Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Overall this is a very nice TV, but my personal experience fell flat. I wouldn't treat my experience as gospel and expect the same complaints from everyone, but here's my assessment of the TV I received: PROS: * Holy cow are the picture quality and colors amazing, especially when viewing some high-bitrate HDR content like from a UHD Blu-ray. Insanely bright, colors pop, and tons of available picture settings for any possible personal preferences. * Uniformity is excellent on the panel, I had virtually zero dirty screen effect. * 120Hz panel is a welcome feature, sources such as PCs pushing 120Hz are buttery smooth. (1080p at 120Hz was fine, had issues with 1440p at 120Hz per below con) * FreeSync/VRR support! Big plus for gamers with AMD cards or an Xbox One. * The user interface and built-in smart apps are surprisingly snappy, responsive, and functional. YouTube app supports Google Cast once opened. So I never really felt the need to supplement this TV with a Chromecast. (Unless I wanted to cast from other sources eventually, but I only cared about YouTube for casting capabilities) * Relatively light compared to some other 55" TVs I've lugged around for friends. CONS: * The build quality leaves a little to be desired. It seems sturdy enough, but the entire back is a smooth, semi-glossy, thin plastic with some hollowness behind it. The centered bottom TV stand makes the weight of the TV shift forward a lot, and the chassis can occasionally wobble and creak more than I'd hope for it do to when I'm fiddling with cables. The TV is shipped in a box that doesn't have foam all the way around the set, so shipping damage may also be more likely. (I had a small dent on the back of the chassis due to a slight hole punched into the box.) * All the above praise on image quality disappears once you get at any angle. Colors get washed out at the narrowest of viewing angles, and I get the rainbow effect & drastically varying colors across the panel. I may just be spoiled from my previous TV with an IPS panel (LG 49UB8200), but I feel like a $700 4K TV from 2015 should not absolutely stomp the panel in a $900 4K TV from 2018. So guess the con here is that a $900 TV should maybe have an IPS panel, or at least have a premium VA panel that is good enough to at least not be this awful at an angle. I have cheapo monitors with VA panels with better viewing angles for crying out loud! * Supposedly this set supports 1440p at 120Hz per RTings, but I couldn't get my set to do it whatsoever. I was using a GTX 1070 and a High Speed rated cable, so output/cabling should not have been an issue. (It ran 2160p at 60Hz fine, and that's more data throughput than 1440p at 120Hz) No combination of HDMI UHD deep color or Game Mode being disabled/enabled gave any different results. Custom resolution of 1440p at 120Hz resulted in dropped input because it couldn't display it. I manually upgraded to a later firmware available on Samsung's site from mid-July 2018, but no help there. Samsung support could fine no fault either. * For an entire 10 minute span every single time the TV turns on, I hear a loud, annoying ticking emanating from the area below all the inputs. The ticks happens exactly 20 seconds apart, then 19 seconds apart, then 18 seconds apart, continuing in this pattern until they get down to 5 seconds apart. The ticking then stops. Given the pattern and consistency, I can pretty confidently say that this wasn't a "creaking chassis from heat" type of thing. I'm sure this is some component initializing (not sure what exactly though), but this was extremely annoying to hear on every startup of the TV. * Using HDMI ARC resulted in constant dropouts. This was reproducible on 2 different speaker sets, 2 different HDMI cables, and any combination of audio settings. (PCM/bitstream, and the various Dolby output formats) Samsung support again was unable to resolve. * HDMI ARC being buggy wasn't a problem because I could resort to optical output to my soundbar. (Polk MagniFi Mini) However, the soundbar's infrared remote learning feature couldn't receive the commands correctly from this TV's remote. Every other infrared based remote I have has never had an issue with the speaker's remote learning feature, so I can only conclude that something about the remote is... different. The remote is for sure using infrared because I can see its light flashing if I watch it through a phone camera, yet it seems to still be "speaking a language" the speaker doesn't understand. So without this, I lose the ability to change volume with the Samsung remote and would have had to keep the original Polk remote laying around for volume. No bueno. * The TV guide interface on the TV is *horrendous*. I have my cable coming straight into the tuner on the TV and let the TV auto-program my channels. No HD this way, but I don't really care enough to rent a cable box. Anyway.... When pulling up the guide, the current channel will sort stop playing and the window preview of the channel gets a "loading" icon. All of the channels in the guide take literally 5 seconds to start populating. If I browse downward 10 channels, the app hangs, the channel preview cycles again, and then it's back to working after 10 seconds. This repeats with every single set of 10 channels that I scroll past. As with other issues, upgrading to the latest firmware did not help. Another auto-program did not help. Resetting the TV to factory defaults did not help. To add injury to insult, the TV guide listing never even populated either, just a "no information" for every single channel's lineup. No other TV in my house has issues pulling this info from my cable provider. Samsung support was also unable to shed light on a fix/cause for any of this. FINAL THOUGHT: I could have lived with all of the little bugs and quirks and hassles if this was a $300-400 TV, but this is unacceptable at a $900 price point. Even more so when you give the manufacturer a chance to explain/fix the issues, and they fall short. Unfortunately, I felt I had no choice but to return the TV.