Samsung 77-inch S95C OLED TV review – brilliant picture quality and stunning design

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• VERDICT

Samsung’s S95C OLED TV offer a premium home entertainment experience with stunning picture and audio quality and a sleek design that won’t look out of place in your home.

Samsung has expanded its line-up of OLED TVs which now make up part of its 2023 TV range and Tech Guide got a chance to go hands on and eyes on with the S95C 77-inch model.

On the design side, the Samsung OLED is a stunner with an edge to edge screen and a thickness of just 11.2mm top to bottom.

What helps keep the TV thin is the fact the Samsung OneConnect box is seperate and connects to the TV with a single cable and allows you to connect all your sources to the box rather than the TV.

It also reduces cable clutter behind the TV to give it a cleaner look.

Samsung unveiled its first OLED TV nearly 10 years ago – not long after competitor LG unveiled its first OLED panel.

While LG stuck with the technology (the company has just released is 10^th generation of 4K OLED panels), Samsung decided to focus on its LED TV technology and Quantum Dot.

Neo QLED TVs in 4K and 8K resolution are still the flagship TVs in the Samsung range but it is putting its OLED technology on a pedestal as an alternative for customers.

To outsiders, including us, this move looks like a way to slow down rival LG’s domination of the OLED format and expand the Samsung offering to customers.

In the years when Samsung only offered QLED Quantum Dot TVs, it did point out what it called the weakness of OLED technology – like burn-in and lack of brightness – as it fiercely competed against LG who was purely offering OLED and winning customers in the process.

Samsung is singing a different tune now that it’s making OLED again.

And by the way, OLEDs in our experience of viewing them regularly and reviewing them for 10 years have never had an issue with burn-in and brightness has never been a problem even when we watched the TV in our bright and open planning living space.

Samsung says its 2023 OLED is ideal for the customer who has darker a room where they can control the lighting.

This is another way for Samsung to distinguish its OLED panels from its premium Neo QLED range that is brighter than ever before and designed to handle bright spaces.

But the first thing we noticed with the Samsung OLED TV when we sat down to take a look at it was that it had decent brightness to offer a quality viewing experience even in brighter rooms.

And to be clear, Samsung’s take on OLED technology is a lot different to that of LG.

Samsung’s self-illuminating pixels in its OLED panel incorporates its Quantum Dot technology.

And it also has a new backlighting technology so it differs again from the LG formula.

Each self-illuminating pixel consists of three sub-pixels – Quantum Dot red and green and OLED blue – to achieve 100 per cent colour volume at all levels of brightness.

The result is a faithful reproduction of natural and realistic colours.

Whether we were watching Netflix of playing a game, the panel impressed.

It did offer tremendous black levels that OLED is famous for but it was on par with the black levels produced by the Samsung Neo QLED TVs.

With the added backlighting aboard the Samsung OLED, it’s obvious the focus was delivering a brighter and punchier image which it achieved marvellously.

What it also offers is stunning HDR (high dynamic range). In fact, the Samsung OLED TV is the world’s first Pantone-certified HDR OLED.

HDR does all the heavy lifting when it comes to seeing even more in darker scenes. If you watch shows like Game of Thrones and LOTR: The Rings of Power, there is a lot to take in even in the shadows.

We were seeing more detail than ever before. Details we would have missed had we not had a TV of this quality.

Image quality is boosted thanks to the Neural Quantum Processor 4K which looks after the colour tone mapping and image upscaling.

Whether we were watching a documentary, a TV show or a movie, the Samsung OLED handled colour extremely well with solid brightness and accuracy.

Skin-tones were also rendered perfectly as well with everyone looking as they should.

There were some occasions where we could see some grain in the image but that’s more an issue with the content than the TV itself.

On the audio side, the S95C OLED TV also includes OTS+ (Object Tracking Sound) which, through the TV’s eight built-in speakers, allow viewers to track object as they move across the screen as well as hearing every word of dialogue.

And, of course, you have the option of adding a Samsung soundbar which takes the sound to another level.

For our review we had the new HW-Q990C Q Series soundbar which has wireless True Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and 11.1.4 surround sound.

This added so many layers and scale to the sound that helped immerse us in whatever TV show or movie we were watching even more.

The Samsung 77-inch S95C OLED TV is available now and is priced at $9,299. The Samsung Q Series Q990C soundbar is priced at $2,099.

VERDICT

Samsung’s S95C OLED TV offer a premium home entertainment experience with stunning picture and audio quality and a sleek design that won’t look out of place in your home.