Samsung UE43TU7020 43 inch Ultra HD Smart 4K HDR TV

Product Information

It adds dynamic metadata on top of the core HDR10 signal that tells a TV how it should adjust the brightness, colours and contrast of content for the most optimal picture quality. While not outfitted with the fancier features of its more expensive siblings, the TU7020’s interface, app support and gaming are like what you’d see higher up the range.

This isn’t the most out-and-out bright screen you ever saw, but its contrasts are nevertheless wide and convincing. While exclusivity has run out on Apple TV and BT Sport, Apple Music is still under Samsung’s lock and key.

Around the back, the connections amount to aerial, ethernet and USB sockets, an optical audio output and two HDMIs.

With all modes, the treble is a bit insistent and there’s a predictable lack of weight, solidity and dynamism that’s to be expected at this level.The colour loses a little more saturation and there’s some shimmer on surfaces and patterns that makes Digital Clean View worth switching on. It has virtually the same spec as the TU7100, and comes armed with the brand’s 4K upscaling prowess, HDR support and a bevy of streaming apps via the Tizen OS. HDR10+ is a dynamic metadata HDR format backed by Samsung, and it tailors the HDR performance to the characteristics of the TU7020’s display given its relative lack of brightness.

The TU7100 is about as affordable as TVs get and, as long as you’re not expecting the moon on a stick, you will be delighted by its performance.The endless blacks of space are good and deep, with bright, seemingly unclipped whites happy to exist in the same scene. Black levels hold up well – at least head-on – in Alien ( HDR10+) as the crew of the Nostromo investigate the foreign ship.

For more or less the same money, and with more or less the same specification, LG’s 43UM7500PLA certainly needs a place on your shortlist. The RU7020 is a 4K LCD TV with HDR10+ compatibility and the same Tizen-based interface as Samsung’s best smart TVs. The set clearly doesn’t have the contrast range of a higher-end model, but blacks are surprisingly deep for a TV that costs so little and there’s plenty of overall punch. Motion is solid enough with the Picture Clarity settings, although movement can invoke a little judder with fast-moving content – the TU7020 has a less than grippy hold on NFL players when they’re grappling with each other. In the Avatar Blu-ray, colours have vigour and naturalism that’s tonally more on point than what’d you get from the Hisense A7500F, for example.Even in dark scenes and scenes with lots of motion, there’s no point at which we really feel like we’re watching something inferior. If we’re looking for something on the spec sheet to account for that difference, then the missing Dynamic Crystal Control technology would seem like an obvious candidate. As well as describing really convincing colors, with subtle gradations of tone handled well and enough detail retrieved to properly describe textures, black tones improve significantly over their HD equivalents.