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What is the Samsung UE48HU7500?

The UE48HU7500 is both the smallest (48-inches) and cheapest (£1,500) UHD TV we’ve tested to date. Which raises interesting questions about whether UHD/4K really has anything to offer once you get below 55-inch screen sizes, and whether it’s worth still thinking about a premium HD TV when UHD is now so affordable. 

Samsung UE48HU7500: Design and Features

The UE48HU7500 is slightly hit and miss from a design perspective. The heavy-duty ‘wing’ metal stand is very appealing, and the bezel is fashionably slim. But despite the HU7500 resting towards the top of Samsung’s 2014 range the main chassis is a little flimsily built versus the current high-end offerings from some rival brands – notably Philips and Panasonic.

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Connections are plentiful. Highlights comprise four HDMIs; three USBs for both multimedia playback and recording to USB HDD from the built-in Freeview HD and Freesat HD tuners; and built in LAN/Wi-Fi network options. These connections are all built directly into the TV, rather than being found on an external (swappable in the future) connections box like they are on Samsung’s HU8500 series.

The HDMIs are, significantly, built to the 2.0 spec level, meaning they can handle UHD at 50/60Hz without compromising colour fidelity as much as they did last year. As for the network options, these inevitably include multimedia streaming from networked DLNA-enabled devices, a decent degree of file and second-screen viewing functionality with Samsung’s latest (and much improved) Smartphone/tablet TV companion app, and of course access to Samsung’s latest Smart TV platform.

It’s important to stress after failures in both areas by some other brands that the UE48HU7500 supports Netflix 4K streaming through its integrated HEVC decoder, as well as the new HDCP 2.2 anti-piracy protocols.

Samsung’s 2014 smart platform has been covered in depth in our Samsung Smart TV 2014 review, so there’s no point wasting words on it again here. Very quickly, though, it impresses greatly with its presentation and content – especially its provision of apps for all the key UK catch-up and on-demand streaming services - while also offering one of the most effective programme recommendation engines on a Smart TV to date. But its interface feels a bit clunky and impenetrable at times, and is also too ambitious with its attempts to integrate voice and gesture controls. 

The 48HU7500’s star picture attraction is, of course, its native 3840x2160 UHD resolution – a resolution that should lead to images looking even more free of pixellation than they do on larger UHD screens, given that all these pixels have been crammed into a smaller area.

Samsung backs up its UHD picture headliner with a high-powered version of its Micro Dimming technology, which breaks the picture up into thousands of small ‘blocks’ for more accurate processing when deciding how best to treat each frame of an incoming image. There’s also a 1000Hz-like motion engine, created through a combination of backlight scanning, a native 200Hz panel and optional frame interpolation processing.

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The 48HU7500’s menus are packed with processing tools too, including edge enhancement, sharpness enhancement, noise reduction, colour boosting and contrast enhancement options. And the whole processing kit and caboodle is driven by a powerful Quad Core engine that should reduce picture processing artefacts as well as keeping the smart menus zipping along.

One last key feature of the UE48HU7500 is its 3D playback. This is of the active type always used by Samsung, and is available right out of the box thanks to two pairs of 3D glasses being included for free.

Samsung’s HU8500 range-topping new 4K models use Quad Core Plus processing, even more finely tuned micro dimming, and impressive PurColour technology to deliver a noticeably wider, richer colour palette. Oh, and they’ve got curved screens too! But while all of these things with the possible exception of the curve are significant reasons to try and step up to the HU8500 series, the UE48HU7500 is still a very well specified set for £1500.

Samsung UE48HU7500: Set Up

While Samsung is slowly improving some aspects of its TV presets, we still think there should be more of them, and have issues with the four you do get. Most notably they all leave their backlight and contrast settings too high, leading to so-so black levels (including some backlight clouding issues) and excessive noise. 



To be fair we guess the Standard preset works decently enough in a bright room with normal TV footage, but if you’re watching something with a wider contrast range and lots of dark scenes - like a typical film - in a darkened room you should drop the backlight to as low as its 8 setting and contrast to around 82-83.

Also best switched off with HD sources are the noise reduction and edge enhancement processing. Regarding motion this set enjoys the best balance between dodging judder/blur and not causing too many distracting processing artefacts if you use either the Clear setting or a custom setting with the judder and blur components both set to around three.

We sometimes also felt the need to nudge down the UE48HU7500’s sharpness a bit, to stop pictures looking a touch noisy or stressy around the edges of objects. But the crucial thing to finish on is that while a little set-up work is required, the results make your efforts more than worthwhile.

Let’s cut right to the chase here and find out if the UE48HU7500 can still deliver UHD’s advantages on a 48-inch screen. And the simple answer is that it can – though it’s not completely immune to the laws of diminishing returns.

First, our collection of native UHD content – including footage from the recent World Cup and Netflix 4K streams – indisputably looks sharper, cleaner and more detailed than the same content looks in HD either upscaled on the UE48HU7500 or shown on a top-quality full HD TV. 

It’s great to see, too, that thanks to the speed and power of Samsung’s picture processing engine this sharpness remains impressively intact when there’s motion in the frame – especially if you’re watching native UHD at 60fps as we could with some World Cup footage we’ve got our hands on.

The native UHD advantage is clearly apparent on the UE48HU7500 without you having to stick your face right up against the screen too. However, the extra clarity and detailing isn’t as aggressively obvious as it is on larger UHD/4K screens, so we guess there’s a little comfort there for the UHD-on-smaller-screens naysayers. But to say there’s no visual benefit to going UHD on a 48-inch screen is just plain wrong.

The general impression of extra clarity isn’t just down to the extra detailing you get from having four times as many pixels to play with. As we’ve noted before, UHD screens also make an impact with the depth and colour resolution of their pictures. Large-scale shots are resolved further into the distance before a lack of clarity causes the image to flatten off. You can even appreciate this extra sense of scale with the relatively confined environment of the World Cup stadia.

As for colours, colour blends are delivered with such infinite finesse that you can never see the ‘joins’ (AKA stripes or bands). As well as making pictures look more natural, this helps objects look more three dimensional against their backdrops.

We wouldn’t say all of these individual advantages each leap out at you and slap you in the face on a 48-inch screen like they do on significantly bigger TVs. But it’s still easy enough to identify them when you really try to focus on what elements are delivering the overall extra clarity you’re seeing.

The 48HU7500 doesn’t quite rival Samsung’s HU8500 series where native UHD playback is concerned, chiefly because its lack of Samsung’s PurColour technology prevents it from delineating quite as much colour resolution. But you’re never in doubt that you’re watching images that are native UHD, not HD.

Talking of HD, the fact that normal consumers are still limited for native 4K content to House of Cards and Breaking Bad on Netflix (if you have a broadband connection of at least 15Mbps) and a few demo clips you can download from the internet means that for much of the time anyone who buys a UE48HU7500 now will be heavily dependent on its UHD upscaling of HD and maybe even – shudder – standard definition sources. 

Just as well then that this upscaling is very effective for the most part, adding genuine detail and pixel depth to images rather than just sharpening the hell out of everything, and retaining colour tone accuracy exceptionally well. Also seriously impressive is how clever the UE48HU7500’s upscaling is at handling source noise. Not only is source noise not exaggerated by the HD to UHD conversion process, it actually seems to be reduced. In fact, the UE48HU7500 makes HD sources look more refined than Samsung’s highest-level full HD sets.

There’s a slightly softer look to upscaled content than you get with Sony X9005B series and Samsung’s own HU8500 series, again chiefly, we suspect, because the HU7500 doesn’t offer the same degree of colour resolution/refinement. But nonetheless the UE48HU7500’s upscaled HD results can still be considered excellent.

Upscaling standard definition predictably proves more of a stretch for the TV, with a much softer level of presentation in evidence. It’s not unwatchable by any means, but hopefully anyone AV savvy enough to buy a UHD TV will already be living on a fairly HD-rich content diet. 

Having focussed predominantly on picture traits associated with the UE48HU7500’s UHD resolution, let’s quickly look at one other key picture facet: contrast. After recently seeing a welter of LCDs with pretty uninspiring black level responses it’s hugely satisfying to see the UE48HU7500 producing rich, deep, naturally toned black colours without having to manipulate its backlight so severely that shadow detailing is crushed out.

Dark scenes of the sort rife in films are thus immediately much more natural looking and immersive than they are on an alarmingly large number of rival screens this year. Especially as the strong black level performance leads to more natural colour response during dark scenes, and a much more consistent look to images as they skip between bright and dark scenes.

Provided you’ve followed our advice and reduced the backlight to its 8 or even 7 level when watching a film or TV drama with dark content the UE48HU7500 also impresses with its freedom from backlight clouding, even in the screen’s corners.

The UE48HU7500 does lose a little contrast – or rather the contrast becomes less consistent across the screen – if you watch from an angle of more than around 35-40 degrees of axis. Though this problem is not as severe as it used to be with Samsung LCD panels, and so doesn’t really persuade us to prefer one of the wider-angle IPS-style panels out there given how compromised the contrast of such panels tends to be.

Overall, while there are some minor niggles we’ve already discussed, so long as you tweak down the UE48HU7500’s backlight setting for serious film viewing its picture quality is pretty stellar – with both HD and UHD content.
 

Samsung UE48HU7500: 3D Picture Quality

The UE48HU7500’s success story continues for the most part in the 3D realm. The use of active 3D technology results in 3D images packed with spectacular amounts of detail and pixel density, avoiding the 3D resolution compromise often felt with rival passive screens. This helps the 3D world look more tangible and immersive - which is, of course, pretty much the whole point of 3D.



Colours are rich and intense too, and brightness levels are excellent, with the dimming effect of the shuttering active 3D glasses having less of an impact than usual.

Motion is handled fairly well too compared with some previous Samsung 3D generations, with less judder and more potential for using higher levels of Samsung’s motion processing system if you DO feel troubled by judder. This is thanks to the improved power of Samsung’s latest processing engine.

Also extremely well suppressed is active 3D’s crosstalk ghosting issue. We’re not saying there’s no crosstalk at all; you can definitely see tell-tale double ghosting from time to time around very bright objects, usually in the extreme foreground or background. But this shows up sufficiently rarely and is sufficiently subtle even when you do see it not to class as a big problem – especially given how well the screen delivers the benefits of the active system.

Samsung UE48HU7500: Sound Quality

Considering its slimness and uninspiring build quality, the UE48HU7500 doesn’t sound bad at all. The mid-range is powerful and open, and you can reach very respectable volumes before the speakers or the cabinet start to sound strained. 

Voices are always given due prominence, even during action scenes, and the soundstage spreads a decent distance beyond the confines of the TV’s bodywork without losing cohesion.

It must be stressed that we’re not talking about an audio performance in the same ballpark as that produced by the large, forward facing, magnetic fluid-using speakers in Sony’s X9005B 4K TVs this year. 

But it’s a good step forward for Samsung, and could be good enough to at least delay your purchase of an accompanying soundbar or surround sound system.

Other Things to Consider

The UE48HU7500 ships with two remote controls: a small, rather cheap-looking ‘normal’ one, and a much funkier ‘smart’ one boasting ‘point and click’ functionality, a touchpad, a neat ergonomic shape and a much-reduced button count. 

This smart remote takes a bit of getting used to at first thanks to the amount of functionality and control options crammed into a very small area at the remote’s centre. The point and click system is a bit odd too, since the cursor always appears at the last point on the screen you were using it, rather than in the exact spot you’re pointing the remote, leading to a bit of a disconnect at times between what the cursor is doing and what you’re doing waving the remote about. 

However, we recommend you stick with it, as it’s ultimately the quickest and most rewarding way of delving into the TV’s smart features.

We also suggest you take the time to familiarise yourself with the voice control options the TV carries, though we’d only expect you to use them sparingly, as a supplemental control useful in certain situations, rather than as your main interface.

The UE48HU7500 clearly has spectacular appeal as a gaming monitor. So it was disappointing to find it joining a number of other current UHD/4K screens in suffering slightly high input lag – around 70ms according to our tests. That’s more than double what we’d like to see, and could have some impact on your performance when playing reaction-based games.

Should I buy a Samsung UE48HU7500?

It’s a really serious temptation. As well as making UHD/4K available at a new lower price point than ever before, it backs its value appeal up with an outstanding picture performance and content-rich smart system. 

Yes, the impact of UHD/4K is a little reduced on the UE48HU7500’s relatively small screen, but you can still appreciate a clear improvement over HD. 

You can, of course, get some seriously talented and larger full HD TVs for way less than £1500 – the 50-inch £800 Sony 50W829 and £1000 55-inch Philips 55PFS6609 spring to mind. But UHD is UHD, right?! Um, except for when it’s 4K…

Verdict

It turns out you really can still appreciate UHD’s charms on a 48-inch screen. At least when they're underpinned by the sort of outstanding picture quality foundations offered by the UE48HU7500.

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