Reason for a new thread
Creating this new thread to share the reviews of U7K. I know there's an existing thread about the overall TV, but given the extreme amount of interest and misinformation about the TV, I thought a thread just for user reviews and experiences might help future buyers more by them not having to navigate through pages of FOMO and speculation about the TV on the other thread. I'll start out with my own review to kick off the thread, but I do expect other FMs to chime in with their own comparisons, settings and opinions. Anyway, let's begin the review, shall we?
Context
I have a 65" Sony A95K QD-OLED as my bedroom TV since last year and while I've been (obviously) super happy with its performance, I was looking for a rough and tough, big bright TV for the living room. I wanted something that could handle abuse like sports, TV channels, gaming, and guests for hours and hours on days and days without fear of burn-in, and something that handles the relatively bright living room just fine too. Overall, I was more keen on getting a bright LCD FALD TV rather than another OLED.
However, given the horrendous pricing of FALD TVs in our country, I was thinking of giving up on that and was looking to get an S90C OLED, and then the U7K dropped which fit my needs perfectly. It was cheap(1.4 lakhs for 85" mini LED), bright (1000 nits) and the overall reviews were positive. I pre-ordered it, got it last week and have been playing with it since then.
The size and first impressions
85" is a BIG TV, especially for my 11' viewing distance. I'm going to move to a new place in a couple of months where the viewing distance will be even smaller at1' and it will look even bigger, in a good way.
The TV is immersive and the first TV I've seen that gives a proper HT vibe. Everything looks life-size or bigger and the TV takes over your field of vision like a projector screen would, assuming that your viewing distance is around 10 feet.
The TV is so immersive that 90% of the time we prefer watching on this than my A95K, despite the A95K being a better TV. As long as the quality is adequately good for you, I've been convinced that going for as big of a screen size as you can is an amazing decision
Local dimming
I've counted 36 horizontal and 36 vertical dimming zones, giving a total of 1296 zones. This gives an impressive dimming performance and is the first miniLED screen I've seen that gets very close to giving an almost-perfect dimming performance with virtually no blooming and almost-perfect blacks.
In terms of dimming performance, the 1296 dimming zones and the high-quality VA panel on this TV deliver performance comparable to the MacBook Pro miniLED screen that I have. I never thought a consumer TV would match the performance of the 2500 zone miniLED of Apple, but this TV surprisingly has.
You need to see it to believe it. In terms of dimming and black-level performance, this TV has far surpassed my expectations. I didn't expect it to be so good.
I'll give you an example. For most TVs with low dimming zones (50-100) you can't set local dimming to high when watching sports or content with lots of uniform colours as the dimming causes splotches on the screen causing haloing and smearing. This is true of my 56 zone U7980 and the 128 zone TCL C825. However, on this TV you can set local dimming to high on every piece of content because the number of dimming zones are so high and it won't even be visible, you'll just get pure high contrast.
Brightness
This TV is very bright. I belive the 85" is a brighter panel than the rest of the lineup as the panel seems to be shared with the U8K (same 1296 zones).
I took my pixel 6A's lux meter app and measured some brightness on panels:
MacBook pro 16" (supposed to be 1600 nits): 1690 lux on 10% window, 1400 lux on 25% window, 1100 lux on 100% window.
Odyssey neo G7 monitor (supposed to be 1300 nits): 1440 lux on 10% window, 1130 lux on 25% window, 390 lux on 100% window
85U7K: 1190 lux on 10% window, 1440 lux on 25% window, 650 lux on 100% window.
In real-world content, I found this display to be slightly brighter than my Odyssey Neo G7 and slightly dimmer than the Macbook Pro miniLED. Also for small specular highlights, the Macbook is significantly brighter but causes more blooming.
Comparing to the A95K is tough. This TV gets much brighter in high APL scenes where there's a lot of brightness over a wide area of the screen, however the A95K still hits much better when it's small specular highlights. Overall, I would take the A95K in a dark room for HDR impact but in a living room with more ambient light the miniLED will do better.
While it's not eye-searing bright as Samsung's neo QLEDs it's still plenty to give a good HDR impact, especially with how good the blacks and the local dimming are.
Picture quality and accuracy
Overall, I've been very happy with the PQ of this TV. It doesn't quite get on the same level as the A95K, but it's around 90% there. And it gets 99% there with the MacBook pro in most HDR scenes.
What's more impressive is that out of the box you don't have to do much to get colour accurate settings out of the TV. You just make minor adjustments to brightness, dimming and dark level performance and white to warm 1 and you'll be immaculate in terms of colour performance.
The display without any calibration matched my MBP 1:1 which is regarded as well calibrated. And I did the Apple TV calibration on it which found that my display was calibrated and it couldn't improve it further (attached picture here)
View attachment 80684
Conclusion
As someone who owns a master series QD-OLED as well as various other miniLED displays with 1000+ dimming zones, I'm still impressed by this TV. It's so good that for most of our viewing we prefer the U7K over the A95K because the size difference is bigger than the PQ difference.
At around 1.5 lakhs, it's a must buy and a great value for money in India. I highly highly recommend it.
Images for comparison
Since MBP is the only portable display I have of high quality, I put down a comparison with it to see how good it can get. Keep in mind the macbook is closer to me so might appear slightly brighter but if we put it away they'll look about the same.
This should also give an idea about how the TV performs. Attaching those pics in a subsequent comment.
