Samsung MU8000 55" (UN55MU8000) vs Samsung MU9000 65" (UN65MU9000)

The Samsung MU8000 is the best gaming TV in its range because of its low input lag and excellent motion-blur handling. The TV’s input lag of 24.2 ms makes it suitable for fast-paced gaming.

Out of the box, the color accuracy of the Samsung MU8000 is very high. It’s unlikely that you’ll need to spend substantial time calibrating this TV.

This 4K120 TV is an excellent companion to any current generation gaming console, such as the Xbox One X, PS4 Pro, and Wii U. Additionally, the HDR gaming support of the MU8000 will allow you to experience the immersive HDR effects in the latest console games.

The Samsung MU8000 can detect and eliminate the judder effect from 24p content even when the content is sourced from a 60 Hz device, like a cable or satellite box, or Apple TV.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The MU9000 can produce really detailed pictures, especially in dark scenes thanks to its really deep black levels. It has a contrast ratio of about 6000:1, which enables it to produce blacks that are 6000 times darker than the brightest white.

The colors are lifelike and accurate even without any calibration by the user. They will look really vibrant even in bright scenes because of the panel’s high peak brightness levels of ~400 nits for SDR & ~450 nits for HDR.

Even in a decently-lit environment, the MU9000's picture quality can still hold up - the panel is excellent at handling reflections thanks to its glossy finish, and it can get bright enough to fight off glare.

The MU9000's panel has a glossy finish that reduces reflections significantly. This makes it excellent at fighting glare, along with its adequate brightness levels of ~400 nits for SDR & ~450 nits for HDR.

The MU9000 is great at dealing with 24p content, such as Blu-rays or media sourced from a cable or satellite box. It can detect and eliminate the judder effect present in these content, where images displayed can appear jittery.

The MU9000 comes with a OneConnect box which moves all the hard-to-access rear inputs away from the TV. Thanks to this, you’ll always have full access to all inputs and outputs of the TV even if it’s wall-mounted. The OneConnect box can also be used as a USB charging hub.

The MU9000 runs on the Tizen smart platform, known for its simplicity and intuitiveness.

It’s easy to navigate and access all the functions of features of the TV - the whole menu of the Tizen OS is organized around a menu known as the “Smart Hub” which contains everything: apps, settings, input switching, etc.

It also has a section for quick access to frequently used items.

The MU9000 can upscale 480p, 720p, and 1080p content to 4K quite well. The upscaled content has almost no noticeable artifacts, and all the details are preserved.

The MU9000 is pretty versatile. On top of its great picture quality, it has features that make it perform quite well for gaming and sports.

It offers a responsive and fluid gaming experience - players will have no issues keeping their actions in sync with what’s on the display, and fast-moving objects won’t leave any trails on the screen. That is thanks to the low input lag of ~25ms and the panel’s quick response time of ~15ms, which results in virtually no motion blur.

It’s also great for watching sports because of the virtually non-existent motion blur that makes fast-moving objects, like football, look smooth. The panel is also pretty uniform - it has also had no issues with displaying large, same-color objects on the screen, like football fields.

The MU9000's remote has a voice command feature that can perform actions as you physically would with the remote, and it can even be used to adjust settings directly.

On top of its great picture quality, the MU9000 has a high HDR peak brightness level and wide color gamut that makes it good for HDR.

Shadows look pretty good with nice details, and highlights are quite vibrant thanks to the peak brightness level of ~450 nits.

The panel can reproduce the wide range of colors required for true HDR playback because of its wide color gamut, which covers ~60% of the standard colors required for HDR according to the Rec. 2020 color space. This is considered decent enough for reproducing HDR details, and it can display these colors accurately at different brightness levels.

It’s worth noting that while the MU9000 has local dimming that’s supposed to make HDR better, the local dimming is crap and doesn’t do much - it increases the contrast ratio by a meager amount and does nothing else.