Samsung QN85F vs TCL A400 PRO

Although the more than double number of dimming zones compared to its predecessor has not translated into a spectacular jump in black levels and contrast, we definitely felt it in the HDR effect itself. The QN85F is up to 50% brighter than last year's model, making a huge impression in dynamic scenes. The peak brightness can reach nearly 1700–1800 nits, which is truly impressive in this Mini-LED class. The best part is that almost regardless of the scene being viewed, the HDR effect remains strong and vibrant. In four out of five test scenes, the brightness was around 1000 nits, a level that in most cases allows viewers to feel the true magic of this format. Of course, in scene number 4 from the movie Sicario 2, the limitations of Mini-LED technology become apparent – the brightness of the helicopter's spotlight drops to around 500 nits. It's not an outstanding result, but it's still much more acceptable than in last year's model. Samsung deserves applause, as the improvement in brightness in the QN85F is substantial compared to its predecessor. However, it's a pity about a certain trend seen in this year’s televisions – the manufacturer has worsened the color gamut coverage. Although the QN85F has a QLED panel, its result of around 90% DCI-P3 is average, and in the most demanding films, it can lead to less vibrant colors than in the predecessor. Despite this shortcoming, the overall HDR effect is at an excellent level and really makes a big impression in this class of devices.

The TCL A400 Pro is a moderately bright TV. Its peak brightness reaches about 600 nits. That level already allows for a real HDR effect and in many movies it does produce a noticeably more attractive picture than SDR. However, it is not a level that overwhelms by brightness alone. The A400 Pro is not one of those TVs that "attack" the viewer with a powerful flash in every dramatic scene. The biggest limitation is visible with small bright elements on a dark background. Due to rather aggressive control of the dimming zones, the TV can significantly reduce their brightness — in extreme cases down to around 100 nits. That means small lights, sparks, stars, or single highlights can be much less visible than they should be. That said, this is not done without reason. The A400 Pro does this to keep blacks as deep as possible and to limit haloing around bright objects. It's a deliberate compromise: the TV more often chooses deeper blacks over maximally bright, point-like highlights. On one hand this is understandable, especially with a limited number of dimming zones, but on the other hand you should be aware that the HDR effect will not always be as strong as the peak brightness alone would suggest.

On the plus side, the colors are worth noting. The PFS LED filter used here, marketed by the manufacturer as QLED, produces suitably saturated colors. Our measurements showed about 94% coverage of the DCI-P3 gamut and about 74% of BT.2020, which is a solid result for this class.

The Samsung QN85F offers several preset picture modes, but out of the box, the television starts in "Eco" mode. We could actually end the discussion here, because for such a model, using this setting makes no sense – the picture is washed out, unpleasant, and far from what we expect from a television of this class. Therefore, we conducted our tests in the best available mode, which is the Filmmaker mode. Its purpose is to faithfully reproduce what the directors saw while filming, and indeed, this setting performs best among all the factory options. However, this does not mean it is free of flaws.

Both in SDR and HDR, the QN85F strongly highlighted warm colors. This stemmed from a lack of white balance, with a noticeable absence of blue. Additionally, the picture sometimes appeared overexposed – both the gamma brightness characteristic and the EOTF curve indicated that the television has a tendency to blow out scenes. In SDR, the color reproduction errors (Delta E at levels of 4–5) were still acceptable, but in HDR, the inaccuracies became really significant and clearly deviated from what the creators intended to show us. Fortunately, Samsung provides a wide range of calibration tools in its televisions, so – as always – we proceeded with professional calibration to see how much could be improved.

As standard, we carried out color measurements in the best-calibrated mode, Filmmaker Mode, the one that is supposed to be closest to the creators’ intent. The A400 Pro, of course, also offers other picture modes, but in practice they suffer from much larger color errors and alter the image character more strongly. We won’t go into those modes in detail in this part of the test. So how does the factory color reproduction perform? In short: really very well. In fact, looking at our measurement results, it’s excellent. Both the white balance and the luminance response were set surprisingly precisely. The errors were so small that during testing we genuinely rubbed our eyes in disbelief. Such good out-of-the-box settings don’t happen often, even in TVs operating in Filmmaker Mode. All the more reason to praise TCL, because the A400 Pro right out of the box can produce an image very close to how the source material should look. The results were so good that you could easily think someone had already paid extra attention to that unit and tried to calibrate it.

Our nitpicking really comes down to just one thing. In SDR content the image was slightly brighter than the reference for a dark room, because the factory gamma was set closer to 2.3 than to 2.4. It’s not a big error and most viewers probably won’t even notice it.

However, it should be noted that we’re talking about our specific review sample. With factory colors there can always be some variation between units, production batches, or screen sizes. So we don’t assume that every A400 Pro will look identical straight out of the box.

After calibrating the movie mode, we managed to tame the colors in both modes to nearly perfection – most of them did not exceed an error value of 3, which is the limit of visibility to the human eye. The image became more natural, fuller, and at the same time devoid of the blooming that was noticeable right after taking the TV out of the box. This shows how much potential lies in the QN85F and how well it responds to precise settings. However, this does not change the fact that certain technological barriers cannot be overcome. Despite the significant benefits of calibration, limitations of the panel itself still remain. Although the number of dimming zones has doubled compared to its predecessor, the algorithms controlling the backlighting can manipulate brightness in their own way. Sometimes this leads to slight color distortions or subtly visible halo effects around bright objects. Nonetheless, the reception after calibration is really pleasant and shows how good a screen the QN85F can be if we just take a moment for the right settings.

Despite its excellent factory tuning, we couldn't resist checking how the TCL A400 Pro would respond to a professional calibration. Since the starting point was so good, we were even more curious whether we could squeeze even more out of this TV. And here we have to boast: we managed to bring our unit to absurdly low color errors. Results below 1 are something you don't see every day, even on very good TVs. Such results are more often associated with professional reference monitors than with a lifestyle TV for the living room. In terms of white balance and color reproduction, the A400 Pro after calibration simply performed outstandingly. The only thing we can pick at after a deeper analysis concerns the brightness behavior. The TV can manipulate luminance levels depending on the content being displayed, and quite often the image is a bit darker than it should be according to the standard. This most likely stems from the way the Mini-LED backlight and local dimming algorithms work in this model. However, that doesn't spoil the overall impression, because in terms of color precision alone the A400 Pro after calibration reached a level we really didn't expect.

Although the native tonal transitions on the QN85F perform excellently with 4K materials, we don't always deal with content in the highest resolution. That's when it becomes crucial how the television handles upscaling and digital image processing. This process is managed by Samsung's proprietary processor – AI NQ4 Gen2. In practice, it works very efficiently. If visible color banding or other undesirable phenomena appear on the screen, for example in materials from YouTube, they can be easily smoothed out using the "noise reduction" function. Set to medium, it improves tonal transitions while not excessively blurring desired details. However, it's important to remember that – as with most Samsung televisions – this feature significantly affects the film grain. Therefore, during movie screenings, it's advisable to use it cautiously to maintain the natural character of the image.

The upscaling itself looks very good. Test materials in lower resolutions were displayed sharply and clearly, with a lot of detail. The only drawback remains the issue of overscan, which is cutting off the edges of the screen. In most situations, this is not noticeable, but with very old materials below HD quality, there may be instances where part of the image on the left side is slightly cropped.

Digital video processing is unfortunately one of the weaker points of the TCL A400 Pro. That doesn't mean the TV performs badly, but it's hard to call it anything clearly above standard. The upscaling itself is adequate: edges are smoothed fairly well, the image doesn't look overly sharp or pixelated, and lower-quality content can be watched without major discomfort. At the same time the overall look is slightly soft and it lacks the precision that the best image processors in more expensive TVs can deliver.

Much worse, however, is its handling of tonal transitions caused by heavy compression. TCL equipped the A400 Pro with a "Gradual Smoothing" feature that in theory should reduce visible color banding and artifacts in lower-quality content. In practice its effectiveness is very limited. It does not improve tonal transitions in any noticeable way, and at higher settings it can also smooth out image details, giving the picture an artificial, slightly blurred character. For that reason we think it's best to leave this feature off. The A400 Pro handles basic image scaling decently, but if you often watch heavily compressed content with visible posterization, this model won't be one of the best choices.

Motion blur and fluidity of motion in the QN85F is a topic worth discussing in more detail, as the television is equipped not with a standard 120 Hz panel, but with a 144 Hz panel. The additional hertz will primarily be appreciated by PC gamers, but the mere presence of such an option can be seen as a nice addition and a sign of the times – it’s hard to complain about the trend towards faster panels, since in practice, each of us would like the image to be as fluid as possible. However, the most important thing is how the television handles typical 120 Hz refresh rates – in the case of consoles, sports, or films recorded at 24 or 30 frames per second. And here, the QN85F performs really well. In movies, you can easily adjust the character of the image thanks to the “picture clarity” function, where we find two adjustable sliders. Key for viewing sessions is the one responsible for reducing motion blur. Lower values give the image a more cinematic character with preserved “frame rate,” while higher values lead to a strong smoothing that resembles television theater.

The TCL A400 Pro is equipped with a 144 Hz panel, but in practice we're most interested in how it performs at 120 Hz. That's the refresh rate used by most consoles today, as well as many sports broadcasts and high-frame-rate content. In this range the TV performs quite well. Motion clarity is really good, especially after properly configuring the motion smoothing. The "Motion Clarity" feature improves smoothness. Its settings include two sliders that let you tailor the motion smoothing to your preferences — separately for lower- and higher-frame-rate material. That way you can achieve either a more cinematic look or a noticeably smoother picture. If you don't want to tweak settings manually, you can use presets such as low, medium, high, cinema, or nature.

The Samsung QN85F makes a great impression in terms of features for gamers. It has four HDMI 2.1 ports, so we can easily connect several devices at once. There is also variable refresh rate (VRR) to prevent screen tearing, as well as automatic game mode (ALLM), which allows the TV to switch to the appropriate settings automatically when we start the console. Additionally, it supports refresh rates of up to 144 Hz – something that PC gamers will particularly appreciate, but the mere fact that such an option is available shows that Samsung is fully supporting gamers. The Game Bar panel deserves praise as well. It's a quick glance at key parameters – from frame rate to refresh mode to shortcuts for picture settings. Instead of sifting through the entire menu, everything is at our fingertips, which turns out to be really convenient in practice. However, the most interesting addition is the Game Motion Plus feature. It's nothing more than motion smoothing, transferred into the gaming world. When enabled, the picture becomes smoother, sometimes it even looks as though we're getting several more frames, and importantly, the response delay does not increase enough to interfere with gameplay. This solution truly sets Samsung's 120Hz TVs apart from the competition.

[UPDATE] We have updated our tests of Samsung TVs for the 2025 model year due to the release of software version 1131, which restored the crucial feature for gamers, HGiG.

The only serious downside remains the lack of proper HGiG support. This is a standard responsible for correct tone mapping in HDR games, ensuring that brightness and contrast are displayed as intended by the creators. Without HGiG, we have to adjust the brightness manually, which doesn’t always yield ideal results. The feature was available in previous models, but it disappeared from the QN85F after one of the updates. We hope that Samsung will quickly fix this issue, and we will keep checking to see if it has been resolved.

When it comes to features for gamers, the TCL A400 Pro performs excellently. The TV has practically everything you can expect from a gaming TV today: 4K support at high refresh rates, VRR, ALLM, correct implementation of HDR formats in games, including Dolby Vision, and HGiG. Because of that it works well with both next-gen consoles and PCs. Another plus is the inclusion of a Game Bar, a special panel with the most important settings for gamers. From it you can quickly check basic signal information, refresh rate, and active features, and also adjust the look and behavior of some settings to your own preferences. This is a solution that may not change picture quality by itself, but it greatly improves the convenience of using the TV while gaming.

The only thing to complain about is the number of full HDMI 2.1 ports. The A400 Pro has only two such ports out of four, and one of them also functions as eARC. In practice this means that if someone wants to connect two next-gen consoles and a soundbar, they may hit some limitations. In that scenario you'll have to either swap devices or use extra equipment, for example an AV receiver or a soundbar with HDMI inputs. Despite this, it's hard not to rate the A400 Pro very highly as a gaming TV. The gaming feature set here is really powerful.