Recs.
Updated
The Samsung UN55MU8000 is a versatile 4K TV suitable for movies, gaming, and sports.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Suitable for watching sports
The Samsung MU8000 is a good option for sports fans because of the TV’s decent color uniformity, well-controlled motion blur, and adequate picture quality.
Good color uniformity is essential for a sports TV since it allows it to reproduce beautiful and even looking sports pitches and arenas. In this aspect, the MU8000 performs as well as its more expensive competitors, like the Sony X850E and Sony X900E.
Also, a good sports TV must have a responsive panel that can eliminate the motion blur effect. Fortunately, the Samsung MU8000’s panel has a full pixel response time of 13.8 ms, which means that each pixel of this TV can fully change its color in about a 70th of a second, preventing fast-moving objects from leaving trails.
Pro Good picture quality
The Samsung MU8000’s picture quality is on par with its direct competitors. The TV produces a clear and good-looking picture in both dark and bright environments.
The MU8000 does an excellent job of displaying rich dark scenes because of the TV’s fair uniformity of its blacks and high contrast ratio.
High SDR luminosity allows the Samsung MU8000 to deal with the glare even in relatively bright rooms. The peak brightness of this TV is 380 nits, which is a good result considering that the competitors are only a tiny bit more luminous.
Pro Remote has a voice command feature
The MU8000’s remote has a built-in microphone and a voice command feature that makes it straightforward to control the TV — it can perform many operations as you physically would with the remote, and it can even be used to adjust settings directly.
Pro Intuitive smart platform
The Samsung MU8000 runs the Tizen smart platform which is well known for its simplicity and intuitiveness. The whole menu of the Tizen OS is organized around the Smart Hub which acts as a gate for accessing all the functionality of the TV. Additionally, the Smart Hub has a row which contains the most-used items.
Pro Great black levels and uniformity
The black levels of a TV affects the viewer’s perception of other colors next to it. If the black levels are not deep enough and doesn’t remain uniform across the screen, the overall picture quality will look “flat” without much depth. The MU8000 handles this well with only <1.3% deviation (across the entire screen) from what a pure black screen should be — this results in a significant gain in its native contrast levels, thereby increasing the picture quality.
Pro Accessible inputs
The Samsung MU8000 comes with a mini One Connect box which is used to move all the TV’s inputs away from the rear of the TV so that you can easily access all of the essential inputs even if the TV is mounted on a wall. The One Connect box can also be used as a USB charging hub.
Cons
Con Local dimming is horrible
Local dimming is the TV's ability to dim areas of the screen for deeper black levels and better contrast — they are separated into different dimming zones, where each zone can be individually dimmed as needed. The local dimming on the MU8000 is bad and doesn't offer what it should; the contrast ratio with local dimming only increases by a miniscule amount and there is no discernable change in picture quality. It also can't be disabled.
Con Poor viewing angle
Just like many other VA TVs, the Samsung MU8000 does suffer from the substantial picture degradation due to viewing angle. The colors of this TV start to degrade once the viewing angle is greater than 19 degrees which makes this unsuitable for watching with a large group.