Samsung S95F (QE65S95F) review: It’s OLED, but not as we know it

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The Samsung S95F is one of the most eye-catching options in the manufacturer’s TV lineup, but the South Korean brand hasn’t always been a fan of OLED technology.

It spent the best part of a decade favouring LED technologies, but its OLED-sceptic approach changed when it developed a consumer-friendly version of a new quantum dot-based self-emissive technology. This allowed it to deliver pure RGB colours without the white element used in traditional OLED panels. 

Samsung has since embraced OLED, and if the rate of improvement it’s achieved year on year is anything to go by, it has invested a lot of time and money to try and take its OLED approach to places other OLED screens cannot reach. As Samsung’s flagship OLED range for 2025, the S95F represents the pinnacle of the brand’s OLED efforts – and the results are out of this world.

Samsung S95F OLED review: What you need to know

The S95F is Samsung’s flagship 4K TV for 2025. In previous years, Samsung would have had a similarly priced LCD range alongside its top-tier OLED series, but for 2025, the S95F stands alone at the top of the Samsung tree. 

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Three of the four screen sizes use Samsung’s quantum dot variation on self-emissive OLED technology. This shines an organically created blue light through red and green quantum dot layers to deliver pure RGB colour without compromising brightness. As we’ll see, the S95F is the least brightness-compromised OLED TV we’ve tested.

The S95F also carries an extremely powerful anti-glare screen filter that removes almost all reflections and provides cutting-edge gaming features, including 4K@165Hz.

Samsung S95F OLED Review: Price and competition

The S95F’s status as Samsung’s most high-end 4K TV is reflected in its pricing. The 55in model costs £2,499, the 65in costs £3,399, the 77in costs £4,599 and the 83in costs £6,999.

The main competition for the S95F in the market right now is the LG G5 OLED. These use a new four-layer type of WRGB OLED technology to also achieve unprecedented OLED brightness, as well as expanding the range of colour such screens can deliver. Panasonic’s Z95A is another exceptionally bright and cinematic WRGB OLED TV, thanks to its use of micro lens array technology and a proprietary heat sink system.

Samsung S95F OLED review: Design, connections and control

The S95F is a stunning television. Its epic screen sizes are supported on a flat rear panel that’s just 11mm deep. This makes for a few nervous moments as you first put it on its centrally attached pedestal-style stand or hang it on your wall, but once in place, it looks like a million dollars.

If you’re wondering how screens as trim as the S95F’s can accommodate all the connections we expect on a high-end TV, the short answer is that it can’t. Instead, it outsources them to an external connections box that links to the screen via a single cable that provides it with power as well as picture and sound information.

This One Connect box removes the need to manage the cable spaghetti that pours out of regular TVs. It’s also designed to rest against the back of the TV’s angled stand neck.

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Connections on the S95F’s One Connect box are impressive. Particularly eye-catching are the four HDMI ports, one of which can support HDMI’s audio return channel system, and all of which can support 4K video and gaming frame rates up to a super-slick 165Hz.

Elsewhere are three USB ports, an RF input feeding into a Freeview HD tuner, an Ethernet port and an optical digital audio output. There’s no physical headphone port; the S95F only supports Bluetooth headphones. This Bluetooth support is backed up by built-in Wi-Fi.

The S95F ships with two remote controls: one regular button-heavy one, and a much more streamlined affair that includes a built-in voice mic for accessing the TV’s impressively expansive and intelligent voice recognition/control system. A limited degree of control is possible via Samsung’s SmartThings app, but for most people, the smart handset or voice controls will be their control options of choice.

Samsung S95F OLED review: Smart TV platform

The S95F uses Samsung’s Tizen smart system. After going through an awkward phase when Samsung transformed it from a compact overlaid menu system to a full-screen approach, Tizen has found its feet again. It still presents you with a huge amount of information, even on its home page, but most of the content that’s recommended is useful and well-tailored to your interests.

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Tizen’s massive app collection includes all of the streaming services the vast majority of households could ever want, including the catch-up services for all of the main UK terrestrial broadcasters. The only absentees are Freely, which enables you to live stream the UK’s terrestrial broadcast channels, and Freeview Play.

Samsung S95F OLED review: Image quality

While the real excitement about the S95F will come in the high dynamic range section of this review, it’s also capable of delivering a fantastic range of results with the SDR content that most of us still spend the majority of our time watching.

Tests using Portrait Display’s Calman Ultimate analysis software, G1 signal generator and C6 HDR5000 colorimeter prove that the TV is very accurate in both its Filmmaker Mode and slightly brighter Movie presets.

Delta E 2000 average errors with Calman Ultimate’s colour gamut, colour checker, saturation sweep and luminance sweep tests come in at under 1.5, while the average multipoint greyscale error is just 0.5. Errors under three are considered imperceptible to the human eye. Outstanding.

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As well as resolutely ticking all the ‘as the creator intended’ objective performance boxes, the S95F’s Filmmaker Mode and Movie presets also prove quite beautiful to watch. They don’t look dull or flat like they can on lesser TVs, and SDR images look stunningly detailed, three-dimensional, balanced and mesmerisingly immersive. This is underpinned by stunningly deep black levels that both contribute to the consistent accuracy of the colours and give everything a fantastically cinematic feel.

If you’re looking for an SDR experience that exploits the extremes as well as the subtleties of the S95F, two enticing options are available to you. First, the Standard picture preset does the best job I’ve seen any Samsung TV do of injecting more brightness, colour and sharpness into proceedings without throwing up lots of distracting excesses or imbalances.

I’d recommend switching the default Auto setting of the Picture Clarity suite of adjustments to Custom and turning off noise reduction with 24p sources while adjusting the judder and blur reduction features to somewhere between their three and five settings. But aside from that, the S95F’s Standard mode breathes extra life into SDR images so successfully and thoughtfully that I think all but the most die-hard purists will find it hard to resist. 

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The other option the S95F provides to ‘upgrade’ SDR content is an SDR to HDR conversion system. This draws on AI to help figure out how an SDR colour tone or light point can best translate into the HDR domain, and the results are far more engaging than expected.

The S95F’s NQ4 AI Gen 3 processor also has AI to draw on – to the tune of a huge 128 separate neural networks, up from just 20 on its predecessor, the S95D – when it comes to upscaling HD and SD sources to their native 4K resolution. The results are consistently outstanding, doing a brilliant job of spotting the difference between unwanted noise in a lower resolution picture and real picture information when figuring out what all the pixels that need to be added should look like.

One last excellent boost to the S95F’s SDR performance comes from its anti-glare screen. This is remarkably effective at soaking up both the general and specific point source reflections you usually get on TV screens unless you’re watching in a blacked-out room. 

Samsung S95F OLED review: HDR performance

Lovely and refined though the S95F is with SDR content, it’s with HDR that Samsung’s flagship 4K TV explodes into life.

The sheer range of light it can deliver between its essentially perfect black tones and the most intensely bright HDR images I’ve ever seen on an OLED TV is mind-blowing. Calman Ultimate tests reveal Samsung’s new TVs can hit peak brightness levels of more than 4,000cd/m² when measuring a 2% window using the Standard picture preset. This unprecedented result instantly rewrites the rule book of what we think OLED TVs might be capable of.

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The brightness reading drops in Standard mode to 3,449cd/m² on a 5% window, but that’s still 400cd/m² more than LG’s G5 produces in essentially the same conditions. At 10%, the S95F’s Standard mode brightness drops quite substantially to 2,334cd/m², while a 100% window in Standard mode drops to 500cd/m². Both of these figures, especially the full screen one, still outgun anything we’ve seen from an OLED TV before.

Things aren’t as searingly bright in Filmmaker mode. Here, brightness hovers consistently around 2,220cd/m² across the 1%-10% window sizes – a number that’s almost exactly the same as the LG G5 produces in its Filmmaker Modes. This is Samsung reining its new flagship TV’s extremes in to keep colours and brightness more in the same ballpark professional mastering studios are typically working in.

More Calman testing reveals that the S95F’s Movie and Filmmaker modes keep average Delta E 2000 errors below three for the HDR Colour Checker test and sweeps of the BT.2020 and P3 HDR colour standards used in the HDR mastering process. Again, the Movie and Filmmaker Mode images look gorgeously refined, pure, natural and just endlessly watchable, as well as hitting the key accuracy targets.

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The Standard HDR preset, though, is the one that best shows off what the S95F can do. Small HDR details like stars, distant lights, reflections of sunlight on metal and glass and the glints in actors’ eyes are portrayed with an intensity I’ve never seen before on a consumer TV. Yet right alongside these ultra-intense highlights – as in, literally a pixel away – you can find black colours that are, to all intents and purposes, perfect, with no hint of greyness or noise.

The Standard mode ups the sharpness too, making even native 4K sources look even higher resolution. Unlike some previous Samsung Standard modes, this sharpness enhancement doesn’t lead to exaggerated noise, grittiness, moire noise or edge haloing problems.

The S95F’s unprecedented brightness combines with the QD-OLED panel’s pure RGB architecture to deliver the most intense and far-reaching colour saturation the TV world has ever seen. Calman measurements prove the S95F can cover a remarkable 89.2% of the huge BT.2020 colour spectrum and essentially 100% (99.94% to be precise) of the digital cinema DCI-P3 HDR format.

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As a result of the S95F’s stellar colour volume and gamut reach, movie scenes I’ve watched hundreds of times look like they’ve never looked before, revealing astonishing levels of vibrancy that hold up in dark scenes in a way not seen with any rival screen technology.

Crucially, the S95F marshals all these elements and extremes with a much more delicate awareness of the consistency needed to achieve the sort of immersive connection with viewers that serious AV fans are looking for. So essentially, the Standard mode gives you its immense spectacle without the usual distracting downsides.

There are a trio of small niggles to report beyond the unhelpful default Auto Picture Clarity settings. One is that if a really (really) bright light shines at the screen, it can cause the typically impeccable black colours to turn a little grey. Another is that in the relatively dark Filmmaker Mode and Movie picture presets, some subtle details can become lost in the darkest picture areas.

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Finally, the S95F – in common with all Samsung TVs – doesn’t support the Dolby Vision HDR format. There is support for the similar HDR10+ format, though, and the TV’s dynamic tone mapping system is fantastically good at optimising basic HDR10 to the screen’s capabilities.

Even lumped together, the niggles I’ve just gone through are pitifully small in the context of what are overall the most spectacular OLED pictures I’ve ever seen.

To test the Samsung S95F we used Portrait Displays Calman colour calibration software.

Samsung S95F OLED review: Gaming

The S95F’s out-of-the-box performance with HDR games is initially a little disappointing. Brightness is pushed to the point where the brightest areas can start to look bleached of detail, and the default dynamic tone mapping system causes the picture to keep dimming and brightening as you run around any game environment that contains a mix of light and shade.

Both of these issues are relatively easily fixed by turning off the S95F’s dynamic tone mapping for Game mode and using the ‘HGiG’ features of your console or PC to calibrate its output to suit the screen. Do this, and the S95Fs instantly deliver what I knew they could: arguably the most vibrant, dynamic and crisp gaming images I’ve ever seen.

The S95F’s high frame rate support, meanwhile, joins with a phenomenally low input lag of just 9.4ms in Game mode to ensure that the visual splendour remains smooth as butter.

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As well as being able to handle frame rates up to 165Hz, the S95F supports variable refresh rates in the AMD FreeSync Premium form as well as the standard HDMI system. It can also automatically switch to its Game mode when it detects a game source and offers a gaming-specific menu containing several gaming aids, such as a superimposed target reticle and mini map magnification.

With all four HDMIs supporting all of the S95F’s premium gaming features, aside from including the ability to game in Dolby Vision, it’s hard to see how much more glorious fun the S95F could deliver.

Samsung S95F OLED review: Sound quality

Despite the ultra-thin design, an eye-catching bank of eight mid-range drivers across the rear of the S95F helps it produce more volume, more bass and a more open midrange than expected.

The TV also manages to deliver a compelling take on Samsung’s Object Tracking Sound+ system. Here, a combination of clever processing and other speakers built around the TV’s frame manages to make sound effects appear to be coming from the correct part of the screen. This makes soundtracks feel busier, more natural and more immersive. Especially if they’re Dolby Atmos.

8 / 12

Long and heavy bass rumbles can lack a bit of impact (though without succumbing to distortions and dropouts), and the sound doesn’t have much forward impetus. Overall, though, the S95F sounds good enough despite its slender frame to make upgrading to an external sound system a luxury rather than a necessity.

Samsung S95F OLED review: Verdict

The Samsung S95F combines the brightest, most vibrant and most contrast-rich OLED panel we’ve ever tested with easily Samsung’s best 4K picture processing engine to date – and the results are nothing short of breathtaking.

Written by

John Archer

John has been working as a freelance tech writer, specialising in soundbar, TV and projector reviews, for more than 25 years. During that time, he’s worked for countless esteemed publications, including Forbes and The Sunday Times, attended industry events worldwide and got hands-on with all manner of weird and wonderful products. With all that experience under his belt, John’s confident that he’s seen more AV technologies come and go and reviewed more home entertainment products than anyone working in AV journalism today.

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