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Usability
Samsung's 2014 TVs were a little unwieldy to use, thanks to the presence of too many over-bearing, full-screen menus and too much focus on relatively unimportant content. The smart remote control was a faff, too, as it put too many different control systems into too small a physical space.
This year, things are much better. Samsung has shifted to a graphical user interface based around its Tizen operating system, which does a much more economical (in terms of screen real estate and structure) job of putting the content you actually want right at your fingertips.
The Tizen system looks remarkably similar to LG's webOS engine, but there's no shame in that.
The new smart remote control, meanwhile, is far more intuitive to use than its predecessor. The separate cursor button and point and click options are nicely separated now, and the fiddly touch pad of 2014 has been removed.
There's still an issue whereby the onscreen cursor for the point and click system doesn't always feel as if it's in the place on the screen where you're actually pointing the remote, and the menus do sometimes run a bit sluggishly. But, overall, Tizen has made Samsung's smart TVs a lot more approachable and friendly than they were before.
Sound quality
While the UE65JS9000 isn't remotely as cutting edge with its sound as it is with its video, it sounds decent enough. Effects – even subtle ones – are rendered clearly and positioned accurately in the frame despite the speakers firing down rather than directly out.
Voices generally sound convincing and stand clear of the soundstage, even during raucous action scenes, and the speakers don't tend to distort even under fairly serious distress.
Bass levels are only fair to middling compared with those delivered by some rival brands, though, and the soundstage never achieves the sort of scale you can get with the best Sony and LG models.
Value
It's a tough one to judge, this. On the one hand, the UE65JS9000 delivers the same groundbreaking features as the UE65JS9500 for a whole £2,000 less.
And while having to reduce the backlight to combat backlight clouding does certainly lead to a reduced HDR performance versus the UE65JS9500, arguably only people with very healthy bank balances will feel that the difference in picture quality is worth paying £2,000 for.
On the other hand, you'll probably be able to get good-quality non-HDR 4K/UHD 65-inch TVs this year for as little as £2,000, so even though it's substantially cheaper than the UE65JS9500, the UE65JS9000 is still a substantial investment for an HDR feature that won't have much native support until Christmas at the very earliest.
