Review: Samsung S95C QD-OLED | WIRED

Rating:

8/10

WIRED

Excellent black levels. Bright colors. Great for well-lit rooms and wide viewing angles. Center pedestal mount. Remote never needs a battery.

TIRED

Slow interface. Thin enough that you'll want help installing it, especially in larger sizes. Remote is easy to lose in couch.

I don't have any windows in my office. Through sheer lack of funds as I was refinishing my detached garage into a soundproof workspace---high-grade acoustic windows apparently cost thousands---I ended up in an LED-lit cave. So when I review TVs, I do my best to treat them as windows, playing scenes from the outdoors as I work. My fake plants and I have watched thousands of hours of YouTube nature videos, which loop real outdoor imagery in 4K. Some TVs make the content look better than others, but the only model I've nearly been convinced might be a window is the Samsung S95C.

This quantum-dot-enabled organic LED display (QD-OLED) has perfect black levels and gorgeous colors, and it gets extremely bright when you need it to be. From all angles, it fills a room with beautiful pictures, even if all you use it for are videos of waves crashing into a distant shoreline. It has a few downsides (namely the interface), but if you're after the most astonishing screen of the year, this is one of the best TVs you'll find.

Help Required

Two kind gentlemen helped me assemble and place the 77-inch review unit inside my studio workspace, which makes this a good time to talk about modern screen sizes and thicknesses. If you're going to get a model this large and thin, you're going to need at least one other person to help you set it up. They're too large and fragile to do it by yourself.

Photograph: Samsung

Once unboxed and placed on its center pedestal mount (!), the sleek black screen connects via proprietary Samsung cables to the Samsung One Connect box. This provides power and image to the TV, and you can place the box on the back of the pedestal mount or in another location farther away, where you can still use it to connect various inputs and outputs, depending on which of the two included proprietary cables you use. I placed the box below the TV and slightly to the back of my TV stand, where it remained out of the way, but it was still easy to connect a soundbar, my Nintendo Switch, and a long cable that ran to my desktop computer.

The S95C comes with Samsung's solar-powered remote, an excellent bit of technology for those of us tired of hunting around for AAA batteries when all we want to do is watch Succession. (It charges perfectly fine with man-made light sources, just make sure you flip the remote upside down for the solar panels to absorb the light.) That said, you might spend the same amount of time regularly hunting for the remote as you would for batteries. It's so slim and compact it can easily fall between the cushions of your couch.

Getting Started

I'll come right out and say it---Samsung's Smart TV ecosystem is far from my favorite on the market. It makes it inexplicably hard to find already-installed apps, and while it does offer every app you'd want, the implementation on this TV is extremely laggy, if not utterly unusable at times. I highly recommend you grab the streaming device of your preference. Apps ran so much better via Roku's streaming stick and my Apple TV. Surprisingly, adjusting preferences on the TV is dead simple. Just press the settings button on the remote and adjust whatever you want on the classic-style (but still usable) settings menu.

I spent the vast majority of my time operating between Game and Movie modes, which work well to modify the image for their specific purposes. I especially like the low response time on this OLED, making games like Forza Horizon 5 feel more responsive when you input an action into the controller. Those who want the most unadulterated image can switch to Filmmaker mode, or set the TV to automatically adjust when this mode is available; it mimics the settings content creators have set for the media you're streaming, coming in handy on Netflix and other major services.

With a 144-Hz refresh rate, the TV is also excellent at showing sports and other speedy events. I watched a few F1 races with friends at my place during my review time, and it was easily the best-looking TV I've tested for super-fast cars racing around the track. (The stream was limited to 60 frames per second, but the built-in variable refresh rate made everything from my PC smooth.)

Samsung S95C QD-OLED

Rating: 8/10

The built-in speakers, located on the back of the TV, are bigger and more powerful than most I've tested, and they will work as a decent substitute for a low-end soundbar if that's all you have. But if you're spending this amount of cash on a TV that looks this good, I highly recommend you buy a larger soundbar or surround system.

An OLED for Bright Rooms

For the longest time, I've been telling folks to avoid OLED TVs if they have a bright room. OLEDs just don't get quite as bright as their backlit LED counterparts. But this is the first time I can firmly say it's not a problem anymore. Despite watching with a group of people in a super bright room, the TV still looks fantastic, thanks in large part to the quantum-dot-enabled panel. Turn out the lights and things get even better, with the perfect black levels of the OLED display becoming especially obvious in sci-fi films and TV shows. (I watched a lot of Star Trek on this thing, and it made me very happy.)

It's impressive to see Samsung improve on the technology LG has been growing for nearly a decade, especially when it comes to how vivid and bright the colors are on this panel. One thing that's odd is that the S95C doesn't support Dolby Vision or DTS pass-through (two relatively normal standards on high-end TVs). It supports all other modern HDR formats, though, and I never noticed the lack of Dolby Vision as a problem.

Heck, half of the YouTube videos I play to pretend I have a window aren't even HDR at all, and they still look utterly real on this thing. Especially in a large 77-inch size, the Samsung S95C is the perfect TV to transport you anywhere.