Samsung 77-Inch S95D 4K OLED TV

Samsung seems to have effectively solved one of the biggest weaknesses of OLED TVs: low brightness. Its new flagship S95D TV can put out as much light as a very good LED TV (under the right circumstances) while retaining the same fantastic color, contrast, and deep, detailed shadows OLED panels are capable of. It’s quite expensive at $4,599 for the 77-inch model we tested and $3,399 for the more common 65-inch version, but its picture quality, sleek design, and strong feature set earn it our Editors’ Choice award for high-end OLED TVs. 

Design: A (Sort Of) Floating Panel

The OLED panel is everything on the S95D, and the TV is designed to highlight it while making every element that isn't the screen almost invisible. It's less than a centimeter thick, framed by only a narrow band of dark gray metal. The screen sits on a flat, gray metal stand with a V-shaped profile, giving the impression that it's floating over a clean metal surface. It can also be mounted on the wall.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Samsung's OneConnect box furthers the clean, screen-forward look by putting all of the TV's connections in a separate component connected to the screen through one thin wire. It's a flat, square black plastic box with ridges along the sides, reminiscent of a PlayStation 2. In addition to the connector for the cable to the TV, the back holds four HDMI ports (one eARC0), three USB ports, an Ethernet port, an optical audio output, an antenna/cable connector, and a 3.5mm EX-Link port for integrating into a custom home theater system.

Like last year's high-end Samsung TVs, the S95D uses the company's clean, simple Eco Remote. It features a circular navigation pad near the top with option, power, and voice command buttons above it alongside a pinhole microphone. Volume and channel rockers sit below the pad, along with back, home, play/pause, and dedicated Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Netflix, and Samsung TV Plus service buttons. More notable, and unique to the Eco Remote, is a solar panel on the back that charges the built-in battery with light. A USB-C port also sits on the bottom edge for direct charging.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Software: Tizen OS Has Lots of Features, But Feels Clunky

Samsung’s Tizen OS smart TV platform continues to be both functional and frustrating. Most major streaming apps are available, including Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Crunchyroll, Disney+, Max, Netflix, Twitch, and YouTube. Apple AirPlay is supported for streaming from your iPad, iPhone, or Mac, as is Miracast/WiDi for screen sharing from your Windows PC. The interface also has a generous game center with support for playing games streamed through cloud services like Amazon Luna, Nvidia GeForce Now, and Xbox Game Pass (though Steam Link for local game streaming isn’t currently available).

You can use Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant hands-free on the S95D thanks to its built-in far-field microphones, letting you use your voice to control the TV itself and compatible smart home devices, search for content, and get general information like weather reports and sports scores.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The frustrations of Samsung’s smart TV OS come from its interface. It’s a bit overbearing, trying to hold your hand for almost every adjustment. Common picture adjustment settings are buried a menu layer or two deeper than they are on most other smart TV platforms. Since the remote lacks a dedicated input button, even switching devices is a bit tedious at first, since you have to navigate a separate menu to find the source until the system decides to push it to the top of its home page app bar. These nuisances can eventually be gotten used to, but in the effort to automate the experience, it actually makes for a steeper learning curve.

Performance: Lots of Light and Color

The Samsung S95D is a 4K OLED TV with a 120Hz refresh rate. It supports high dynamic range (HDR) content in HDR10, HDR10+, and hybrid log gamma (HLG), though Samsung continues to ignore Dolby Vision despite the TV's 70-watt, 4.2.2-channel speaker system being compatible with Dolby Atmos audio. It has an ATSC 1.0 tuner for live broadcasts. It does not have ATSC 3.0 for over-the-air 1080p and 4K.

We test TVs using a Klein K-10A colorimeter, a Murideo SIX-G signal generator, and Portrait Displays’ Calman software. Out of the box, in Movie mode with an SDR signal, the S95D shows a peak brightness of 193 nits with a full-screen white field and 264 nits with an 18% white field, with the typical perfect black levels OLED panels are capable of.

With an HDR signal, peak brightness jumps to a still-modest 321 nits for a full-screen white field, but a very bright 1,060 nits for an 18% white field and an incredible 1,613 nits for a 10% white field. This is a big increase from the S95C (889 nits 18% field, 1,352 nits 10% field), and extremely impressive for an OLED panel. Light output is the biggest weakness of OLED, and that can be seen from the full-screen all-white field numbers, but being able to hit around 1,000 nits while still lighting up a good part of the screen is ideal for most HDR content. It actually comes close to Samsung's QN90D LED TV (1,253 nits, 18% field), though neither is as blindingly bright as the Hisense U8K (2,114 nits, 18% field).

(Credit: PCMag)

The above charts show the S95D’s color levels with an SDR signal compared against Rec.709 broadcast standards and with an HDR signal compared against DCI-P3 digital cinema standards. SDR colors are mostly spot-on, with just a little bit of drift toward coolness in whites, cyans, and magnetas. HDR colors are wider than the DCI-P3 color space while staying balanced, with whites still running a touch cool but cyans almost perfect and magentas just a little bit warm.

BBC's Dynasties looks excellent on the S95D. In the "Lions" episode, a stormy scene shows impressive shadow details like leaves in trees silhouetted and almost black against the dark, cloudy sky. Daylight scenes on the savanna look about as bright as they would on many high-end LED TVs, and fine details can be clearly seen in both the highlights of a lion's near-white neck fur and the blacks of its nose and ears.

The Great Gatsby shows off the incredible contrast and detail the S95D is capable of. In the party scenes, black suits look dark while showing the cuts and fabric textures clearly, and not a hint of muddiness in the deepest shadows. The whites of light shirts in the same frames look brighter than I've seen on an OLED TV, while again preserving details in the highlights. Skin tones also appear natural against the starkly contrasting blacks and whites.

Gaming: Fast and Functional

OLED TVs have proven their ability to offer some of the best gaming performance, and that’s clear on the S95D. Its 120Hz panel can output up to 144Hz variable refresh rate (VRR) from a compatible computer, though it doesn’t formally support AMD FreeSync or Nvidia G-Sync. Its latency is also as low as we can measure; like the S90C from last year, we recorded input lag of less than one millisecond in Game Mode using an HDFury Diva HDMI matrix. That’s obviously far below the 10ms threshold we use to consider a TV to be good for gaming.

Tizen OS provides a very useful gaming mode menu that lets you check common settings for gaming and confirm you’re getting the right refresh rate, and even enable extra features like an on-screen crosshair. It also supports a surprisingly wide selection of cloud gaming services, including Amazon Luna, Nvidia GeForce NOW, and Xbox Game Pass; just connect a controller to the TV over Bluetooth and you can start playing.

The TV only has Wi-Fi 5 and not the more advanced Wi-Fi 6 or 6E, though, so you might not get the best streaming experience possible. 

Verdict: Samsung's OLED Shines Bright

Samsung once again proves it can make a stunning OLED TV with the S95D. It isn’t cheap, but it’s brighter than any other OLED we’ve tested, with wide and mostly accurate colors out of the box. It’s very expensive, and Samsung’s smart TV platform remains irritatingly overbearing, but even so, the S95D earns our Editors’ Choice award for sheer picture quality. If you’d like to spend less, last year’s LG C3 Evo and Samsung S90C OLED TVs can both be found for around half as much as the S95D while they’re still in stock, and for smaller budgets, the Hisense U8K remains a relatively affordable favorite.