My Samsung Horror Story

[JonJon1239]

Right, I've had a pretty torrid experience with Samsung the past 7 months and I want to tell you all what happened and see if any of you have been through anything similar and how you resolved the issue.

It all started in November, I purchased a pretty 50 inch Phillips Ambilight that had terrible banding issues to the point that 4K, HD and SD were unwatchable. I decided to return it to the retailer and bought a 55mu7000 with at first I was overjoyed with. After a few days of usage a friend came round and noticed clumps of dead pixels to the corners of the TV, I had a repairman from Samsung come out who replaced the screen which had even more dead pixels and they didn't even bother to contact me back after promising me they would.

Here's where a little silver lining happened. Samsung phoned me after I chased them around ten days later, offering me a 55Q8FAM which I was pleasantly surprised about. I unboxed it, set it up and could not beleive how lucky I was to get this expensive model. After a week however, I was watching the champions league when the dreaded vertical lines started appearing. Samsung proceeded to remote into my television and advised me that everything was fine with the unit, I took their word for it as I thought I may be over careful due to the issues I had before.

Three months later the lines got worse, forcing me to contact Samsung support again, to be told there was no issue and they couldn't just replace it as it was past the 28 day period. After a lot of back and forth with their customer relations team I managed to get them to agree to a replacement. Brilliant, I thought. Oh how I was wrong.

Please see the attached image to see just how bad my current unit is. Would any of you put up with the state of that and is it as bad as I feel it is? I'm currently in touch with the President however I feel I'm being brushed aside, rather than offer me a replacement as a good will gesture they are offering me a refund of the original price I paid for the MU7000. Any and all advise would be appreciated in solving this matter.

https://imgur.com/a/lEK8Wcf

*This is the iPlayer loading screen, so pretty unavoidable when watching 4k football

[Phil12]

Hi

TVs have various issues related to how they are designed or hacked to work with the latest trends or technologies.

LCD TVs need to be slim to compete with OLEDs that can be slimmer as they have no backlight, and we as consumers want thing TVs, plus need to have high contrast ranges and support really bright images for HDR.

To get the contrast on LCDs these days, they split the backlight up into sections, so each section can have a different power of brightness.  For Samsung TVs these tend to be vertical bands.  Straight away this is going to mean you will see some vertical banding on certain types of image, most typically on skies or football pitches.  Basically anything that has a uniform colour where the camera pans allows our eyes and brain to see it.  In addition, making all the filters and dies etc completely uniform across the large surface area of larger TVs we buy now is hard, so you can get some other smudges or variations in brightness across different parts of the screen and this gives rise to somethong often refered to as the dirty screen effect.  Again this is most noticable on panning pictures across areas of solid colour as you've used to photograph.

Now depending on how good the panel is or the how good that batch was, the effects may be more or less obvious in comparison to another one.  Also depending on how you have your brightness and other settings adjusted, can make the issue more or less obvious.  Usually the out of box default settings are the worst as they are set at the "buy me" settings.  Usually the "Movie" or "Professional" picture modes gets you to something more akin to a correctly adjusted TV.

The other issue is more physcological, as looking for the issue and once seen makes it stand out and much more obviously and you can't unsee it.  I've seen TVs with very obvious banding issues and friends can't see it, but once it's pointed out they see it all the time.  

Now due to how the back light works on TVs where you have any form of "local dimming" which is all HDR LCD TVs, as they can't be HDR otherwise, then this type of banding or patterning is going to be there to some degree if you look for it hard enough.

Samsung TVs tend to have lots of other nigglying issues as well, usually to do with software, so this might not be your only problem, and their support isn't good.

My suggestion if you haven't already is switch to the Natural or Movie picture mode, this is setup to be much more natural and closer to reality and issues with banding are less noticable.  Always expect to see some banding etc on screens of uniform colour and just live with it if you can.  You will likely always see banding on football matches, it's not an uncommon complaint, again it is a case of living with or trying a different technology.

OLED TVs do not use back lights, so don't have this type of banding, however again making the TV perform uniformily across such a large area also gives rise to complaints about the dirty screen effect, and they don't wear as well, meaning as time goes on the effect can become worse.

Some people go through several TVs before they find one with a panel they find the least problematic.

Regards

Phil

[JonJon1239]

---

@Phil12 wrote:

Hi

TVs have various issues related to how they are designed or hacked to work with the latest trends or technologies.

LCD TVs need to be slim to compete with OLEDs that can be slimmer as they have no backlight, and we as consumers want thing TVs, plus need to have high contrast ranges and support really bright images for HDR.

To get the contrast on LCDs these days, they split the backlight up into sections, so each section can have a different power of brightness.  For Samsung TVs these tend to be vertical bands.  Straight away this is going to mean you will see some vertical banding on certain types of image, most typically on skies or football pitches.  Basically anything that has a uniform colour where the camera pans allows our eyes and brain to see it.  In addition, making all the filters and dies etc completely uniform across the large surface area of larger TVs we buy now is hard, so you can get some other smudges or variations in brightness across different parts of the screen and this gives rise to somethong often refered to as the dirty screen effect.  Again this is most noticable on panning pictures across areas of solid colour as you've used to photograph.

Now depending on how good the panel is or the how good that batch was, the effects may be more or less obvious in comparison to another one.  Also depending on how you have your brightness and other settings adjusted, can make the issue more or less obvious.  Usually the out of box default settings are the worst as they are set at the "buy me" settings.  Usually the "Movie" or "Professional" picture modes gets you to something more akin to a correctly adjusted TV.

The other issue is more physcological, as looking for the issue and once seen makes it stand out and much more obviously and you can't unsee it.  I've seen TVs with very obvious banding issues and friends can't see it, but once it's pointed out they see it all the time.  

Now due to how the back light works on TVs where you have any form of "local dimming" which is all HDR LCD TVs, as they can't be HDR otherwise, then this type of banding or patterning is going to be there to some degree if you look for it hard enough.

Samsung TVs tend to have lots of other nigglying issues as well, usually to do with software, so this might not be your only problem, and their support isn't good.

My suggestion if you haven't already is switch to the Natural or Movie picture mode, this is setup to be much more natural and closer to reality and issues with banding are less noticable.  Always expect to see some banding etc on screens of uniform colour and just live with it if you can.  You will likely always see banding on football matches, it's not an uncommon complaint, again it is a case of living with or trying a different technology.

OLED TVs do not use back lights, so don't have this type of banding, however again making the TV perform uniformily across such a large area also gives rise to complaints about the dirty screen effect, and they don't wear as well, meaning as time goes on the effect can become worse.

Some people go through several TVs before they find one with a panel they find the least problematic.

Regards

Phil

---

Thanks for the response. I've been using movie mode with the backlight of 14 for normal content, and the same mode with the backlight of 20 for HDR. 

What annoys me the most is that this particular unit is only two weeks old! I know they did me a huge favour by upgrading me to a QLED when my MU7000 broke, but now feel like anything bar an OLED is going to be a dissapointment to me now. 

Would you say the attached image is particularly bad for a two week old TV?

[Phil12]

Hi

It's really hard to say from the photo how bad it might be in reality, but it doesn't look good from that picture.  

Brightness level 14 is quite high in a dark room, we have ours on more like 6 in the evening with the lights dimmed. 

Regards

Phil