Rob Sabin

Sometimes, you have to go big. And that’s just what one young power couple did when they built their dream home in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, a teeming metropolis that sits about a six-hour drive north of the Rio de Janeiro coast. To be more precise, they went 50,000 square feet big. With that area, the modern two-story residence shown in these photos, if laid flat, would cover the size of an American-style football field (minus a couple of end zones).

New advanced UHDTVs and UHD Blu-ray players were the most notable product announcements for A/V enthusiasts at Samsung's 2017 CES press conference today.

The brand's new QLED TVs are said to push the state of the art with a new metallic-core quantum dot formulation in the backlight, one that ultimately provides the ability to deliver brighter highlights and an even wider color gamut than Samsung's top-line 2016 models.

AT A GLANCE
Plus
HDR10 plus Dolby Vision HDR
Great color
Wide viewing window
Minus
Middling black levels
Backlight artifacts

THE VERDICT
LG’s midpriced 65UH8500 delivers good image quality with a super-wide viewing window, and it’s one of the few sets around that plays both predominant types of HDR content.

A year ago, I tested the LG 65UF9500, an LCD Ultra HDTV that retailed for $2,999, and I criticized it for offering no future-readiness for soon-to-emerge high dynamic range (HDR) content. Since then, Ultra HD Blu-ray has come to market, bringing HDR along with it, and there’s a growing library of HDR movies available for streaming. To LG’s credit, their line of so-called Super UHD LCD TVs for this holiday season, including the midline 65-inch 65UH8500 tested here ($1,700), recognizes both predominant types of HDR—namely, HDR10 (used currently on Ultra HD Blu-rays) and Dolby Vision (still only available via web streams). LG is one of only two TV makers to support both formats on a single chassis (in both their LCD and OLED models), the other being Vizio, which updated their Dolby Vision sets for HDR10 in mid-2016. So how does this wellfeatured, attractively priced set perform? Let’s have a look.