle the 4K/120Hz and variable refresh rate signals gamers are now looking for their TVs to handle.
The VRR support includes the AMD FreeSync (but not official NVidia G-Sync) system, while further strings to the 55Q80D’s impressive gaming bow include both a Gaming Hub area within its onscreen menus into which is compiled every gaming source (from streaming services to connected consoles and PCs), and a Game Bar menu that provides data on the graphics feed and a range of game enhancement options.
While I’m on the subject of gaming, I measured the 55Q80D Game mode’s input lag at just 9.8ms with 60Hz feeds. This is one of the lowest figures around – though bear in mind that the input lag increases by a few tens of milliseconds if you activate the TV’s Game Motion Plus option, which can add mild motion smoothing processing to games with relatively low and/or inconsistent frame rates.
Operating System
- Tizen OS
- Ships with two remotes
As with most Samsung TVs, the 55Q80D ships with two remote controls: one standard, button-heavy one, and one stripped back smart one. The Smart one takes a little getting used to but will likely become the one you use the most – especially as it a) carries a solar panel so that you never have to change its batteries, and b) sports a mic for activating the 55Q80D’s unusually far-ranging voice control system. There’s hardly any part of the 55Q80D’s features that you can’t adjust simply by verbally telling the TV what you want to achieve.
The voice recognition features form part of Samsung’s Tizen operating system, which this year offers refinements to its support for different user profiles and the content it intelligently (in the sense that the TV can learn from your viewing habits) highlights on its home pages. The amount of content available through Tizen is immense, too, covering all the main global and local streaming services I could think of to check bar the UK’s Freeview Play app.
While the absence of Freeview Play means users can’t access catch up content from the UK’s main terrestrial broadcaster within Freeview Play’s umbrella app, each individual broadcaster catch up services is available separately.
The only real gap in the 55Q80D’s feature list for a mid-range TV is its lack of support for the Dolby Vision HDR format. Samsung doesn’t offer this on any of its TVs, though, always sticking instead with its own HDR10+ alternative format. Note that Dolby Vision masters will still play in the HDR10 high dynamic range format on the 55Q80D.
Picture Quality
- Excellent black levels and contrast
- Vibrant colours
- Strong 4K detail and sharpness
While the QE55Q80D’s pictures inevitably don’t hit the same sublime heights as those of Samsung’s high-end TVs, they still punch well above their mid-range weight.
One of the first things that struck me as I put the 55Q80D through its paces with a mix of native 4K and HD content was how phenomenally sharp its pictures are. Despite its relatively small 55-inch screen size by today’s standards it delivers a resolutely 4K experience full of the picture minutiae, refinement and enhanced sense of depth I’ve come to associate with the step up from HD.
Areas of extremely fine texture, moreover, such as brickwork or the pattern or weave in a well-made suit, are presented without any of the moire noise or excessive grittiness that could crop up on Samsung 4K TVs in days gone by.
The sharpness holds up well when there’s motion in the frame too. Actually too well when you’re using the TV’s Dynamic, Standard and Movie presets, thanks to these modes’ use of an over-enthusiastic default motion processing system that leaves 24p film sources looking unnatural and processed.
Fortunately Samsung lets you customise its Picture Clarity/motion settings, which I’d suggest you do by selecting manual strength settings of three or four for the processing’s separate judder and blur reduction components. Turning off the motion processing entirely with the 55Q80D’s Movie and Filmmaker mode picture presets is a valid option for movie viewing too. I would recommend sticking with my suggested custom mode settings for the Standard preset, as this mode’s extra brightness can make judder more distracting.
The efforts of the 55Q80D’s FALD panel as driven by the NQ4 Gen 2 processor are fantastic for a mid-range TV. Dark scenes reveal black colours almost as profound and natural as those of Samsung’s best high-end LCD models. Which also means they sometimes dip into depths not far short of those achieved by OLED TVs.
These excellent black levels instantly make dark scenes look much more believable than they are on most similarly priced 55-inch TVs. This impeccable black level response is achieved and maintained, too, without subtle shading details being lost in the darkness. This is especially true with the Movie and Filmmaker mode presets, but even the punchy Standard preset retained enough shadow detailing in dark areas to stop them looking hollow or artificial.
This points to some excellent work by the local dimming system – as does how rarely I noticed any significant light blooming from around stand-out bright objects despite the screen only having 100 dimming zones. Just occasionally a shot containing a mix of very bright and very dark elements can look a touch smoky, and faint clouding can creep into the supposedly pitch black bars that frame content filmed with a wider than 16:9 aspect ratio.
Seldom are these little backlight limitations strong enough to feel distracting; in fact, if there’s any ambient light in your room, you might not even register their existence.
Slightly more noticeable is the way in its punchiest presets that the 55Q80D sometimes adjusts its baseline brightness level quite sharply during hard cuts between dark and bright content. This doesn’t happen often, and even when it does you don’t usually feel strongly aware of it simply because the 55Q80D isn’t as bright as most more premium LCD TVs.
That does not mean, that the 55Q80D has a brightness problem. In fact, its measured peak brightness of just over 1000 nits (depending on picture preset) on both 10% and 25% of screen area HDR test windows is high by mid-range TV standards. Especially in the context of a TV that’s also capable of delivering the sort of excellent black levels I’ve talked about.
The brightness is certainly enough to ensure that bright highlights of HDR images look suitably intense. Even better, full-screen bright shots are much less compromised in brightness terms than they are on even the best OLED TVs (though those OLED TVs can, of course, provide local contrast accuracy right down to actual pixel level).
Strong contrast and decent brightness usually feed into a strong colour performance, and so it proves with the 55Q80D. There’s a lovely richness to relatively primary tones that’s devoid of the paleness or inconsistency associated with TVs that struggle for contrast or deploy clumsy local dimming systems. Outside of the set’s overcooked Dynamic picture preset, though, even at their richest these bold colour moments don’t look cartoonish or plasticky thanks to the deftness with which the screen delineates subtle tonal shifts and blends.
The only odd thing about the 55Q80D’s colours is a faint salmony tone that can creep into very bright picture areas and some oddly strident pink pigmentation that occasionally shows up in bright skin tone. This is particularly noticeable out of the box in the Standard preset, but is faintly noticeable across really every picture mode.
Fortunately you can substantially reduce this issue simply by adding a little more green to the picture using the TV’s Tint adjustment. Or by calibrating the TV using either the TV’s built-in Smart Calibration feature in conjunction with your mobile phone, or calling in a professional calibrator.
Sound Quality
- Impressively large sound stage
- Solid, distortion-free bass
- Reasonably effective object tracking sound system
While not quite loud or room-filling enough to stand out as much as its pictures do, the 55Q80D’s sound is still good for a mid-range TV.
It’s at its best with Dolby Atmos soundtracks, with which it manages to cast ambient and score movie mix elements way beyond the screen’s left and right sides, as well as conjuring up a sense of verticality despite the TV not carrying any actual up-firing speakers.
The sense of height allows the 55Q80D to place different soundtrack elements in different vertical layers, helping them remain more distinct from each other. This layering effect also contributes to at least a vague sense of Atmos’s vertical as well as horizontal sound stage charms.
Despite its limited speaker count, the 55Q80D is equipped with a basic version of Samsung’s Object Tracking Sound (OTS) system, where audio processing tries to make sounds appear to be coming from the correct part of the screen. While this isn’t as precise as the more premium OTS implementations found higher up Samsung’s TV range, it fills in the space between the wide sound stage extremes with plenty of involving detail and general ‘busyness’.
Bass is presented with enough depth and enthusiasm to make the sound feel reasonably fulsome and cinematic without crackling or buzzing even under extreme pressure, while all but the very shrillest trebles manage to avoid sounding thin and harsh.
Voices don’t sound as attached to on-screen talkers as they do with Samsung’s more advanced OTS systems, but seldom does this disconnect become really distracting unless you’re sat unusually close to the screen.
Latest deals
Should you buy it?
Excellent picture quality
You want excellent picture quality and advanced gaming features at a much more affordable price than you need for Samsung’s flagship TVs.
You want the best picture out of the box
You’re a Dolby Vision HDR fan, or you’re not prepared to spend a little time tinkering with things in the TV’s menus.
Final Thoughts
While its brightness and colour limits leave you with an excuse to step up to the premium Mini LED and OLED TV world if your bank balance permits, the Samsung QE55Q80D is outstanding by mid-range TV standards.
Its pictures are punchy, clean, sharp and able to adapt to both dark and bright room viewing conditions way better than most rivals, its gaming features humble many way more expensive TVs, and it sounds good enough to let you put buying a soundbar on the backburner.
How we test
We test every television we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Benchmarked with Spears and Munsil UHD test dics
Tested with real world use
FAQs
It supports HDR10, HLG and HDR10+ – but not Dolby Vision.
Where a TV such as the QE55Q80D describes itself as a QLED TV, it means it uses Quantum Dots to create its colours rather than using the usually darker, smaller gamut RGB filter approach.
A proprietary Samsung technology that uses audio processing to try and make sound effects appear to be coming from the correct part of the screen.
Trusted Reviews test data
Jargon buster
HDR10+
HDR10+ is a HDR format supported by Panasonic and Samsung as a free to use, open platform alternative to Dolby Vision. It adds dynamic metadata on top of the core HDR10 signal that tells a TV how it should adjust the brightness, colours and contrast of content for the most optimal picture quality.
HLG (Hybrid-Log Gamma)
HLG is a HDR format co-developed by the BBC and Japanese national broadcaster NHK for transmission of broadcast and live streamed content in HDR. It’s backwards compatible with SDR transmission standards, enabling people without a HDR TV to receive the same feed but downsampled.
Dolby Vision
Dolby Vision is a variant of HDR, adding a layer of dynamic metadata to the core HDR signal. This dynamic metadata carries scene-by-scene (or frame-by-frame) instructions from content creators on how a TV should present the images to improve everything from brightness to contrast, detailing and colour reproduction.
HDMI
HDMI stands for High Definition Multimedia Interface and is to transmit video/audio signals from a source to a receiver.
QLED
QLED stands for Quantum-dot Light Emitting Diode. It’s a display technology that uses small particles (called Quantum Dots) made up of slightly different sizes that produce different wavelengths (colours) when light is shone through them. This filter helps to emit a brighter and wider gamut of colours than a conventional LED TV is capable of.
FALD
FALD stands for Full Array Local Dimming and is a more advanced version of Local Dimming technology. It divides a TV’s screen into zones where contrast/black levels can be controlled. In theory, the more zones there are, the more control over black levels and contrast there can be, resulting in a more dynamic looking picture.
Verdict
The QE55Q80D may lack a few of the bells and whistles of Samsung’s high-end TVs, but it’s still a brilliant mid-range option.
Pros
- Excellent picture quality
- Extensive gaming features and strong gaming performance
- Strong smart features and processing
Cons
- No Dolby Vision HDR support
- Some out of the box colour errors
- Some minor backlight inconsistencies
-
Full Array Local dimming panelFeatures lights positioned directly behind the screen, and where clusters of LEDs can be controlled to boost contrast -
Quantum DotsTVs that use Quantum Dots can usually produce wider colour ranges and volumes than traditional colour filters -
Tizen OS smartsOffers a huge range of video streaming content backed up by a gaming hub
Introduction
After being wowed by a run of excellent premium Samsung 2024 Mini LED and Quantum Dot OLED TVs but then swiftly cowed by the sorry state of our bank balance, it’s high time for something rather more affordable from Samsung’s current range.
To which end the QE55Q80D seems the perfect option, combining a still promising feature count with a price that puts it squarely in mid-range rather than premium territory.
Availability
The QE55Q80D launched in summer 2024 across multiple (but not all) territories around the world. It’s positioned at the top of Samsung’s ‘mass market’ TV range, with a price tag of £1,199 in the UK and $1,099 in the US. The Q80D range is not showing any availability in Australia.
The QE55Q80D’s use of a normal LED lighting engine helps it sell for a hefty £500 / $700 less than Samsung’s most affordable 55-inch Mini LED model, the QE55QN90D.
Design
- Good build quality
- Centrally placed desktop stand
- Chunky by Samsung standards
After the gleaming, ultra-slim designs of Samsung’s premium TVs, I couldn’t help but notice how relatively chunky the QE55Q80D is. The frame around the screen is a little wider, and while the outer sides of this frame don’t extend back much further than those of Samsung’s premium QN95D Mini LED TVs, there’s a pretty substantial extra rear-end bulge that you don’t get with the QN95D.
The bezel’s light silver brushed metal finish is attractive and opulent, and it ties in handsomely with the finish applied to the centrally placed desktop foot. The chunky black rear panel enjoys a striking corrugated effect, too, and there are channels cut into it into which you can tidily push all your source and power cabling.
The back of the TV’s desktop stand neck also clips on and off so that you can run your cables through it, rather than have them hanging messily from the 55Q80D’s bottom edge.
The build quality of both the TV and its stand is excellent by mid-range TV standards, and while the screen and stand don’t enjoy the innovative screwless set up of some of Samsung’s premium sets, the finished article feels pleasingly stable and robust.
Features
- Full array with local dimming panel
- Expansive gaming support
- Quantum Dot colours
The QE55Q80D is built around a FALD panel hat uses a full array LED arrangement, where the LEDs lighting the TV are placed directly behind the screen, and driven by a local dimming system that can independently control the light output of different LED zones.
The LEDs in the QE55Q80D are not the tiny ones used in Samsung’s Mini LED TVs, so there aren’t as many of them tucked into the 55-inch screen. And the 55Q80D’s local dimming zone count is a neat 100, rather than the multiple hundreds used with Samsung’s Mini LED TVs. So inevitably the 55Q80D can’t deliver such fine light control as Samsung’s premier LCD TVs.
This is only to be expected given the 55Q80D’s relative affordability. And in any case, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from testing huge numbers of LED TVs over recent years, it’s that the cleverness of dimming systems can actually be more important than the raw number of dimming zones at their disposal.
The 55Q80D uses a VA 4K LCD panel, which bodes well for its potential contrast performance, while its wide colour gamut is delivered by a Quantum Dot system rather than the more basic, less expressive old RGB filter approach.
While the 55Q80D inevitably loses some of the premium features of Samsung’s high-end LCD TVs, it does, surprisingly, retain the Neo Quantum 4 Gen 2 processor deployed by the step up models. As well as hopefully helping the 55Q80D get the most effective results out of its local dimming system, I’d expect to see this powerful, AI-driven processor also having an impact on colour, motion and, especially, the upscaling of sub-4K sources.
The 55Q80D is extremely well connected for a mid-range TV. In particular, each of its four HDMI connections can handle the 4K/120Hz and variable refresh rate signals gamers are now looking for their TVs to handle.
The VRR support includes the AMD FreeSync (but not official NVidia G-Sync) system, while further strings to the 55Q80D’s impressive gaming bow include both a Gaming Hub area within its onscreen menus into which is compiled every gaming source (from streaming services to connected consoles and PCs), and a Game Bar menu that provides data on the graphics feed and a range of game enhancement options.
While I’m on the subject of gaming, I measured the 55Q80D Game mode’s input lag at just 9.8ms with 60Hz feeds. This is one of the lowest figures around – though bear in mind that the input lag increases by a few tens of milliseconds if you activate the TV’s Game Motion Plus option, which can add mild motion smoothing processing to games with relatively low and/or inconsistent frame rates.
Operating System
- Tizen OS
- Ships with two remotes
As with most Samsung TVs, the 55Q80D ships with two remote controls: one standard, button-heavy one, and one stripped back smart one. The Smart one takes a little getting used to but will likely become the one you use the most – especially as it a) carries a solar panel so that you never have to change its batteries, and b) sports a mic for activating the 55Q80D’s unusually far-ranging voice control system. There’s hardly any part of the 55Q80D’s features that you can’t adjust simply by verbally telling the TV what you want to achieve.
The voice recognition features form part of Samsung’s Tizen operating system, which this year offers refinements to its support for different user profiles and the content it intelligently (in the sense that the TV can learn from your viewing habits) highlights on its home pages. The amount of content available through Tizen is immense, too, covering all the main global and local streaming services I could think of to check bar the UK’s Freeview Play app.
While the absence of Freeview Play means users can’t access catch up content from the UK’s main terrestrial broadcaster within Freeview Play’s umbrella app, each individual broadcaster catch up services is available separately.
The only real gap in the 55Q80D’s feature list for a mid-range TV is its lack of support for the Dolby Vision HDR format. Samsung doesn’t offer this on any of its TVs, though, always sticking instead with its own HDR10+ alternative format. Note that Dolby Vision masters will still play in the HDR10 high dynamic range format on the 55Q80D.
Picture Quality
- Excellent black levels and contrast
- Vibrant colours
- Strong 4K detail and sharpness
While the QE55Q80D’s pictures inevitably don’t hit the same sublime heights as those of Samsung’s high-end TVs, they still punch well above their mid-range weight.
One of the first things that struck me as I put the 55Q80D through its paces with a mix of native 4K and HD content was how phenomenally sharp its pictures are. Despite its relatively small 55-inch screen size by today’s standards it delivers a resolutely 4K experience full of the picture minutiae, refinement and enhanced sense of depth I’ve come to associate with the step up from HD.
Areas of extremely fine texture, moreover, such as brickwork or the pattern or weave in a well-made suit, are presented without any of the moire noise or excessive grittiness that could crop up on Samsung 4K TVs in days gone by.
The sharpness holds up well when there’s motion in the frame too. Actually too well when you’re using the TV’s Dynamic, Standard and Movie presets, thanks to these modes’ use of an over-enthusiastic default motion processing system that leaves 24p film sources looking unnatural and processed.
Fortunately Samsung lets you customise its Picture Clarity/motion settings, which I’d suggest you do by selecting manual strength settings of three or four for the processing’s separate judder and blur reduction components. Turning off the motion processing entirely with the 55Q80D’s Movie and Filmmaker mode picture presets is a valid option for movie viewing too. I would recommend sticking with my suggested custom mode settings for the Standard preset, as this mode’s extra brightness can make judder more distracting.
The efforts of the 55Q80D’s FALD panel as driven by the NQ4 Gen 2 processor are fantastic for a mid-range TV. Dark scenes reveal black colours almost as profound and natural as those of Samsung’s best high-end LCD models. Which also means they sometimes dip into depths not far short of those achieved by OLED TVs.
These excellent black levels instantly make dark scenes look much more believable than they are on most similarly priced 55-inch TVs. This impeccable black level response is achieved and maintained, too, without subtle shading details being lost in the darkness. This is especially true with the Movie and Filmmaker mode presets, but even the punchy Standard preset retained enough shadow detailing in dark areas to stop them looking hollow or artificial.
This points to some excellent work by the local dimming system – as does how rarely I noticed any significant light blooming from around stand-out bright objects despite the screen only having 100 dimming zones. Just occasionally a shot containing a mix of very bright and very dark elements can look a touch smoky, and faint clouding can creep into the supposedly pitch black bars that frame content filmed with a wider than 16:9 aspect ratio.
Seldom are these little backlight limitations strong enough to feel distracting; in fact, if there’s any ambient light in your room, you might not even register their existence.
Slightly more noticeable is the way in its punchiest presets that the 55Q80D sometimes adjusts its baseline brightness level quite sharply during hard cuts between dark and bright content. This doesn’t happen often, and even when it does you don’t usually feel strongly aware of it simply because the 55Q80D isn’t as bright as most more premium LCD TVs.
That does not mean, that the 55Q80D has a brightness problem. In fact, its measured peak brightness of just over 1000 nits (depending on picture preset) on both 10% and 25% of screen area HDR test windows is high by mid-range TV standards. Especially in the context of a TV that’s also capable of delivering the sort of excellent black levels I’ve talked about.
The brightness is certainly enough to ensure that bright highlights of HDR images look suitably intense. Even better, full-screen bright shots are much less compromised in brightness terms than they are on even the best OLED TVs (though those OLED TVs can, of course, provide local contrast accuracy right down to actual pixel level).
Strong contrast and decent brightness usually feed into a strong colour performance, and so it proves with the 55Q80D. There’s a lovely richness to relatively primary tones that’s devoid of the paleness or inconsistency associated with TVs that struggle for contrast or deploy clumsy local dimming systems. Outside of the set’s overcooked Dynamic picture preset, though, even at their richest these bold colour moments don’t look cartoonish or plasticky thanks to the deftness with which the screen delineates subtle tonal shifts and blends.
The only odd thing about the 55Q80D’s colours is a faint salmony tone that can creep into very bright picture areas and some oddly strident pink pigmentation that occasionally shows up in bright skin tone. This is particularly noticeable out of the box in the Standard preset, but is faintly noticeable across really every picture mode.
Fortunately you can substantially reduce this issue simply by adding a little more green to the picture using the TV’s Tint adjustment. Or by calibrating the TV using either the TV’s built-in Smart Calibration feature in conjunction with your mobile phone, or calling in a professional calibrator.
Sound Quality
- Impressively large sound stage
- Solid, distortion-free bass
- Reasonably effective object tracking sound system
While not quite loud or room-filling enough to stand out as much as its pictures do, the 55Q80D’s sound is still good for a mid-range TV.
It’s at its best with Dolby Atmos soundtracks, with which it manages to cast ambient and score movie mix elements way beyond the screen’s left and right sides, as well as conjuring up a sense of verticality despite the TV not carrying any actual up-firing speakers.
The sense of height allows the 55Q80D to place different soundtrack elements in different vertical layers, helping them remain more distinct from each other. This layering effect also contributes to at least a vague sense of Atmos’s vertical as well as horizontal sound stage charms.
Despite its limited speaker count, the 55Q80D is equipped with a basic version of Samsung’s Object Tracking Sound (OTS) system, where audio processing tries to make sounds appear to be coming from the correct part of the screen. While this isn’t as precise as the more premium OTS implementations found higher up Samsung’s TV range, it fills in the space between the wide sound stage extremes with plenty of involving detail and general ‘busyness’.
Bass is presented with enough depth and enthusiasm to make the sound feel reasonably fulsome and cinematic without crackling or buzzing even under extreme pressure, while all but the very shrillest trebles manage to avoid sounding thin and harsh.
Voices don’t sound as attached to on-screen talkers as they do with Samsung’s more advanced OTS systems, but seldom does this disconnect become really distracting unless you’re sat unusually close to the screen.
Latest deals
Should you buy it?
Excellent picture quality
You want excellent picture quality and advanced gaming features at a much more affordable price than you need for Samsung’s flagship TVs.
You want the best picture out of the box
You’re a Dolby Vision HDR fan, or you’re not prepared to spend a little time tinkering with things in the TV’s menus.
Final Thoughts
While its brightness and colour limits leave you with an excuse to step up to the premium Mini LED and OLED TV world if your bank balance permits, the Samsung QE55Q80D is outstanding by mid-range TV standards.
Its pictures are punchy, clean, sharp and able to adapt to both dark and bright room viewing conditions way better than most rivals, its gaming features humble many way more expensive TVs, and it sounds good enough to let you put buying a soundbar on the backburner.
How we test
We test every television we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Benchmarked with Spears and Munsil UHD test dics
Tested with real world use
FAQs
It supports HDR10, HLG and HDR10+ – but not Dolby Vision.
Where a TV such as the QE55Q80D describes itself as a QLED TV, it means it uses Quantum Dots to create its colours rather than using the usually darker, smaller gamut RGB filter approach.
A proprietary Samsung technology that uses audio processing to try and make sound effects appear to be coming from the correct part of the screen.
Trusted Reviews test data
Jargon buster
HDR10+
HDR10+ is a HDR format supported by Panasonic and Samsung as a free to use, open platform alternative to Dolby Vision. It adds dynamic metadata on top of the core HDR10 signal that tells a TV how it should adjust the brightness, colours and contrast of content for the most optimal picture quality.
HLG (Hybrid-Log Gamma)
HLG is a HDR format co-developed by the BBC and Japanese national broadcaster NHK for transmission of broadcast and live streamed content in HDR. It’s backwards compatible with SDR transmission standards, enabling people without a HDR TV to receive the same feed but downsampled.
Dolby Vision
Dolby Vision is a variant of HDR, adding a layer of dynamic metadata to the core HDR signal. This dynamic metadata carries scene-by-scene (or frame-by-frame) instructions from content creators on how a TV should present the images to improve everything from brightness to contrast, detailing and colour reproduction.
HDMI
HDMI stands for High Definition Multimedia Interface and is to transmit video/audio signals from a source to a receiver.
QLED
QLED stands for Quantum-dot Light Emitting Diode. It’s a display technology that uses small particles (called Quantum Dots) made up of slightly different sizes that produce different wavelengths (colours) when light is shone through them. This filter helps to emit a brighter and wider gamut of colours than a conventional LED TV is capable of.
FALD
FALD stands for Full Array Local Dimming and is a more advanced version of Local Dimming technology. It divides a TV’s screen into zones where contrast/black levels can be controlled. In theory, the more zones there are, the more control over black levels and contrast there can be, resulting in a more dynamic looking picture.
