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- Stunning contrast
- Gorgeously rich, pure colours
- Outstanding gaming support
- No Dolby Vision support
- Can struggle with low frequency sound
- Some unhelpful preset settings
Samsung’s OLED screens continue to go from strength to strength. No sooner has the brand’s flagship OLED series for 2025, the S95F, shown us a bigger leap in brightness and colour over their predecessors than we’d have thought possible, than the S90Fs roll into town to rewrite the mid-range OLED TV rulebook, too.
The top-line attraction of the S90F is simply that it’s a cheaper way to get your hands on Samsung’s OLED TV technology than the brand’s S95F flagship TVs. Things get more complicated when you start getting into the nitty gritty, though.
Samsung S90F: Key Specifications
| Screen sizes available | 48in, 55in, 65in, 77in and 83in |
| Panel type | QD OLED and WOLED depending on screen size |
| Resolution | 3,840 x 2,160 |
| Refresh rates | Up to 144Hz for gaming |
| HDR Formats | HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ |
| Audio Enhancement | Object Tracking Sound Lite technology via 5 speakers, Dolby Atmos playback, Q Symphony support, 2.1 channel count, Adaptive Sound Pro, 40W power |
| HDMI Inputs | 4 (all fully featured v2.1 ports) |
| Freeview Play compatibility | Yes |
| Tuners | Terrestrial Freeview HD |
| Gaming Features | Variable refresh rates including AMD Freesync (and Nvidia G-Sync via future firmware update); 4K/120Hz and 144Hz support; fast-response Game mode; motion processing; dark area brightness enhancement; superimposed crosshairs; mini-map zoom; Super Wide Game View; HGiG support; ALLM switching; Gaming Hub |
| Wireless connectivity | Bluetooth 5.3, WiSA, Wi-Fi 5, Apple Airplay, TV to mobile, TV initiate mirroring, sound mirroring, Tap View, Wireless TV on |
| Smart Assistants | Built-in Alexa ad Bixby voice assistants, far-field voice interaction, SmartThings Hub, Matter Hub, IoT Sensor functionality |
| Smart platform | Tizen |
What you need to know
The complication comes from the fact that the S90F range uses a wider mix of Samsung’s own Quantum Dot OLED technology and traditional WOLED technology than the predominantly Quantum Dot OLED S95F.
And so, while the 65in S90F we have focused on for this review does use QD OLED technology (at least in the US and UK), it’s less clear cut with other screen sizes whether you’re getting a QD OLED screen or a WOLED panel.
Indeed, in the UK it appears that only the 65in model uses a QD OLED screen, while the 55in, 65in and 77in S90F in the US look like they’re QD OLEDs. That means that, while there will be many similarities between all the S90F screen sizes when it comes to design and features, our findings when it comes to picture quality with 65S90F can’t be considered completely indicative of picture quality right across the S90F range.
Things you can depend on for every S90F, however, are that they will be using some sort of OLED technology, will be powered by Samsung’s latest NQ4 AI Gen 3 Processor (the same one used for the flagship S95F range), will support high-frame-rate gaming up to 144Hz, and will carry regular glossy screen finishes rather than the reflection-free screens found on the S95F.
Price and Competition
The S90F’s mid-range status in Samsung’s OLED range is backed up by their prices, which put them in the same ballpark as the LG OLED C5 models. The 48in 48S90F costs £1,499, the 55in 55S90F costs £1,899, the 65-inch 65S90F costs £2,699, the 77-inch 77S90F costs £3,799, and the 83-inch 83S90F costs £5,999.
| Samsung S90F prices | |
|---|---|
| 48S90F (48in) | £1,499 |
| 55S90F (55in) | £1,899 |
| 65S90F (65in) | £2,699 |
| 77S90F (77in) | £3,799 |
| 83S90F (83in) | £5,999 |
LG’s C5 series use mid-tier EX-grade OLED panels with no QD OLED options at all. Other rivals of note in the UK and Europe include Philips’ OLED909 2024 TVs, which add brightness-enhancing micro lens array WOLED technology and Philips’ unique Ambilight technology to the mix.
Design, Connections and Control
The S90F’s rear isn’t exactly what you’d call conventionally attractive. Instead of merging the panel, electronics, audio drivers and connections into one coherent whole, what we have here is a quirky two-tier look, where the super-slim OLED screen seems to just be stuck to the front of a narrow chunkier box housing all the bits and pieces.
From the front and even quite extreme angles, however, its narrow bezel and super-slim extremities make it very easy on the eye. And who on earth wants to look at the back of a TV anyway?
If you’re not wall mounting your S90F, it sits on an unusual stand design that finds a silvery metallic plate placed on top of a pair of feet placed just a few inches apart towards the screen’s centre. It’s a bit faffy, but the end result looks classy enough.
All the S90F TVs are extremely well connected. All four, rather than just one or two, of its HDMI inputs are fully specified 2.1-generation ports, able to offer the latest cutting edge gaming features. There’s support, too, for the eARC system for passing soundtracks – including lossless Dolby Atmos – through to AV receivers or soundbars.
Other physical connections include a trio of USB ports, an optical digital audio output and an Ethernet port, while wireless connectivity comes courtesy of Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.3.
As usual with Samsung’s premium TVs, the S90F ships with two remote controls. One is fairly chunky and festooned with buttons, including a full numerical key pad, and the other, much slimmer, “smart remote” is more stripped back and comes with a built-in mic for voice control and a built in solar panel so you don’t have to keep replacing the batteries.
A far-field mic built into the TV itself, too, meaning you can control it by voice without even needing the remote.
Smart TV Platform
The latest iteration of Tizen OS that powers the Samsung S90F delivers refinement across the system. There are navigational refinements, both to the picture and sound set up menus. Personal profile support has been improved, too, and there are AI enhancements to the content that’s recommended on the top pages and content shelves. Tizen continues to be admirably easy to customise, too.
While Tizen carries most of the UK’s most important streaming and catch-up apps, it doesn’t currently support Freeview Play or Freely. The various UK catch up services are all supported separately by Tizen OS, however, and while the lack of Freely means there’s no integration between the EPG and live BBC, ITV, Channel Four or Channel 5 streams, the TV does of course have a digital Freeview HD tuner, which does largely the same job.
Image Quality
The S90F delivers a beautiful combination of intensity and naturalism with the standard dynamic range (SDR) content, most of us still spend much of day to day lives watching.
For starters, its delivery of black – the key foundation of any cinematic picture – is exemplary. Dark parts of a film or TV show actually look black rather than milky or gray, instantly making them feel natural and intense. Crucially, though, these dark shades do not come at the expense of faint shadow details.
In fact, the slightly higher brightness the S90F brings to its SDR playback helps it deliver significantly more shadow detail than 2024’s S90D did. This ensures dark scenes enjoy the same sense of detail and depth that you get with bright ones, creating a more consistent and therefore immersive viewing experience.
The S90F don’t get the remarkably effective anti-reflection coating that Samsung’s flagship S95F OLEDs benefit from, and the QD OLED models can look slightly grey if the TV is being watched in high levels of ambient light. I suspect some people at least, though, may actually prefer the glossier look of the S90F’s screen, and the level of greyness that creeps in with high levels of ambient light is really quite mild.
That extra brightness contributes to substantially punchier looking colours, too. This is especially true in the default Standard preset, but even the usually more muted Filmmaker Mode preset has a more vibrant feel.
However, there is a downside, too, in that the S90F does cost the TV a touch of accuracy versus the Rec 709 standard. Tests taken using Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate display assessment and calibration software, G1 signal generator and Klein K10-A colorimeter recorded DeltaE 2000 average errors of 4 (for 2-point greyscale) and 5 (for 10-point greyscale) – marginally above the level considered imperceptible to the human eye. This error level is still low enough, though, to only be visible to professional eyes, and separate colour checker, saturation and luminance tests all clock in with lower error levels of between 2.8 and 3.6.
The Standard preset takes a much more aggressive approach to SDR, resulting in a 432cd/m2 white level that really does stretch SDR far beyond Rec 709 levels. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that greyscale accuracy in Standard mode slides significantly to Delta E 2000 average errors of 14.6 and 13 for the 2-point and multipoint Calman Ultimate greyscale tests, while colour checker, saturation sweep and luminance sweep colour tests slide to between 8.8 and 9.8.
While the Standard preset might not be particularly accurate, though, it’s actually a pretty brilliantly judged alternative to the Filmmaker Mode for anyone who wants to see SDR playback exploit more of the S90F’s capabilities. Its extra vibrancy and punch is delivered while retaining enough tonal balance and subtlety to stop images from starting to look cartoonish or messy. You just feel like you’re getting more picture, rather than a messy picture.
The S90F’s pictures look crisp, clean and sharp with 4K images. And samsung’s latest AI processor does an exemplary job of upscaling HD and even SD sources to 4K, adding detail and density without causing grain, edge stressing, colour clumping or tonal sliding.
The set’s default motion and noise reduction processing settings can cause a little softness and a few distracting side effects in Standard mode, but with noise reduction turned off and the motion settings set to low, motion can look natural and cinematic without exaggerated judder or blur.
Even the HDR upgrade option Samsung provides for SDR sources is quite effective if you really want to push SDR to a point where it’s utilising more of the screen’s capabilities. Personally, though, I preferred to leave this feature disabled.
HDR image quality
The Samsung S90F’s extra brightness comes into its own with high dynamic range content, especially where the 65in model is concerned.
The pure RGB QD OLED technology deployed on our review set delivered a visibly more richly saturated HDR colour gamut than not only its predecessor, but also every other OLED TV in its class. In fact, Calman Ultimate tests show the QD OLED S90Fs able to cover essentially all (99.87%) of the DCI-P3 colour spectrum used in most current HDR mastering, as well as a monumental 91% of the much larger BT2020 colour gamut. Other OLED technologies struggle to get much beyond 70% of BT2020.
What’s even more impressive is the fact that these colours are delivered with such impressive levels of brightness – by OLED standards. In Standard mode, I measured a peak brightness output of 2,000 cd/m2 on a 2% window, which holds up at a still very impressive 1,380cd/m2 on a 10% window. In Filmmaker Mode, the 2% HDR test window brightness drops to around 1,595cd/m2, but the 10% measurement actually increases slightly, to 1,406cd/m2.
What’s more, since these impressive brightness figures are achieved without compromising the screen’s stunning black level, the sense of contrast you get with HDR content is beautifully intense.
I should stress here that the Samsung S90F TVs are still substantially less bright and rich in contrast than Samsung’s game-changing S95F range. But those flagship OLEDs are much more expensive. If you’re on a tighter budget, the S90F (in particular the Quantum Dot models) deliver much more of Samsung’s OLED technology quality than their predecessors.
Not only that, but the extra brightness and colour range you get with HDR sources enhance the sense of detail and sharpness from the S90Fs’ pictures and, again, provided you deactivate noise reduction with good quality sources, and set the TV’s motion processing to low (or turn it off completely), motion is handled without blurring or excessive judder.
Add almost infinite viewing angles, and finding fault with the S90F’s HDR images becomes seriously difficult. The best I can come up with, aside from the previously mentioned slight greyness to dark scenes if the screen is hit by high levels of ambient light, is that it would still have been nice to find Dolby Vision HDR supported alongside the HDR10, HLG and HDR10+ formats.
Gaming
The S90F TVs are beautiful gaming displays. On the features front, all four HDMI ports can handle 4K resolution and frame rates all the way up to 144Hz, as well as variable refresh rates. The VRR support includes the AMD FreeSync Premium system already, and support for Nvidia’s G-Sync system is coming soon via a firmware update.
There’s auto low latency mode switching, too, so the screen automatically switches into its fastest response mode when a game source is detected. This Game mode results in input lag of just 9.2ms – one of the speediest responses of any TV I’ve tested. Samsung thoughtfully also provides the option to introduce different levels of motion smoothing processing if you’re playing a game with a relatively low frame rate that doesn’t depend on ultra-fast reflexes.
A dedicated Game Bar menu screen you can call up while gaming provides access to an onscreen target reticle, a clever system for zooming a game’s mini-map, and the option to raise the brightness of dark areas of a game environment so enemies are easier to see without affecting the rest of the image.
There’s support, too, for the HGiG (HDR Gaming Interest Group) system, where the TV can turn off its own HDR tone mapping systems and let your gaming sources set the optimal HDR output instead.
In addition to all this, the Tizen OS includes an excellent Game Hub section that brings together all the gaming sources connected to the TV’s HDMI ports, as well as a wide range of game streaming services.
It all adds up to one of the most satisfying gaming experiences you’ll have on any TV. The only rider is that you manually need to turn off the TV’s dynamic tone mapping system (unless you’re in HGiG mode) if you don’t want the picture to look unstable as you run between light and dark areas on a game map.
Sound Quality
The S90F’s audio output isn’t as giddily brilliant as its pictures. Its 40W, 2.1-channel system can’t quite get loud enough to totally satisfy on movie nights, and bass can start to buzz and break down a bit under heavy pressure.
The bass issues don’t crop up often, though, and while more raw volume would have been appreciated, the S90Fs’ Object Tracking Sound system does a surprisingly good job of crafting a sound stage that’s at the same time much bigger than the TV’s physical form, and delivers a striking degree of accurately placed detail.
There’s a decent sense of forward impact to the sound, too, rather than everything appearing to happen behind the screen.
Samsung S90F TV Review: Verdict
Samsung’s OLED efforts continue to go from strength to strength. While the brand’s flagship S95F OLED series for 2025 are better, the improvements made to this year’s step-down S90F (or, at least, the models that use QD OLED technology) sees it holding on to much more of that distinctive Samsung OLED DNA than its predecessor.
The S90F’s talents are as effective for gaming as they are for video, and while the sound quality isn’t as outright spectacular as their pictures, the object tracking sound system is seriously impressive. All the S90F’s strengths and improvements are delivered, too, at no extra cost over last year’s S90D .
While it’s a bit frustrating that not all S90F models are built the same, those models that use QD OLED technology, at least, can be considered almost shockingly good contenders for the mid-range OLED throne.
