Samsung UE48HU7500 review

We were a little disappointed that the HU7500 wasn’t able to play our .MOV version of Tears of Steel completely smoothly, though, as a couple of times it had to pause for loading, although we had no problems with MP4 files. The 24p footage also felt jerky without Samsung’s Motion Plus frame interpolation feature. Luckily, there are plenty of pre-set Motion Plus modes to choose from to help smooth over any jerky camera pans, but we found the Custom setting, where you can adjust the blur and judder reduction to your liking, to be the most effective. 

If catch-up services are more important to you than terrestrial TV, you’re in luck as Samsung’s Smart TV hub remains one of the best around. It’s been slightly refined since we last saw it, as the TV Guide has now been separated from the rest of the smart services and has its own dedicated button on the HU7500’s remotes. Pressing the Smart Hub button also brings up a small row of recently visited channels and apps rather than the entire smart menu, making it easier and quicker to access your favourite content.

There’s a huge range of pre-installed apps, with even more in Samsung’s app store. BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4OD, Demand 5, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Wuaki.TV, BlinkBox, BFI Player, Digital Theatre, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype and a web browser should mean there’s something for everyone.

Samsung’s On-Demand window has also been improved, as it’s now much clearer how you can actually watch the populated content that appears on the main Film and TV Shows page. All of them were tied to the Wuaki.TV app during our testing, though, even after linking our Netflix and Amazon Instant Video accounts, which isn’t particularly useful if you don’t have a Wuaki account. We could also do without the Games panel.

The Multimedia tab, meanwhile, shows content from Vevo, Dailymotion and TuneIn Radio. This is also where you can connect your TV to other devices, including those in the cloud, other PCs on your home network and mobile phones and USB devices. The HU7500 supports all the main file formats, including MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC, WAV and M4A audio files and MP4, MKV, WMV, DIVX, XVID, AVI and MOV video files.

There are plenty of ports, too, including four HDMI 2.0 ports, SCART, component and composite inputs, an optical S/PDIF output, a headphone jack, an Ethernet port, a CI card slot and a port for Samsung’s One Connect box. This doesn’t come bundled with the TV sadly, but this is essentially the same dedicated set-top box we saw on the HU8500, which contains more connections than what’s currently on the back of the TV. It will also enable you to upgrade the HU7500 to support future Samsung connection boxes if the HDMI 2.0 standard gets replaced. The HU7500 also has a built-in HEVC decoder for 4K Netflix streaming, MHL support and integrated Wi-Fi.

The only disappointing thing about the UE48HU7500 is its active 3D. It comes with two pairs of glasses in the box, but when we watched our test scenes in Avatar, only the centre seemed to be in focus. There was lots of crosstalk toward the edges of the screen, and text and the Na’vi subtitles were difficult to read. We weren’t able to improve it with the TV’s 3D settings either, as the only option available was adjusting the 3D perspective, which simply made it worse. It wasn’t as bad as the Panasonic TX-AS740B‘s passive 3D, but it’s still disappointing to see this on such a high-end set.

The HU7500 is one of the cheaper and better-looking 4K TVs out there and its smart services are second to none. However, it’s not completely perfect as sub-par 3D and middling default picture quality means you’ll have to spend time tweaking the settings to get the best out of it. We definitely recommend it over Samsung’s curved HU8500 TV, but for us, the Panasonic Viera TX-50AX802B is still the 4K TV to buy, especially since it’s just received another price cut and is now available for £1,499.