Samsung U8000F (UE65U8000F) review

Samsung’s old dominance of the budget TV market has been severely challenged in recent years, most notably by the likes of Hisense and, especially, TCL.

Can the 65-inch U8000F do enough within its measly price to make the Korean brand the king of TV value once more?

Price

In the UK and US, at least, being able to bag a 65-inch Samsung U8000F for £469 / $430 really does look like a potentially huge bargain.

It’s perhaps not quite such an eye-catching deal in Australia, but when all is said and done, even AU$1299 hardly looks excessive for a 65-inch TV with the usually dependable Samsung name attached.

There are, as we’ll come to later, plenty of reasons why this TV is so affordable. These reasons don’t, though, include anything that might automatically disqualify it from being a potentially good performer for its money.

Not surprisingly, in today’s TV world, the strongest competition for the U8000F comes from TCL – in particular from the C7K and C6KS models, the 65-inch versions of which cost in the UK £829 and £479 respectively. The latter model actually adds local dimming and Mini LED lighting to the equation, despite costing more or less the same as the Samsung U8000F.

Design

The 65-inch U8000F is predictably built predominantly from fairly lightweight plastic. This makes it easy to move around, though, and actually, its bodywork still feels decently rigid and robust. That’s helped, perhaps, by the use of some attractively integrated ribbing in parts of the rear panel.

It’s fairly chunky around the back by today’s TV standards, making it a slightly awkward-looking wall hanging option – but you don’t notice its depth so much when it’s mounted on its pair of included feet.

These feet handily just slot and lock into holes on the screen’s underside, without the need for any screws. They’re positioned quite wide apart, however, meaning you’ll need a fairly wide TV stand to accommodate the TV.

The U8000F’s bezel tastefully sits more or less flush with the screen it holds, and is narrow enough when viewed head-on to prevent you from spotting the bodywork’s fundamentally plasticky nature.

The TV ships with two remote controls. One is an old-school looking chunky affair with a full button count, while the other is a much sleeker number with a nice polished finish and much reduced button count. It doesn’t carry a solar panel like the ‘smart’ remotes you get with Samsung’s premium TVs, but it’s comfortable to hold and easy to use.

Features

The panel at the 65-inch U8000F’s heart is understandably fairly basic by Samsung LCD standards. It’s lit by big ol’ regular-sized LEDs rather than Mini LEDs, and its backlighting doesn’t benefit from any sort of true local dimming system. It’s only a native 60Hz panel, too, which may limit its appeal to gamers with 120Hz (or more) consoles or PCs.

Most surprisingly of all, it doesn’t get a colour system built around Quantum Dots. Instead, as with all of Samsung’s U series TVs of the past few years, it gets something called PurColour, backed up by a Crystal 4K processor that’s a good few notches down in power and sophistication from Samsung’s Neo QLED processors.

If this PurColour system can still map colours accurately and subtly, though, it could still be enough to help the U8000F stand out from the budget TV crowd.

The TV supports high dynamic range video, including in the premium HDR10+ format. There’s no Dolby Vision, though; it seems like hell will need to freeze entirely over before Samsung joins most other TV brands in bringing Dolby Vision to its TVs.

The U8000F’s smart features and interface are provided by Samsung’s home-grown Tizen OS. This would normally be fine; Tizen now carries basically every streaming and catch-up TV service almost anyone could want, bar Freeview Play and Freely. You can operate the TV and find content by talking to it, too, via Samsung’s Bixby system or an external Alexa device. It maintains a dedicated Game Hub screen from which you can access streamed gaming apps or any game consoles or PCs you have connected.

Unfortunately, though, the 65-inch U8000F struggles with the demands of the latest Tizen system, typically running very sluggishly when it comes to opening menus, and booting up apps and streaming services.

While the U8000F’s lack of 120Hz support for gaming is unfortunate (if hardly surprising for such a cheap TV), it does have a few other gaming tricks up its sleeve. These include ALLM switching, VRR support and the HGiG system, whereby the TV essentially passes HDR output control to your Xbox or PlayStation console.

The set also takes just 9.7ms to render graphics when running in its Game mode – one of the lowest such figures we’ve measured.

Picture settings, meanwhile, include a Filmmaker Mode, raising hopes of an easily accessible route to accurate picture quality for AV enthusiasts, as well as Samsung’s suite of Picture Clarity tools for making pictures look cleaner and sharper. The Picture Clarity options here, though, do not include a blur reduction system as you get with more premium Samsung TVs; there are only noise reduction and judder reduction components to play with.

The U8000F’s sound is delivered by a fairly basic 2 x 10W sound system, bolstered by Samsung’s Q Symphony and OTS Lite features. Q Symphony lets the TV’s speakers join forces with those in Samsung soundbars, while OTS Lite uses nifty audio processing to try to make specific sounds appear to be coming from the correct part of the screen.

Connections on the U8000F, finally, comprise a trio of HDMI ports, a single USB-A port, an Ethernet port, the RF jack, a CI slot and, of course, wi-fi and Bluetooth wireless options.

Picture

The U8000F is very much a tale of two picture settings, looking very respectable for its money in its Standard mode, but struggling to meet the demands of AV enthusiasts with its Filmmaker Mode.

Starting with the good news, the Standard mode’s pictures immediately look surprisingly bright by budget TV standards. There’s a very clear step up in brightness between SDR and HDR content, as well as a mild expansion in the HDR image’s colour range. Enough in both cases to make HDR look convincing and surprisingly natural – helped by the presence of a surprisingly effective dynamic tone mapping system (a feature that’s by no means a given at the sort of price level the U8000F is operating at).

The TV’s brightness in Standard mode sits alongside some quite respectable black tones for such an affordable TV. This makes dark scenes comfortable to watch, and creates a degree of contrast that again helps to sell the idea that this is a more HDR-friendly TV than most of its similarly priced rivals.

We should stress that we’re not talking about depths of black in dark scenes of the sort you’d get with an OLED or premium LCD TV – there’s always a hint of grey to remind you that you’re watching a fairly affordable LCD screen – but the impact of this is mild by cheap TV standards.

Dark scenes contain plenty of shadow detail on the U8000F, too, avoiding that flat, hollow look so commonly encountered with budget TVs. Especially budget TVs that are as focused on producing a convincing black tone as this Samsung model seems to be.

The U8000F’s pictures are also sharp enough to look definitively 4K – and thanks to some crisp upscaling, this feels pleasingly true with HD sources as well as native 4K.

The sharpness does dip, though, due to some resolution loss over moving objects that none of the available Picture Clarity settings can completely fix (though choosing a Custom setting with Judder Reduction set to level four or five can at least reduce the impact of the screen’s quite strong native judder with 24fps sources).

There are a couple more Standard mode niggles to report as well. First, very bright picture areas can clip a little, meaning they lose subtle shading information and end up looking so stark that they draw too much attention to themselves (though this reduces with Dynamic Tone Mapping active). Second, colours in relatively dark scenes can ‘clump’ a little, so that very detailed areas such as grass or leaves become a bit rough and ill-defined.

You can also sometimes notice a slightly distracting lag between the backlight system dimming and brightening during scenes that feature abrupt cuts between dark and light shots, and finally, there’s a narrow stripe of light leakage running down the left and right sides of the picture – though this is only generally visible in the black bars above and below 21:9 and similar-ratio films. It’s typically too faint to appear where there’s any sort of picture information other than pure blackness on the screen.

While it’s good to find a very affordable TV that is ambitious enough to carry a Filmmaker Mode, unfortunately, that mode isn’t much fun to watch on the U8000F.

Clipping, for instance, becomes quite extreme without any Dynamic Tone Mapping in play, while motion looks both juddery and soft.

Colours feel flatter in Filmmaker Mode, too, and the image generally lacks impact. Perhaps the biggest issue with Filmmaker Mode, though, is that for some reason, perhaps due to its reduced brightness and contrast, dark scenes suddenly reveal multiple areas of backlight clouding at various points across the screen. You can reduce the impact of this if you watch in a little ambient light, but it’s a shame this feels necessary.

Dark scenes look generally a little greyer in Filmmaker Mode, too, and this greyness can also sometimes take on a slightly green or blue tint.

Not everything about the Filmmaker Mode is a bust. Colours look slightly more even-handed and nuanced, which contributes in particular to a touch less colour clumping in densely textured areas. Shadow detail is still strong, too, despite the extra clouding. Ultimately, though, the Filmmaker Mode’s slightly more nuanced feel in some areas isn’t enough to make it the sort of instant cinematic hit that movie fans might have hoped for.

There’s one more issue to mention, too, that actually affects all of the U8000F’s picture settings: viewing angles. View the TV from really any sort of angle, and the VA panel design causes contrast to take a substantial hit, with parts of the picture that should be black taking on a vivid blue-grey tone. Basically, if your room layout requires lots of people to routinely watch this TV from the side, it’s probably not the TV for you.

Sound

The first thing to say here is that we recommend pretty much always turning the U8000F’s Amplify sound mode on. Without it, the sound tends to feel small and trapped inside the TV.

Even with Amplify mode on, the U8000F’s sound doesn’t exactly shake your foundations. There isn’t much bass depth or presence, and volume levels, even set to maximum, are hardly going to burst your eardrums.

While we might have wished for the U8000F’s sound to give us a bit more, though, what it does give us is actually quite clean and engaging – at least to the extent that the TV seems to understand its speakers’ limitations.

So, bass, while not heavy, seldom distorts or crackles. Treble, while not particularly extended, doesn’t tend to sound harsh or forced. Voices are quite well-rounded and contextualised, and surprisingly, given there are only two speakers in play, the OTS Lite system places voices and spot effects decently accurately in the right place on the screen.

This all makes the sound quite clean and therefore immersive by budget TV standards, making it surprisingly easy to live with.

Verdict

The 65-inch Samsung U8000F is overall a solid TV for its money. It’s up against some stiff and only slightly more expensive competition, and it’s certainly not without its limitations, but provided you aren’t a die-hard cinephile desperately on the hunt for a good Filmmaker Mode, the U8000F’s Standard picture setting actually serves up a cleaner, more balanced, more punchy and above all more consistent performance than most rivals in its class.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 3
• Features 4

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