Four years is a long time in electronics, they (kind of) say. Especially when you’re a brand usually as prolific with annual AV range updates as Samsung. That’s how long has passed, though, between Samsung’s debut The Premiere LS9T ultra short throw home cinema projector and the launch of its sequel: The cunningly named The Premiere 9. So what’s changed over those four long years? And does the new Premiere 9 deliver four years worth of improvement?
The first signs of difference come with its design. The new chassis is a touch deeper from front to back than its predecessor, and the rounded edge that faces out into the room and contains a built in speaker system features a felt cover finished in a lighter grey. For me this new felt color harmonizes better with the crisp white finish of the rest of the bodywork—especially as the hue of white used is a little warmer than it was before. Overall the Premiere 9 feels like a slightly more subtle presence on your sideboard than its already elegant predecessor.
For yes, to be sure you fully understand this, the Premiere 9 is designed to sit on a sideboard, just centimetres from a wall or, ideally, screen. That’s all the distance it needs to throw out a picture as much as 130 inches across—which is, of course, a much bigger image than you’ll get from even the most massive readily available, remotely affordable regular TV. Having the projector at the edge of your room, by the wall, is vastly more convenient in a regular living space than having to build your seating arrangements around a long-throw projector sat somewhere in the middle of your room.
The first Premiere 9 was priced very much at the premium end of the UST projector world – and so its successor. The new Premiere 9 carries a price tag of $6,499 in the US and £5,999 in the UK—that’s around the same price the original Premiere 9 launched at in the U.S., with the new U.K. price coming in actually a grand or so cheaper.
There are one or two interesting differences in the connectivity between the old and new Premiere 9s. Particularly striking is the new model’s removal of its predecessor’s tuner input. Ditching the in-built clearly detracts from the Premiere 9’s positioning as a true alternative to a big-screen TV, I guess. But given the hassles involved with sorting out different tuners for different global territories and, more importantly, the massive shift over the last four years towards streamed rather than broadcast content, you can see why Samsung has decided a tuner no longer feels necessary.
The new Premiere 9 joins the original in sporting an impressive (for a projector) three HDMI ports, along with an optical digital audio output, an Ethernet port, and the now expected Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless options. The latter of which can be activated with recent Samsung mobile phones simply by tapping the phone against the projector’s bodywork.
The first HDMI port is compatible with HDMI’s eARC functionality, for passing audio from what’s being watched on the projector to a connected eARC-capable soundbar or AVR. The new model’s HDMIs also offer a little more support for the latest games consoles and PCs, too, in the shape of VRR support in the basic HDMI and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro formats. However, these variable refresh rates only work up to 60Hz, since the new model’s upgrades haven’t extended to support for the 120Hz refresh rates now deliverable by the latest Playstation/Xbox consoles and PC cards.
Having touched on gaming, I might as well continue with the gaming related updates. Starting with the addition of the same Game Bar onscreen menu system Samsung’s TVs have been carrying for the past couple of years. As well as information on the incoming game feed, this menu gives you fast access to a few gaming aids, including mini-map auto detection/magnification, and a selection of virtual aim pointer designs.
The irrepressible rise of AI has found its way into the Premiere 9’s game features too, enabling it to automatically recognize the type of (console) game you’re playing—FPS, RPG and so on—and optimize the playback settings accordingly.
Since the new Premiere 9 also gets Samsung’s latest Tizen smart interface (more on that in a moment), it also benefits from Samsung’s Gaming Hub. This brings together all of your available gaming sources, including connected PCs/consoles and a wide collection of cloud gaming services, into a single dedicated page.
Samsung’s latest Tizen OS is a much more sophisticated smart system than it was back in 2020. There are elements about its full-screen presentation and navigation choices that still feel a little confusing, but the latest generation has got very clever (AI again) at learning what sort of content you like and then highlighting other content it thinks will be up your street.
Another small but actually quite useful upgrade to the new Premiere 9’s smart system finds a far-field mic built into the projector’s bodywork, so that you can control it via voice command (using Alexa or Samsung’s own Bixby system) without needing the projector’s remote.
Truly nativized smarts
Given the projector world’s generally messy situation when it comes to the quality and reliability of the apps carried on their built-in smart TV systems, it’s great to see the Premiere 9’s Tizen OS delivering a complete array of nativized video streaming apps. Basically the Premiere 9’s smart system is as good as that of Samsung’s TVs, and that’s fine by me.
A further handy expansion of the new Premiere 9’s smart features finds it supporting integration into and control of systems of SmartThings devices. This includes being able to call up a visual ‘map’ of SmartThings electronics devices in your home to see if you’ve left anything on that could be switched off to control electricity. You can also include the new projector in customised ‘macro’ routines, as well as setting the projector to save power by turning off if it doesn’t sense any movement in the room after a certain period of time.
One final welcome new smart feature of the latest Premiere 9 is its Custom Ambient system. This lets you use the projector to cast out with a wide variety of digital images, video loops and customisable widgets, digital stickies and so on when you’re not actually watching a movie, TV show or game. This really can become a fun addition to your room decor–especially if you’re making full use of the Premiere 9’s 130-inch maximum image size.
From here on in it’s going to be all about the new Premiere 9’s all-important picture and sound quality. Starting with the latter, while the new model sticks with the 40W of total power provided by its predecessor, it tweaks the configuration from a 2.2-channel set up to a 2.2.2 arrangement—the added ‘2’ alerting us to the presence of a pair of up-firing speakers included to help the projector benefit more from its newly added Dolby Atmos soundtrack decoding. Samsung has also added its Object Tracking Sound technology to the new model, where acoustic processing attempts to make specific sound effects appear to be coming from the right place on the screen.
Also new is the ability to turn the latest Premiere 9’s video system off so that you can use it as a Bluetooth speaker. Though obviously given how much it costs, I wouldn’t suggest that you buy a Premiere 9 just for this purpose!
New picture features
Enhancements for the new Premiere 9’s picture performance start with a very significant step up in brightness from its triple laser, wide color gamut light engine. While the first Premiere 9 could hit 2920 ISO Lumens, the new one is claimed to manage 3,450 ISO Lumens. This should stand it in much better stead when it comes both to getting more impact out of HDR content (it supports the HDR10, HLG and HDR10+ formats, and can cover 154% of the DCI-P3 HDR color gamut) and combatting the sort of ambient light it may find itself having to compete with in a typical living room environment.
In fact, Samsung has introduced a new “Vision Boost” feature to the new Premiere 9 that’s specifically designed to improve the projector’s performance in ambient light. This works by applying a different tone curve to improve visible gradation, and introducing a color compensation system. The result is claimed to be better contrast and the recovery of as much as 50% of the color saturation usually lost in bright room conditions.
Finally—inevitably—we’re not done with the impact AI has on the newest Premiere 9, either. This is because its ‘Quantum Processor’ brain includes a new 4K AI Upscaling system, where a Neural analyser chooses the best AI neural network outcome to apply to the process of upconverting HD and lower resolution content to the projector’s 4K resolution.
This 4K resolution, by the way, isn’t delivered by a full 3840×2160 count of the projector’s DLP digital mirror devices. But the Premiere 9’s system of using the available mirrors to effectively produce multiple pixels per frame is considered by the U.S.’s Consumer Technology Association to deliver a true 4K experience. And I might as well start describing my experience of watching the Premiere 9 by saying that the projector’s 4K claims really do seem to be right up there on the screen.
Detail levels are extremely high. Hair, grass, the fabric of clothing—all the usual areas of extremely fine detail I like to see with a good 4K transfer are delivered fantastically well. There’s a beautifully dense, smooth finish to the picture, too, that again feels completely 4K—even when the image is pushed to its 130-inch maximum. There’s no hint of pixel structure, no sign of a jagged edge, and no softness.
The sharpness seems exceptionally uniform right into the corners of the picture, too—even when watching an image of 100 inches and more. This is an exceptional result for an ultra-short throw projector.
It’s not just with native 4K sources that the new Premiere 9’s pictures look supremely sharp and dense. The improvements introduced by the new Premiere 9’s Quantum processor are at their most obvious with the projector’s upscaling of HD sources. In particular, the upscaler seems as effective as the ones in Samsung’s latest premium 4K TVs at first removing noise–be it excessive grain or, especially, digital compression artefacts–before adding all the extra millions of pixels required to turn HD into 4K. It’s as good an upscaling system as I’ve ever seen on a 4K projector, in fact – including models costing many times more.
The only thing that can take the edge off the Premiere 9’s sharpness is its noise reduction system. So I’d recommend just turning this off. Especially when you’re watching native 4K sources.
Subtle where it matters
One other contributor to the new Premiere 9’s awesome sense of sharpness is the incredible subtlety of its color presentation. Skin tones, for instance, benefit from enough fine lighting control and tonal shifts to always look both convincing and three-dimensional. Trees and meadows have enough subtle tone differences to look natural and refined too, and even blue and cloudy skies alike (both of which strangely often prove a challenge for HDR projectors) look authentic and realistic.
There’s a real feel for balance and naturalism to the Premiere 9’s colors, too, that means it largely avoids the excessively bold primary colours often seen with projectors of its type. (Even the previous Premiere 9 tended to over-cook reds, in fact). Every shade and tone looks like it belongs with its neighbours, as if every tone inhabits the same colour gamut “space”.
It’s not just the subtlety of the Premiere 9’s colors that impresses, though. In its Standard picture preset its tones also look dazzlingly bold, rich, dynamic, and possessed of a wide enough gamut to do remarkable justice to HDR sources. Precious few other projectors I’ve seen can hold a candle to the Premiere 9 in this respect, in fact. And while you naturally get the most resplendent impact of this while watching the Premiere 9 in a dark room, true to its word the new Vision Boost features also sustains surprisingly rich colors in bright room conditions too.
This is not to say that the new Premiere 9’s color performance is perfect. While the Filmmaker Mode picture preset delivers calmer, more even and more measurably accurate tones as you would expect, skin tones become a touch orange at times, while green tones can take on a slightly brown hue. The tools are there to improve these niggles, but overall it feels as if the projector has been tuned to look its best with its brighter, more dynamic and ultimately less warm-toned presets.
Rich red tones sometimes come off a bit less brilliantly natural than all other tones do in the otherwise gorgeously watchable Standard picture preset. If you’ve got the Auto/Custom color setting selected, rich reds certainly pop, but feel a touch orange. But if you switch to the Native color mode, while the orangey hue disappears, bold reds instead start to look a touch muted, leaning towards a more magenta tone. The good news is that the sort of vivid reds that cause these little colour blips only crop up quite rarely with regular real-world content.
Light and dark
At this point it’s high time I got into the Premiere 9’s biggest areas of improvement over its predecessor: Its brightness and contrast.
The Premiere 9 is one of the brightest projectors I’ve seen. In fact, it feels up there with the sort of “light cannons” you usually only get when you spend tens of thousands of pounds. This helps it deliver remarkable HDR results for a projector, both with full screen bright HDR content, and bright HDR highlights, the latter of which appear with a level of intensity I haven’t seen on a UST projector before.
While the brightness is high, though, it doesn’t seem to lead to major clipping or flaring out in the brightest HDR areas–especially when the projector’s excellent active tone mapping is in play. Colors, too, don’t look washed out or faded because of the brightness behind them.
The Premiere 9’s awesome brightness works on two levels, too. In dark rooms it helps the projector produce a phenomenally punchy picture capable of doing more justice to HDR than pretty much any other sub-$10K projector around, while in bright rooms it helps it punch through ambient light incredibly effectively. So much so that only in full on bright summer’s day conditions did I feel the need to activate Vision Boost.
Some might feel a bit frustrated by how much duller pictures look in the Filmmaker Mode than they do in the Standard mode–a result of the more accurate preset setting tone mapping to static and turning off the projector’s contrast enhancer feature. This results in more balanced, neutral images, but reinforces my feeling that the Premiere 9 is–I’d argue sensibly given its lifestyle design–at its most comfortable when running in a relatively aggressive mode.
You also need to handle the projector’s Peak Brightness feature with a bit of care, as while it certainly kicks up the image’s baseline brightness, it causes the Premiere 9’s previously wonderfully rich colors to start looking a bit washed out.
One last brightness related point to mention is the so-called rainbow effect you sometimes get with DLP projectors, where pure red, green and blue stripes can flit over bright picture highlights—especially if you move your eyes around the image. While I did occasionally feel aware of this with the Premiere 9, though, it cropped up more rarely and less aggressively than I’d expected from such a bright projector, especially when using the Standard preset.
Breaking the mould
Projectors—particularly UST models—as bright as the Premiere 9 usually struggle to combine all their light with decent black levels and contrast. Samsung’s new model, though, proves the exception to the rule, delivering the dark parts of mostly bright images and, especially, full-on dark scenes outstandingly well.
There’s far less ‘grey wash’ over dark scenes than you’d usually see with such a bright projector picture—yet just as importantly, the light control measures Samsung is using to achieve this sense of contrast don’t cause any noticeable fluctuations in the overall brightness or contrast of the picture. Even when using the Vision Boost feature.
The surprisingly rich contrast performance doesn’t come at the expense of subtle shadow detailing either, avoiding that hollowed out look dark areas sometimes exhibit with bright projectors. Dark scenes therefore enjoy a sense of depth that’s commensurate with that of bright scenes, contributing further to the sort of cinematic immersion in what you’re watching that you only get with an image as huge as the new Premiere 9.
So striking is the Premiere 9’s ability to produce both exceptionally intense small light peaks and convincing black shades and dark scenes that it’s hard to believe Samsung hasn’t invented some sort of local dimming system for its latest projector.
I should add that the Premiere 9’s contrast prowess is again at its potent best in the Standard mode rather than the notionally more accurate Filmmaker Mode and Standard setting. This merely continues the theme, though, that getting the best from the new Premiere 9 means understanding how it needs to be set ip. In fact, I have one more item to add to this theme in the shape of the Premiere 9’s motion handling.
Out of the box, the projector’s most all-round gorgeous Standard preset picture uses an Auto motion processing system that tends to come on too strong with 24 frames a second films, leaving them looking too smooth (the well known soap opera effect) and generating too many distracting processing side effects around moving objects. Choose a Custom Picture Clarity, though, and set the projector’s judder reduction tool to level one or two, and the digital artefacts and excessive smoothness all fade away, leaving you with a picture that looks clean and cinematic.
You can also just turn the motion processing off completely, of course—as most home cinema fans likely will. But while I realise not everyone will agree with me, I found the Premiere 9’s intense brightness made me a little more aware of 24p judder than I am with less potent pictures.
Game on
Any projector that’s designed to go into a regular living space rather than a dedicated theater room these days is likely to find itself being used for gaming from time to time. Happily the Premiere 9’s punchy, dynamic, vibrant and ultra-sharp approach to pictures is maintained by its Game picture preset, and proves a perfect fit for PC and console graphics. Gaming worlds looks pristine and involving, and best of all the intensity of the imagery makes it possible to still successfully vanquish your foes, even in dark game areas, without having to black your room out. This is a rare but, if the way my own household works is anything to go by, important accomplishment for a ‘lifestyle’ projector.
Given how great game graphics look on the Premiere 9 it’s a bit frustrating that input lag in the projector’s Game mode is a little too high at 52ms with 60Hz feeds to support a really competitive performance in games that depend on ultra-fast reactions. Less reaction-sensitive titles, though, such as the Asssassin’s Creeds, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Diablo IV are all an absolute joy to see—especially at the sort of image size the Premiere 9 can deliver.
The Premiere 9 backs up its brilliantly living room-friendly picture performance with gratifyingly powerful sound. For starters, the soundstage the projector can produce is remarkably wide. It looks from the design as if all the speakers are throwing their sound forward, but score work and ambient effects, at least, feel like they’re coming from way off to the projector’s left and right sides.
Soundtrack detailing is excellent, too. There’s lots of it, and it actually seems to be painted into the right place in the soundstage. Even when there’s a height element to cope with. I hadn’t honestly expected Samsung’s Object Tracking Sound system to be capable of working with a picture area as large as that created by the Premiere 9, but it really does make a difference.
Bass sounds quite ‘hi-fi’ in nature for the most part, as well as readily contributing to the sound rather than appearing reluctant to get involved, and the speakers have enough power and headroom even at high volumes to swell and expand smoothly and powerfully during escalating action or horror sequences.
There is a limit to how far the Premiere 9 can go in this respect; the very loudest and most dense soundtrack moments can cause the sound to start congesting, while bass can sometimes drop back a little under extreme duress. But this only happens at what will be for most people uncomfortable volume levels anyway.
The way the speakers face directly into your room means their sound feels direct and impactful, and helps you appreciate how the Premiere 9’s mid-range is more dynamic, forceful and expansive than that of pretty much any built-in TV sound system—and most other UST projectors.
Dialogue is super clean without losing context or sounding too bright. It also sounds just about raised vertically enough thanks to the OTS system to convince you that it’s coming from the picture, rather than the projector sited below the picture.
Treble sounds, finally, typically sound well rounded and pristine, avoiding harshness and shrillness even when the sound becomes congested.
Verdict
The new Premiere 9 delivers a big step forward in both feature and, especially, picture quality terms over its already illustrious predecessor. It also shows a much better understanding of the quite specific needs of the living room UST projector world – so much so that provided you take some care with its settings, it’s capable of being the best all-round “lifestyle” projector I’ve seen to date.
5/5
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