Samsung’s S95D takes OLED to places it has never been before
QD-OLED TV | £3599| whf.cm/Samsung_S95D
This new OLED set brings us the third generation of Samsung’s Quantum Dot take on OLED tech – and even though its previous generation already gave us a big improvement over the first, nothing could have truly prepared us for just how much of leap forward the S95D represents.
The S95D is a gorgeous sliver of TV. At a uniform 1cm-deep it’s one of the slimmest, most wall-hangable TVs there has ever been. A slinky monolith that has no right to be capable of delivering the powerhouse pictures of which it’s capable. The bezel around the screen is impressively slim too, ensuring your focus remains on the dazzling pictures the TV is playing rather than the tech producing them.
Despite its ultra-slim profile, the S95D carries eight good-sized midrange audio drivers splayed across its rear. The only reason the S95D can manage to be so slim is that it ships with an external One Connect box that houses all of the TV’s connections and processing. This box means that you need to run only a single, light-coloured cable into the S95D itself.
QD-OLED uses a blue organic light shone through red and green Quantum Dot layers to produce its pictures, resulting in a pure RGB colour reproduction without the additional brightness-boosting white element used by standard ‘WOLED’ screens. All OLED screens benefit from self-emissive pixels that are each capable of producing their own light and colour independently of each other, resulting in local contrast and lighting controls that not even the most high-end LCD TVs can rival.
Where the S95D most pushes QD-OLED forward is with its brightness. Watching HDR content reveals a substantial brightness benefit over 2023’s S95C, despite that model itself having pushed the brightness envelope for OLEDs. With HDR highlights, the scale of this brightness increase looks to be between 20 and 30 per cent over its predecessor, making it the brightest OLED screen to date.
Just as instantly noticeable as the S95D’s stunning extra brightness, though, is how immune the screen is to reflections from your room. Thanks to a new anti-reflection filter on the screen’s front, your common or garden reflections – light-coloured chairs and sofas, loud shirts, faces – are suppressed pretty much completely, even on very bright days, and even direct ultra-bright light sources hitting the screen – sunlight from an opposite window, say – are reduced to faint, highly contained light ‘balls
