Samsung S95B QD-OLED Review: The perfect combination of black, brightness and color

In terms of connectivity it comes well equipped and has four HDMI 2.1 ports, one of which is eARC to connect a soundbar and then has three USB ports, optical audio output, antenna and satellite connections and an Ethernet port. It incorporates dual tuner, so you can watch one DVB-T channel and record another at the same time.

S95B OLED connections

It also has dual Bluetooth 5.2 connection, which allows you to connect up to two headphones at the same time while the TV is playing. And then of course it has built-in Wi-Fi, in this case we are talking about Wi-Fi 5.

The integrated operating system is Tizen in version 6.5, which is the same that we find in the other models of the brand. Tizen is the operating system that Samsung has been using for years in its TVs, but this year it has received aesthetic changes.

Now when you press the menu button no longer appears the bottom line where we found the apps while we continued watching the content, but now the menu opens full screen. Here we now have a left panel, where the Multimedia, Gaming Hub and Ambient Mode tabs are located. In the center are the shortcuts to the most important apps that we can organize by putting our favorites more to the front and adding or deleting apps. At the bottom, there is a window in which we can see the previous content we were watching and further down there are lists of recommendations. Now the interface is more based on offering you recommendations of movies, series or documentaries on streaming platforms that may be of interest to you.

Performance is generally good and everything loads smoothly after the latest update. Initially, when we started the TV, the menus were slower to load and would hang for a few minutes. But the latest update fixed this and now the response is almost instantaneous, with only a few seconds of slowdown every time the TV is turned on. Once these seconds have passed, everything is perfect, so we have changed and increased our original rating. We liked Tizen’s interface design and performance better last year.

In terms of apps, it comes with all the main ones like Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, Disney Plus, etc.

You can control certain functions via voice commands by pressing the microphone button on the remote. It is compatible with Google Assistant, Alexa and Bixby.

In July 2021, Samsung introduced its Gaming Hub with the Xbox app, which lets you play Xbox games in the cloud. With a few exceptions, the games are not free and require a Game Pass Ultimate subscription to play them.

Not only is the Xbox app available in this gaming hub, but you can also access other gaming-related services like NVIDIA Geforce Now and Utomik, which offer a large number of games but also require a subscription. There’s also the Twitch app, which you can open in split-screen while you play.

You can also add game console controllers for better gaming, since Xbox, PlayStation and some generic wireless controllers are supported.

1

LG OLED G2 vs C2: What are their differences?

OLED TVs are having a significant growth in sales due to its lower price and has expanded the variety of inches. In addition in this last year, Samsung has joined with its new QD-OLED S95B TV. But this time we want to talk about the LG OLED G2 …

Read full review

There is a quick control panel available in this Gaming Hub that allows you to make specific image settings, enable or disable functions, etc., depending on the type of game you are playing. There are other useful functions such as zoom mode or ultra-wide-angle mode (only with a PC).

A very interesting feature, unfortunately not available on many models, is the ability to split the screen to display two contents simultaneously. This is known as PIP (Picture-in-Picture) and the Samsung S95B has this feature. First, there is the PIP function in the picture menu, which allows you to watch two TV channels at the same time on the TV source via the antenna.

Then there is an advanced feature called Multi View, which you can access by pressing the key combination on the remote. From here, you can split the screen into two parts to watch two different contents at the same time, and each window can be configured in size and position. You can make the two windows the same size or choose different sizes, and specify whether a window should be smaller in the top corner, middle, or bottom corner. You can also adjust the volume of each source and switch the sound so that one content is played through the TV and the other through the headphones.

Multi View function to see two contents simultaneously

Another interesting application is the Ambient mode, which lets you choose images and interactive backgrounds to be displayed when you turn off the TV instead of having a black screen. You can even “camouflage” the TV when you have it hung by taking a photo of the wall it is mounted on, so that the same background is displayed on the screen.

The S95B series features a 2.2.2 channel system with an output power of 60W. Like other high-end Samsung models this year, it supports Dolby Atmos audio format.

The sound quality of this Samsung S95B is more than acceptable and is able to provide audio with good definition, with good clarity in voices and also bass that is quite present. The sound is very direct and doesn’t give the impression of coming from below like many other TVs.

It’s not quite as direct as Sony’s A95K, which has the Acoustic Surface System and outputs sound through the screen itself, but it feels good. Samsung uses what it calls Object Tracking Sound, which analyzes the movement of objects in the scene and tracks the movements. This means, for example, if we see a scene where there is a car chase, the sound will move with the movement on the screen. Don’t expect surround sound, but you do get a slightly more spacious sound that adds to the immersion.

This year also saw the addition of a feature that uses artificial intelligence to detect faces and the position of characters and output sound from that point.

It also supports the 2nd generation Q-Symphony feature, which lets you use all the TV’s speakers and a compatible soundbar at the same time. The experience is spectacular, and you’ll notice how much more immersive the sound is as the S95B speakers support the center channel and deliver more direct sound from the screen. Starting with the HW-Q600B series, you can take advantage of this functionality.

View Q-Symphony soundbars for Samsung S95B

So this is a TV that not only offers great picture quality, as we’ll see in a moment, but also handles the integrated sound with flying colors.

As always, before we begin our picture quality review, we’ll leave you with our picture settings. Following these settings will give you a more natural image with more detail in the highlights, more natural colors, and good sharpness in the shadows.

You also have the option to save an image setting for each source or for all sources. You can select this in the Image menu under the “Apply settings to all inputs” option.

Here are our settings for SDR, HDR, and for use with games.

Before we look at picture performance, we should explain some technical aspects of this new QD OLED technology.

The first thing to say is that, as we mentioned at the beginning, this is a new panel developed by Samsung Display and not like the rest of the OLED TVs (with the exception of the Sony A95K, which has the same QD OLED panel) that have a panel manufactured by LG Display. This new panel brings a number of important improvements that make this TV stand out for its high brightness, wide color gamut, anti-reflective filter and perfect viewing angle, as we’ll see in a moment.

The first major difference is that this is not a WOLED panel (White OLED or WRGB), but an RGB panel where the light emitted is not white but blue, so the blue color is already generated. To create the red and green colors, Quantum Dots are used, which we have already seen on the company’s QLED TVs. However, there is one important difference: in QLED TVs, a film with these nanoparticles in different sizes is added to convert the blue light into green and red light, while in QD OLED TVs, these Quantum Dots are added directly in each pixel.

This is a key aspect, since unlike WOLED TVs that use color filters to generate blue, red and green colors from white light, these are created by Quantum Dots nanoparticles.

The emission of primary colors from QD OLED technology represents the ideal tri-color light source that can cover more than 90% of the BT.2020 color space and 99% of the DCI-P3 color space.

What does this mean compared to WOLED? The WOLED light source consists of a stack of blue and yellow OLED components, with each pixel consisting of four RGB+W sub-pixel structures. Color is created by passing the light through a color filter, which reduces brightness and causes the colors in the highlights to lose saturation.

Also new is the use of three stacked blue OLED layers, which reduce the problem of premature blue subpixel die-off by stacking multiple blue subpixels per pixel.

WOLED is a bottom-emitting display, meaning light is emitted through a transparent bottom surface that has a metallic back surface near the top. This is usually a very thin metal layer made of aluminum or silver, whose position on the surface near the top increases the light reflection regardless of the layer’s thickness.

In the case of the Samsung S95B QD-OLED, the light is emitted from the top and directed away from the bottom layer and the circuitry on the back, both of which are located at the bottom of the screen, helping to make the screen less reflective.

Let’s now take a look at the performance offered by the new Samsung S95B QD OLED display.

The advantage of an OLED TV over an LED TV is that the light is generated by each individual pixel instead of using LED lamps. It is therefore a self-emitting technology where each pixel generates its own light and can be switched on and off independently.

Contrast on Samsung S95B OLED

This has clear advantages, such as pure black and the elimination of halos around a luminous object on a dark background, known as blooming, which is particularly noticeable when viewing the TV in the dark. Even with the new high-end mini-LED TVs, the effect is less noticeable but still slightly noticeable because the light cannot be controlled as precisely.

Black levels on Samsung S95B QD-OLED TV

Although there are TVs like the Samsung QN900B 8K that are equipped with thousands of mini-LED lamps, it is not possible to completely block out the light despite the thousands of dimming zones, and some of the light will always be transmitted. On lower-end TVs that don’t have such advanced systems, this will be much more noticeable, and blacks will look rather grayish.

Pure blacks of the S95B thanks to OLED panel

The S95B delivers an amazing experience for movies and series in dark environments by achieving a pure black while maintaining good detail in the dark areas. For nighttime and indoor scenes, there is a good transition of grays and blacks, so details can be seen even in shadow areas and blacks are not smothered.

One of the most obvious advantages of this new QD OLED panel is its ability to deliver spectacular brightness above what we’re used to seeing from an OLED TV. This increase in brightness is mainly due to the fact that the S95B does not use color filters, as mentioned earlier. Using filters subtracts a significant amount of brightness that WOLED TVs try to restore by adding a white subpixel.

Peak brightness is about 1300 nits in a 2% window in the brightest mode (Dynamic) and 200 nits in full screen mode. These are spectacular numbers and exceed what other WOLED TVs can offer. If you calibrate the picture with Filmmaker mode, the brightness in HDR reaches up to 1000 nits, so you can make the most of HDR content.

LG achieves quite similar brightness levels with its new Evo panels, but only for the white subpixels; the blue, red, and green subpixels fall well short.

The S95B is a TV that offers an exceptional HDR experience thanks to its high brightness, pure blacks and vivid colors. It supports HDR 10+, HDR10 and HLG, but not yet Dolby Vision.

More and more content is available in this format via streaming platforms and TVs from other brands, and even lower-end TVs support this format. That doesn’t mean you can’t watch content in Dolby Vision, since the TV displays it in HDR10 and does the Dynamic Tone Mapping automatically.

You can control the intensity of the TV’s maximum brightness via the picture settings. You have three options for more or less brightness: maximum, medium, or off. This setting enables or disables the automatic brightness limiter (ABL).

If you select the maximum setting, the TV will emit much more light, but this will cause the automatic brightness limiter (ABL) to kick in, and in certain scenes you may notice brightness fluctuations if there are a lot of bright elements and they take up a large portion of the screen. The intermediate level results in lower brightness, but the effect of the automatic brightness limiter is much smaller, and in our case we didn’t notice any change. If you set it to “Off”, the automatic brightness limiter will no longer be activated, so there will be no fluctuations regardless of the proportion of luminous elements in the scene, but the brightness will be significantly reduced.

We recommend leaving the setting on “Off” for SDR content and setting the brightness higher if needed, or on “Medium” if you are watching TV in a brighter room. For HDR content, you should leave the setting on High.

Another important feature of this TV is that it can deliver a larger volume of color because it doesn’t use white subpixels and uses Quantum Dot technology instead of color filters. The Quantum Dots nanoparticles are able to produce greater color richness, so we will see a greater variety of colors.
BT.2020 color space coverage by up to 90%.

Color in S95B with Quantum Dot technology

By using RGB subpixels without adding a white subpixel and a quantum dots laminate as a color converter, color saturation remains virtually unchanged in both dark and very bright scenes. This is especially interesting for HDR content where the brightness is higher, so the colors in highlights do not become whitish but keep their saturation.

However, the factory colors are not very natural and quite saturated, especially the reds, and the faces have a very reddish tone by default. Therefore, we recommend you to follow our image adjustments to get more realistic colors and remove certain wrong hues.

The Samsung S95B is equipped with the Quantum Processor AI processor, which uses artificial intelligence to enhance images.

S95B QD-OLED upscaling with HD signals

Scaling low-resolution sources such as DVB-T or HD YouTube videos looks very good and offers a high level of detail. Faces are rich in texture, allowing you to see the finest nuances.

Samsung S95B manages HD signals really well

With SD broadcasts, the picture is blurrier as usual and the processor cannot perform miracles, but it keeps noise and compression artifacts well in check.

Even with 4K sources, the sharpness is impressive, showing every detail and giving a good sense of depth between foreground and background.

We feel that Samsung has raised the level of its image processing a bit this year, moving closer to Japanese brands Sony and Panasonic, which are always the frontrunners in this regard.

QD-OLED offers a near-instantaneous native response time of 0.1 ms. Modern displays are sample-and-hold devices (e.g., an image is rendered and held for a refresh time of 16.7 ms at a refresh rate of 60 Hz). When the image is still, everything is fine, but as soon as the image moves, the eye wants to follow the movement smoothly.

In LED TVs with an LCD panel, the response time is very slow. QD-OLED is able to reproduce motion with much less blur.

The motion behavior is very good and we noticed a big improvement over other QD-OLED models we tested. Panoramas are completely smooth and jerk-free on this occasion.

With many TVs, you have to turn up the image interpolation to get a smooth effect, resulting in an unpleasant soap opera effect. This is not the case with the S95B, and there is no need to increase the Vibration and Blur Reduction settings to get smooth, jerk-free moving images and preserve the cinematic effect.

As always, you can adjust the settings to suit your taste and the content you are watching. However, we recommend using the settings we’ve provided above in our image settings.

The Samsung S95B is a spectacular TV for gaming as it has four HDMI 2.1 ports so you can play games in 4K at 120 Hz, it supports AMD FreeSync Premium Pro and also NVIDIA G-Sync. Input lag is very low at less than 10 ms and even drops to 6 ms at 4K at 120 Hz, so there’s hardly any lag.

Furthermore, the response time is only 0.1 ms, so it performs perfectly in shooters or racing games with minimal ghosting and blurring.

Samsung S95B OLED TV gaming performance

When you enable the gaming mode, you will have an additional feature called Motion Plus that controls frame interpolation and improves the fluidity of games – something that only Samsung currently offers. Input lag will increase, but it won’t exceed 30ms, so it will still be fine for most gamers.

It has a number of extras like the Game Bar 2.0, which allows you to easily monitor game status and settings, as well as information like response time, frames per second, HDR, VRR, etc. In order for it to be displayed, the game mode has to be enabled and you have to press the Play button on the controller for a few seconds.

As we saw in the Smart TV section, you can play games in the cloud thanks to the Xbox app. Of course, the resolution is not the same and the latency is higher than console games, but this will probably improve in the future.

The S95B series features a new Astra Glass coating developed by Corning. This coating helps achieve perfect viewing angles and maintain color fidelity from any position. WOLED TVs already offer excellent viewing angles, but with this new coating, viewing from the side and color fidelity is even better, and there is no purple tint seen on other OLED TVs when viewed from the side.

Perfect viewing angle in Samsung QD-OLED S95B

In this respect, it is the TV that looks best from any position, along with the Sony A95K, which is equipped with the same panel.

Another important advantage of the new S95B is the spectacularly effective anti-glare filter. You can view it in brightly lit environments with windows or lamps shining directly on the screen without being disturbed. Together with its high brightness, this helps it perform better than other OLED TVs in brightly lit rooms.

Fantastic Samsung S95B anti-glare filter

The S95B’s anti-glare filter is spectacular and facilitates viewing even in brightly lit rooms, which further enhances contrast perception.

It must be said, however, that this filter loses some of its effectiveness when viewed from the side and reflections are more noticeable than when viewed from an angle of more than 60º.

Apart from the matte screen of the new series The Frame and The Sero, the S95B is the TV that best reduces reflections.

As we’ve seen throughout the test, the Samsung S95B QD-OLED is an excellent TV in every way. It’s the perfect combination of pure black, as only OLED can deliver, but now with improved brightness and color.

The feeling it gives when watching a movie is one of great depth with bright images, vivid colors, and exquisite shadow detail. It makes a big impact with HDR content, maintaining a high level of information in highlights thanks to high brightness and good tone mapping. Colors are preserved even in the brightest areas and do not become whitish, which is more noticeable on WOLED TVs.

Other standout features of the Samsung S95B include the spectacular anti-glare filter that makes it unbeatable in bright environments, and the perfect viewing angle that keeps contrast and colors exactly the same as when viewed from the front.

The sound is surprisingly powerful and clear despite its thinness, and the Object Tracking Sound feature makes it feel like it’s coming from the screen. If you want to improve the sound, we recommend buying a compatible Samsung soundbar to take advantage of the Q-Symphony system and thus benefit from the combination of the TV’s speakers with those of the soundbar.

In fact, it’s difficult to find areas of improvement in this TV, but there are some that aren’t very serious, but should still be mentioned.

One is that it does not support Dolby Vision. It is true that the TV reproduces HDR content very well, but more and more content is being produced in Dolby Vision. The TV then uses its own tone mapping, which is sometimes not as accurate as the producer intended.

Also, the covers that hide the cables at the back are a bit tricky to fit, and you have to keep adjusting them to get them just right.

In short, the Samsung S95B QD-OLED is, in our opinion, the TV to beat this year, not only because of everything we mentioned above, but also because you can now buy it at a very interesting price with the cashback promotion.

View Price Samsung S95B QD-OLED

Samsung 55S95B-QD-OLED 55"

Quantum Dot technology, Dolby Atmos, Object Tracking Sound

SEE PRICE

Samsung 65S95B-QD-OLED 65"

Quantum Dot technology, Dolby Atmos, Object Tracking Sound

SEE PRICE

Is the Samsung 95B worth buying?

In our opinion, the Samsung S95B is currently the measure of all things, as it offers excellent picture quality in every respect and also has a very attractive price.

Its main competitor is the Sony A95K, which is equipped with the same QD OLED panel developed by Samsung Display and thus has all the advantages we mentioned. The A95K series has a heat sink and the Acoustic Surface Sound System, which delivers sound directly from the screen. It also has a smoother operating system, though the price difference is about double when you take Samsung’s cashback promotions into account.

Other options are the LG G2 and C2, which do not have a QD OLED panel in this case, but a WOLED panel. Both have the refreshed Evo panel, which increases brightness compared to previous generations, but when using color filters and white subpixels, brightness and color are lower, and there are more reflections. The advantage of these models is that they are available in a wider range of sizes, as you can buy them from 42 to 83 inches.

You might be interested in the G2 series if you want to hang it on the wall, since a mount is included and the screen is thicker than the S95B’s, but flat, so it looks better aesthetically since there’s no gap. This is also a spectacular TV that achieves great brightness thanks to the 2nd generation Evo panel, which doesn’t reach the peak brightness of the S95B, but also offers a great HDR experience.

All of these options will certainly give you top-notch picture quality and won’t let you down, but in our opinion, the Samsung S95B is currently the most complete TV with the best value for money.

Frequently asked questions