Smart features are provided by Samsung’s latest Tizen interface, which delivers a complete revamp of the system found on Samsung’s 2021 models. The quantity of apps supported on this new Tizen iteration continues to be exemplary, including all the big hitting streaming services bar Freeview Play (though all of the catch-up apps for the UK’s main terrestrial broadcasters are supported individually).
There’s also support for ‘Multiview’ picture in picture, no less than three built-in voice assistants (Samsung’s Bixby, Google Assistant and Alexa), a new Video Calling app (though you’ll need an optional extra external camera to use this), and Samsung’s increasingly curated and useful ‘TV Plus’ roster of streamed TV channels.
Unfortunately, though, the new interface feels much more cumbersome, hard to follow and generally unhelpful than its compact predecessor. Samsung has made some pretty unhelpful navigation choices, too (hitting Exit from the picture and sound adjustment menus, for instance, takes you to the home screen instead of back to what you were watching), and the system also runs sluggishly for a while every time you switch the TV on.
As with all of Samsung’s high-end TVs, the S95B supports the HDR10+, HDR10 and HLG formats of high dynamic range, but not Dolby Vision. It’s a pity Samsung’s TV division can’t join its soundbar division in burying the hatchet (or whatever it needs to do) with Dolby over Dolby Vision, but it doesn’t look like the situation is going to change any time soon.
Fully prepared for the S95B to not live up to the QD-OLED hype, despite the success of Sony’s A95K, in fact we couldn’t suppress an involuntary ‘wow’ as soon as we clapped eyes on the Samsung set’s pictures.
The main source of this wow is the screen’s phenomenal contrast. On the one hand the S95B instantly delivers the sort of immaculate, ultra deep blacks long associated with the best of the OLED world, while on the other it delivers levels of brightness – both in small highlights and, even more noticeably, across the whole screen – that we haven’t seen before on any regular OLED TV. Including LG’s brilliant new G2 series.
Outstanding though it is, even Sony’s A95K QD OLED TV doesn’t deliver as much brightness alongside its perfect blacks as the S95B. So right away Samsung’s QD-OLED debutante is delivering something to differentiate it from anything else on the market.
Basically Samsung, as usual, seems more prepared to take the brakes off with its default Standard picture preset than most rival brands (with the possible exception of Philips). Perhaps especially so with the S95B, given that the company is no doubt keen to push the benefits of its new take on OLED technology since its great rival LG has dominated the OLED space for so long.
Spending more time watching more HDR sources on the S95B reveals that its lust for brightness isn’t, as you might have expected, at its most impactful in white parts of the picture. In fact you feel the impact of the panel’s extra luminance most in its colours – particularly yellows and reds. Put simply, the RGB rather than RGBW nature of the QD OLED picture enables Samsung’s new screen to unlock a level of colour volume that we haven’t seen on an OLED-based TV before. While Sony’s A95K scored its biggest points over regular OLED on colour volume too, its slightly more restrained approach didn’t yield quite such explosive results as the S95B.
If you want to witness the full, actually slightly crazy extent of what the S95B can do on the colour volume front, give the TV’s Dynamic preset a quick spin with something like an animated HDR film or a bright, colourful movie scene such as the town pageant sequence from It on 4K Blu-ray. Tones across the board explode off the screen with a combination of brightness and potent saturations that experience says just shouldn’t be possible with OLED technology.
So aggressive is the Dynamic mode, though, that beyond looking at it purely out of interest, we really wouldn’t recommend that you stick with it. Its colours are so extreme that they go too far beyond the source material, losing the image’s balance and drawing too much attention to make for the sort of immersive experience most people will be looking for once they’re done showing off.
The Standard picture preset that we suspect most S95B users will feel most drawn to does a much better job of still providing plenty of impact from the screen’s brightness, contrast (including superb rendering of subtle shadow details) and colour volume advantages without typically tipping the picture into unbalanced, unnatural territory.
It doesn’t get things perfect all the time, though. While most colours look gorgeous to an at-times unprecedented degree, there can be issues with skin tones. Occasionally they can look too heavily saturated, sometimes in dark scenes they can look too undersaturated and a little plasticky, and now and again specific skin tone areas can take on too strong a yellow or green tint.
There’s another, rarer issue with the mostly spectacular Standard mode, too, in the form of an occasional skip in brightness. Since this usually occurs during full-screen bright shots, we’re not entirely sure if it’s down to some sort of screen protection mechanism or something caused by one of the TV’s picture optimisation processes. You can stop it by turning off the Contrast Enhancer feature, but doing this also robs the image of a fair bit of the punch and dynamism that makes the Standard preset – and, to some extent, the QD-OLED technology – so exciting.
If you’re looking for an experience that still delivers some of the benefits of QD–OLED so apparent with the Standard mode, but with the occasional skin tone and instability niggles largely negated, then selecting the S95B’s Movie preset is a good quick-fix option. It’s nice, too, that unlike the Movie mode on many recent Samsung TVs, the one on the S95B delivers a palpably different experience to the more accuracy-focused Filmmaker Mode, being both brighter and more colourful.
In fact, kicking the Contrast Enhancer feature on in Movie mode is a useful option if you want to get a fairly ‘Standard’-like image without so many of the skin tone issues. Though since the Movie preset takes a more restrained approach to colour, tones in very bright areas can become slightly faded with the Contrast Enhancer on unless you also adjust the TV’s colour space setting to Normal – which can increase the skin tone inconsistencies again.
Following a recent firmware update, Filmmaker Mode does as it should – it provides a simple route to pictures that match pretty accurately the standards typically used in the home video mastering world. Compared to the Movie preset, though, we find it looks flat – but it’s important that it’s there.
Sharpness levels with both upscaled HD and native 4K are very good – though perhaps not quite as blisteringly crisp as those of Samsung’s premium 4K LCD TVs. The sharpness remains high when there’s motion in the image too – especially if you take the edge off the screen’s native judder with a touch of Samsung’s motion processing. Samsung’s default motion settings, however, tend to generate too many messy side effects – choose a custom mode with judder and blur both set to around level three and noise reduction off for the cleanest results, or potentially leave the blur element a bit higher if you want a bit more sharpness.
The S95B’s self-emissive screen joins regular OLED technology in delivering far wider realistic viewing angles than you get with any LCD TV. It also impresses by delivering its strong HDR brightness peaks with very little clipping (loss of subtle shading detail), and for suffering practically no colour banding with video or gaming sources.
Talking of gaming, the S95B is a glorious gaming monitor. We can’t recall seeing a more all-round spectacular combination of brightness, colour volume, sharpness, fluidity and responsiveness from our resident PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles than Samsung’s QD-OLED screen provides. Truly jaw-dropping stuff.
The S95B’s undoubtedly aggressive approach to game graphics can occasionally nudge towards a slightly blown-out look with some titles – Dirt 5 being probably the most glaring example. Changing the Colour Space setting to Auto calms things down nicely, though.
The brightness instability issue noticed very occasionally with video sources crops up with some fast-paced games such as Dirt 5, too. This is less obvious than with video sources, but if you do find it irritating with a particular title, turning the contrast enhancer feature off improves (but doesn’t completely remove) the problem.
The Samsung S95B’s audio is in some ways a pleasant surprise, given how insanely thin most of the TV’s bodywork is. With regular day-to-day TV audio and the relatively spartan talky scenes that actually make up most of a typical movie’s running time, the sound appears clean and nicely staged, with the OTS system doing a startlingly effective job of making specific sound effects appear as if they’re coming from the right place both on and slightly beyond the screen. Especially with Dolby Atmos mixes.
The biggest surprise, given our experiences with other Samsung TVs, is that the sound actually seems to have a forward dimension, rather than everything sounding as if it’s happening behind the screen. Dialogue, in particular, comes out at you rather than sounding swallowed and detached.
A dense action scene or hefty sustained low frequency effect, though, catches the S95B out. For starters, there just isn’t much bass at all, denying meaty soundtrack moments the sort of weight and dynamics they need to convince. This shortage of low-end grunt, together with a quite limited maximum volume, can contribute to the sound starting to lose intensity and impact just when it’s supposed to be shifting into top gear.
Really heavy bass effects can still cause the onboard speakers to crackle and buzz from time to time, too.
If you find yourself sat unhealthily close to the screen when gaming, the screen’s use of an unusual triangular sub-pixel structure can mean a hint of reddish fringing around the edges of stand-out image details – white text against a dark background, say. However, it’s not something we could say we felt distracted by with gaming or video images watched from a sensible viewing distance.
The extent to which we found we had to tweak multiple facets of the S95B’s pictures to get results that feel consistent as well as spectacular is a touch frustrating, and perhaps serves as a reminder that this is, after all, Samsung’s first QD-OLED TV. Certainly we’d like to see Samsung develop some sort of dedicated skin tone processing next time out – or even add one via a future firmware update.
It’s worth adding that the S95B does support Samsung’s smart calibration system, where you can calibrate the TV to a decent degree of accuracy using nothing more than an app on your mobile phone. Also, be in no doubt that while the S95B needs more manual intervention than either the LG G2 or the Sony A95K to consistently get the best from it, the rewards for your efforts are so spectacular – and, in some ways, so unique – that your efforts end up just feeling like a labour of love.
Samsung’s S95B continues the journey started by Sony’s A95K towards convincing us that QD-OLED really is a genuine evolution in TV technology. In fact, by being brighter and bolder than the Sony, it makes you even more aware of the technology’s potential.
Samsung’s more aggressive take can become a bit over-excited at times, requiring more regular tinkering with various settings than Sony’s milder but more consistent and natural approach. When it’s firing on all cylinders, though, which it is for the vast majority of the time, the S95B is glorious.
SCORES
- Picture 5
- Sound 3
- Features 5