In 2013, Samsung launched its first OLED TV in Australia. Almost 10 years later, it’s back with another. The Samsung S95B OLED TV is proof of the adage: good things do come to those who wait. The blacks are black, the whites are white and the reds are the most stunning reds I’ve ever seen on a television screen. It’s thin, sleek and doesn’t sound too bad, either. But at the risk of scaring you off with yet another usually flippant saying: you get what you pay for. This thing ain’t going cheap.
Samsung knows how to do OLED. After all, you’re probably using a Samsung OLED phone screen to read this. So, let’s dig into the new Samsung OLED TV.
Samsung S95B OLED TV
The S95B OLED TV is the newest addition to the Samsung 2022 range. The OLED comes in 55- and 65-inch models. It’s ultra-thin, is bezel-less, boasts a Neural Quantum Processor 4K and has everything (and more) that you’d expect from a television in 2022.
We first caught wind of the this OLED in January at CES. It’s an OLED, yes, but in true Samsung form, it’s a little more than just OLED. It’s really QD-OLED. QD-OLED combines the best of Quantum Dot with the best of OLED to create infinite contrast ratios, perfect black levels and high brightness levels. The jargon TV makers use to describe what makes their TV better than their competitors is no doubt getting ridiculous and we’ve got an entire explainer on what QD-OLED is, so I won’t bore you with it too much here. The TL;DR is that quantum dots sit on a separate layer in front of an OLED one and emit blue light to illuminate pixels that contain red and green quantum dots. Each pixel is essentially converted into three subpixels, covering red, green and blue, which can be combined to create true white light.
And that’s a perfect segue into how this thing looks.
A picture tells a thousand words
Samsung is positioning this OLED as ‘completing its range’, which means it now has a TV for everybody. But who is the S95B OLED TV best suited for? Neo QLED had really good blacks, but it was never quite to the level of OLED which also has bright colours and really good contrast. This TV kind of has it all, display-wise.
I reviewed the TV overnight during a stay at Skye Suites in Sydney. Samsung had the TV set up and logged into a number of streaming services. As it was 6 pm when I arrived, there wasn’t any daylight left, so this review will focus more on how the S95B handles a dark room with ceiling lights and a lamp. The best way to explain my experience was that the TV created a cinematic effect, with the display perfectly illuminating everything I threw at it with crisp, clear quality.
Of course photos of a television screen are never going to do it justice, but I urge you to consider how incredible the blacks look, contrasted against the detail of facial features, and even the detail in her costume. There’s no inking, diluting or fake colouring that is being pushed through by the quantum dots.
Launching Netflix, the first thing I noticed was just how beautiful the red logo was. It was a sensation that returned a little while later when I started watching The Boys over on Prime. But instead of it being a stunning red logo, it was stunning red…blood. It was so visceral, somehow. I thought I’d see how well this thing could handle the slasher genre, hence the cover pic being a scene from Scream. And oh my. I’ve never seen blood and guts in such perfect, clear, bright, red detail. Instead of taking a pic of that, here’s a snap from the gorgeous kid’s movie, Sea Beast, which shows you what I mean but without that added gore.
The TV knows what you’re watching and selects a mode it thinks is best for say a movie, a TV show or a game. My experience over the few hours was that it had this nailed. I only had to adjust the brightness/contrast settings to see if it could help me with photos relaying the quality to you. There was a little bit of glare overnight from the ceiling lights and side lamp, but nothing to bother me when sitting on the lounge (and nothing turning off the lights didn’t obviously fix).
In the morning, I woke up early to see how the TV handled the Aussie sun. It was unfortunately a miserable day, so the sun didn’t really show up. I then went back a week later, delaying this review but helping give you a better picture (pun intended) of the display when the room is bright.
The floor-to-ceiling windows are unforgiving, the glare on the TV was very present, washing out the blacks a little too much. Inevitable, of course, but although you could see a glare when standing in front of the TV, and my reflection when taking a pic, sitting on the lounge, the S95B OLED TV was still very much watchable. It was bright, the colours were clear and I didn’t even need to adjust the settings to drown out the glare. We’re never going to get perfection as far as combatting the sun is concerned, but the S95B comes pretty bloody close.
A gamer’s dream
After catching up on The Boys, I did what anyone would do in my situation and started playing Sea of Thieves on Xbox. Kotaku’s David took me for a cruise on his ship for my first time playing the game, and as you can see, the graphics are nothing short of stunning.
Sea of Thieves is already known for its focus on making water appear not only wet, but layered and like it was right in front of you, asking to be touched. But the S95B takes this one step further. This is where 4K and the 120Hz refresh rate of the OLED really shines – no lag, no colour dragging, no blurring, just perfection, like I was watching an animation and not playing a game. Despite the console being visible in my pics, I was playing via the Xbox app on the TV.
While we’re talking gaming, however, it’s worth mentioning that the S95B is certified HDR10+. Similar to Dolby Vision, HDR10+ is trying to achieve dynamic HDR, changing the brightness and black levels scene-by-scene, frame-by-frame. Dolby has a bigger content offering at the moment, but Samsung is banking on HDR10+ being software (not hardware) based for its advantage. Amazon Prime Video will give you HDR10+ content. To be honest, I barely noticed Netflix’s HD content being less than that of Prime through this TV. Everything still looks great.
Sounds good, even without a soundbar
The S95B OLED has ‘True TV Dolby Atmos’ built in – this means there’s no downscaling of sound to stereo. I’d like to tell you that you can tell Samsung’s algorithm that presents true Dolby Atmos is working its magic, but I can’t. I can tell you, however, I happily watched TV without a soundbar and I was more than content. It is the first OLED TV with true Dolby Atmos, so if you’re a sucker for things that have ‘firsts’, there you go.
When you turn the TV on, it actually uses a microphone that’s built in to ping a sound (a sound you can’t hear) around the room. It figures out the space in your room – how big the room is, if it’s wall-mounted or in a cabinet, etc, then it calibrates the sound to the space. Object-tracking sound is also very cool. If there’s a ball bouncing on the bottom left, you’ll hear that pounding the pavement from that side and if there’s some blood splattering…you get the idea.
Wireless Dolby Atmos (which started being rolled out by Samsung earlier this year) will also give you a more advanced sound experience, but will you be able to tell? If you’re watching a movie that has action, dialogue and a whole lotta sound, yeah, you will. You’ll also notice when you’re watching a summer music festival on YouTube, longing for a warm day without rain.
As for how all of this sounds? Fine. Actually, it’s better than fine. It isn’t distorted, nor is it tinny. It’s quite good from a TV.
But wait, there’s more
There are a bunch of settings and features you can fiddle around with on the Samsung S95B OLED TV, such as accessing quick settings to adjust the display and sound while you’re in-picture. Screen-splitting also allows you to watch two things at once (with limitations). But, it still unfortunately allows people to display NFTs. I grilled Samsung for this when I reviewed the 75-inch QN95B Neo QLED 4K Smart TV, so for now, I’ll just shake my head that they’re still humouring Web3 die-hards.
The user interface is clean, sleek and easy to navigate. I’m not sure how well it gets to know you, however, as I wasn’t with the TV for long enough to see. This also means I’m unable to talk you through any troubles with setup you might encounter, or just how time-consuming getting the TV to start playing is.
Last thing worth mentioning is just how thin the S95B is. Ridiculous, you can barely see it from the side.
The S95B was worth the wait
It’s honestly stunning. We harp on a lot about blacks being black and whites being bright, but with the S95B OLED, Samsung has made a TV that can do that, really well, but also introduce a new colour to my eyes I have never really seen. The colours, mostly the reds, felt so lifelike, that I could reach out and touch a blob of blood coagulating on the floor of a dark alley. Of course it isn’t just gore that renders spectacularly, everything from Stranger Things through to a documentary narrated by David Attenborough had me captivated, glued to the screen in absolute awe of the quality I was seeing before my eyes.
Given I usually review TVs in the same spot in my apartment, a spot absolutely sun-soaked, it’s difficult to say the S95B OLED can handle all-day glare well with only a few minutes of sun. I reckon it could, but I wouldn’t be comfortable not reminding you I didn’t get the opportunity to truly test this. Aside from that, I have no complaints. None. Except that I had to leave the TV behind in the hotel room and to buy my own would put a massive dent in my finances.
Where to buy the Samsung S95B OLED TV?
55-inch: The Good Guys $3,495 | JB Hi-Fi $3,495
65-inch: The Good Guys $4,495 | JB Hi-Fi $4,495
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