Samsung CU8000 (UE55CU8000)

Samsung gets some of its budget TV mojo back

55in 4K TV | £529 | whf.cm/SamsungCU8000

Given that the CU8000 series sits towards the bottom of a huge Samsung TV range, we should start off with a list of things the CU8000 doesn’t have. Namely Mini LED lighting, Quantum Dot colours, direct LED lighting with local dimming, or any sort of OLED action.

The 55in CU8000 is, though, built on a VA rather than IPS LCD panel, which experience suggests will help it produce relatively good contrast at the expense of potentially limited viewing angles. It lights its screen using LEDs mounted around its edges, rather than using LEDs placed directly behind the screen. Experience also shows that edge lighting can struggle to deliver as much contrast and light consistency as direct lighting, but Samsung has repeatedly got better results from edge lighting than arguably any other brand over the years.

There’s no attempt to apply a local dimming system to the edge lighting. There’s just whole frame dimming, where the edge LEDs are all dimmed or brightened together to optimise brightness to the changing demands of the images you’re watching. This is actually a sensible call by Samsung, given that combining local dimming with edge lighting typically creates distracting bands of backlight clouding.

The CU8000 does get Samsung’s PurColor engine and Crystal Color system, the latter of which serves up a wider colour gamut (Samsung claims more than a billion hues) than ‘basic’ LCD TVs. The Crystal Colour system, other picture processing attributes and OTS Lite sound system (which uses processing to try to place effects in the right place on the screen) are all controlled by a Crystal 4K Processor designed for the CU8000 range.