TV Samsung UE48JU7000T review

The two 2015-generation Samsung TVs we've seen prior to today have both blown us away with their amazing high dynamic range-powered picture quality.
Unfortunately, though, their unprecedented talents have come with eye-watering price tags attached. Which is why many of you – and your bank managers – will be very pleased about the arrival of the Samsung UE48JU7000T.

For while this 48-inch TV might not have quite all the bangs and whistles of Samsung's £6,000 UE65JS9500 and £4,000 UE65JS9000 sets, it does still offer a very impressive feature list, built around a native UHD 4K resolution, for the considerably less painful price of £1,400.

Resolution revolution

That native UHD resolution finds it sporting 3840x2160 pixels rather than the 1920x1080 of full-HD TVs, delivering four times as much resolution. Some will question the usefulness of so many pixels on a screen that's only 48 inches across, arguing that you can't appreciate all those pixels on a relatively small screen.
I've seen enough evidence from my TV tests, though, to refute this. For while it is true that bigger screens make the UHD difference more obvious, it's still apparent at the 48-inch size, especially in the picture's enhanced depth and colour definition.
Backing up the UE48JU7000T's UHD resolution is Samsung's PurColor technology, which uses powerful processing to produce a wider range of colours than typical LCD TVs.
To be clear on this point, the UE48JU7000T does not use any 'physical' colour enhancement technologies, such as the Nano Crystal system sported by Samsung's JS9500 and JS9000 TVs. So you won't get the HDR-driven colour spectacle that works so gorgeously on those higher-end TVs.
But them's the breaks when you're spending so much less money on your TV, I guess.

Backlight chat

Also catching my eye is the UE48JU7000T's backlighting system. For rather than the edge LED lighting engine I would have expected on a £1,400 UHD TV, it sports direct backlighting, where the LEDs are positioned directly behind the screen.
This makes it easier for screens to control their lighting to boost contrast – especially when, as in the UE48JU7000T's case, the LEDs benefit from local dimming, where different areas of the LEDs can be controlled separately.

In other words, the UE48JU7000T should be able to deliver deeper black levels in dark areas without having to compromise the brightness of the light areas – something edge LED systems find notoriously hard to do. Even if they use local dimming.
The PurColor, local dimming and 4K upscaling processing the UE48JU7000T provides are all driven by a quad-core chipset, which additionally handles the new Tizen-powered smart TV system Samsung has introduced to its TVs this year.

Introducing Tizen

This smart system feels like a work in progress in some areas – for instance, it's still waiting for Samsung's Recommendations engine to be added, and can occasionally respond sluggishly to your commands.
Nonetheless, overall it's a big step in the right direction for Samsung, replacing the rather cumbersome full-screen, confusingly organised menus of 2014 with overlaid menus that focus much more tightly on highlighting the content you most want to watch – such as the most recent AV inputs or TV channels.

BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4OD, Demand 5, Netflix and Amazon Instant are all onboard – and the latter two support UHD streaming, so long as you've got the necessary 15Mbps or so minimum broadband speed.
As I'd expect of any relatively high-end Samsung TV, the UE48JU7000T carries 3D support. This is, as always with Samsung, of the Active variety, which in this instance requires the TV to upscale 3D Blu-rays to UHD to deliver a full-resolution image to each eye.

Enter the third dimension

I couldn't help but be struck by how the UE48JU7000T doesn't ship with any 3D glasses included as standard. Samsung has previously been one of the most generous manufacturers when it comes to including 3D glasses, so you have to wonder about the format's future if even Samsung is no longer enabling 3D viewing right out of the box on one of its poshest TVs.
I've so far cunningly managed to avoid mentioning the UE48JU7000T's design; so let's put that right now, starting with the fact that it's flat, ditching the curved screen employed on the JS9500 and JS9000 series.
Whether this is good or bad news is a matter of personal taste – though if you're not sure of the pros and cons you can check out our in-depth reviews of the two top Samsung screens.

The frame around the screen features the same angular, chamfered look as the Samsung JS9500 range, though since this is clad in dark grey rather than bright silver in the UE48JU7000T's case, the appeal of that chamfering is somewhat reduced.

Striking stand

The biggest aesthetic impact in the UE48JU7000T's design comes from its stand, which protrudes forward from the screen and features a raised silver front adorned with the letters 'UHD'.

Cable haters might like the UE48JU7000T's use of an external Mini One Connect box, too, which houses all the HDMIs so that you have only to connect your sources to the TV via a single connection. Though unlike the full-sized One Connects you get with the S9500 and JS9000 Samsung TVs, the Mini One Connect doesn't house the tuner ports or TV processing brains, both of which are found instead on the main TV chassis.
This means that you can't simply upgrade your UE48JU7000T by adding a future new One Connect box, as you can with the higher-end Samsung models.

Even without the high brightness, wide colour gamut panels used in Samsung's JS9500 and JS9000 HDR TVs, I was fully prepared to love the picture quality of the UE48JU7000T - especially given the much more digestible price you're getting it for.
But, to my surprise, first impressions of this Samsung TV's pictures were hugely disappointing.
The reason for this is the extent to which its key UHD resolution is damaged by unexpected motion blur. Whenever there was any substantial motion in the frame I couldn't help but notice the moving parts of the picture lost considerable amounts of resolution. And even at times left a trail behind as the screen apparently failed to refresh itself fast enough to keep up with the changes in the image content.
This sort of thing used to be a common problem caused by sluggish LCD panel response times, but it's not something I see to this degree much these days, especially on relatively high end TVs. It's also not a problem I associate at all with high-end Samsung TVs.
Very weird.
Thinking it could be a problem related to the TV's motion or noise reduction processing, I turned both these systems off completely. But it didn't make any difference. Then I tried turning off the dynamic contrast and local dimming features on the off chance they were to blame. No change.
Then I tried cranking the motion processing up to its highest setting, but still the motion blur and smearing remained. Same deal if I changed the sharpness and contrast settings.
Next I tried the TV's other picture presets, but again nothing got rid of the problem.
At this point it was tempting to throw in the towel and admit defeat - especially as the amount of legwork I'd already put in would go far beyond what a normal consumer would invest in a new UE48JU7000T. Then I remembered that Samsung had told me a few times its Movie picture preset (the TV defaults to a Standard setting, and it was this I'd been unsuccessfully making adjustments to) automatically turned off a lot of the TV's processing systems.
So I selected the Movie preset again and started working through its associated settings. Nothing much changed until I got to the noise reduction processing options. Turning those off instantly removed almost all traces of the motion - and in doing so, for sundry reasons we'll get to later, turned the UE48JU7000T's pictures from zero to hero.

This is where things get really strange, though.
For even if I copied every single picture setting precisely from the Movie mode to the other picture presets the blurring and motion lag remained painfully obvious. Meaning the only conclusion I could reach was all the picture presets bar the Movie one leave some residual processing in play that you can't turn off and which pretty much destroys picture quality.
Making this situation even more annoying is the fact just choosing the Movie preset and turning off the noise reduction options probably won't be enough to deliver a picture which will satisfy many users.
Even really serious video aficionados focussed on the Rec 709 picture standard (which the Movie mode is designed to deliver) will likely have a problem with, at least, the lack of contrast and the uneven backlighting the Movie mode produces if you only adjust its noise reduction settings.
So many people will have to spend quite some time reworking the Movie preset they're effectively forced to use by the motion problems; doing things like turning on the dynamic contrast feature, activating the local dimming feature for the direct LED lighting system, tweaking the motion processing setting and adjusting the UHD colour setting.
By which point you're probably getting pretty desperate for good news - and wondering why the score attached to this review reads 4.5.
So here you go: once you've finally worked around the motion blur and Movie preset problems, the UE48JU7000T's pictures are actually pretty brilliant.
For starters, once the motion mess has been dealt with the clarity of native UHD pictures is actually gorgeous. There is still a touch of resolution loss over motion versus Samsung's SUHD flagship models, but pictures now always look emphatically UHD in nature.
It does the impression of '4Kness' no harm, either, that Samsung's PurColor is on hand to join forces with all those extra pixels to produce images of spectacular subtlety and finesse.

Stunning contrast

The UE48JU7000T's direct LED lighting system, meanwhile, delivers brilliant contrast performance that combines really outstandingly deep blacks with bold, aggressive colours and strikingly crisp, pure whites - all within the same frame.
No edge-lit LCD TV could deliver nearly the same level of black level purity.
I was pleased to note, too, this dynamism is delivered without causing over-obvious light 'blooms' around the brightest objects, especially if you resist the temptation to push the backlight too high.
It has to be stressed that neither the stretch of the UE48JU7000T's contrast, its brightness, nor the vibrancy of its colours is a rival for the spectacle delivered by Samsung's imperious JS9500 and JS900 TVs. But the UE48JU7000T's pictures are more than competitive with the pictures usually witnessed on sub-£1500 UHD TVs.
The UE48JU7000T's colours look natural as well as punchy, despite not reaching HDR levels of aggression, and the stability of the UE48JU7000T's backlighting when using the provided dynamic contrast system is also very impressive.
With native UHD content still far less plentiful than we'd like it to be, it's a relief to discover that Samsung's UHD upscaling system proves to be superb at adding detail and colour resolution without exaggerating source noise.

Other small issues

There do remain a couple of other minor issues with the UE48JU7000T though, even after you've sorted the initial motion problems out. First, I found its screen quite reflective of any light sources or bright objects in the room. Also, while light blooming from the local dimming system isn't an issue when watching the TV from directly in front, it can creep into the picture if you're watching from an angle of more than 35 degrees or so.
While the lack of any free 3D glasses with the UE48JU7000T might mean many households never get to experience its 3D skills, those skills are actually prodigious. The sense of space from 3D Blu-rays is superb, aided by the screen's excellent contrast and colour handling. While pictures aren't totally free of the crosstalk ghosting noise associated with the active 3D system it occurs rarely and subtly enough to seldom prove distracting.
The UHD detailing of the UE48JU7000T's 3D images helps make 3D worlds feel more tangible too, and strangely I didn't feel as troubled by the TV's motion issues in 3D mode as I was with 2D. The only significant 3D problem really is that 48 inches isn't big enough for a truly immersive 3D experience.
One last impressive aspect of the UE48JU7000T's picture performance is its input lag - or rather, lack of input lag.
My measurements recorded a range of figures between 10 and 30ms, averaging out at around 20ms. This is an excellent effort for any TV, but especially a UHD one that's having to upscale 1080p gaming sources to its 4K pixel count.

Samsung has pretty much gone back to the drawing board for its 2015 TV operating system – and the results are broadly welcome.

Its Tizen interface is superimposed over your TV pictures for the most part rather than replacing it, as happened last year, which makes it feel much more modern and less unhelpfully obtrusive. It also sensibly puts a much greater focus on showing links to recently used content sources rather than trying to force content on you, as Samsung's previous system sometimes felt it was doing.
The smart remote control Samsung provides as an alternative to the drab 'basic' remote control is the result of apparently hundreds of hours of consumer research, and it is indeed far more intuitive than last year's version.
The old touchpad navigation system has gone, and although you do still get both normal button navigation controls and a point-and-click-style system, these has been given greater separation, so there's far less chance of accidentally mixing up the two systems and making incorrect selections.
Samsung has arguably reduced the button count on the smart remote control a little too much; direct access to things such as the electronic programme guide and basic picture control settings might have been useful.
But Samsung assures us the buttons included are the ones that its research showed were most used, so maybe this is one area where my usage as a TV reviewer differs slightly from normal consumer use.

Sound

The 20W speaker system inside the UE48JU7000T is a decent effort by flat TV standards. It's particularly effective at reproducing subtle details in the mix, helping it create a strong sense of audio space and ensuring good-quality movie mixes sound lively and dense.
The speakers also keep a tight grip on vocals, ensuring that voices always sound clear and distinct from the rest of the sound mix without, at the same time, becoming dislocated from the action or sounding artificial.
The downside is that the UE48JU7000T doesn't have enough bass to deliver the sort of audio gymnastics produced by the best TV sound systems in Sony and LG's arsenals, leaving dense action scenes sometimes feeling a touch harsh and compressed.

Value

Hopes that the UE48JU7000T would represent a value sweet spot in Samsung's 2015 UHD TV range initially seemed to be roundly dashed by its out-of-the-box motion problems.
However, while having to work round such a severe issue is hardly ideal, especially given how few people actually ever take the time to adjust their picture settings, the fact remains that it is possible to get superb pictures out of Samsung's UHD mid-ranger.
And in the end it seems only fair to judge the TV based on that.