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We provided examples last year in our QN95A review and encouraged Samsung to respect game creators' hard work to make games look as intended, but sadly Samsung has only toned it down a little in QN95B. We took an additional shot of Little Orpheus where the bright green sequences inside the whale's belly almost turn neon on QN95B and made it look as if there is something wrong with the TV. It looks terrible. Also problematic in the default Standard mode is the way the screen clearly shifts its baseline brightness up and down during scenes that feature hard cuts between quite dark and quite bright shots. You can largely fix this by deactivating the TV’s Contrast Enhancer feature - but doing so costs the preset some of the aggressive richness and contrast that I suspect many viewers will most like about it. Driving all these tiny LEDs and local dimming zones, along with other key features of premium 4K TVs such as noise handling, motion processing, HDR tone mapping and colour management, is a new version of Samsung’s Neural Quantum 4K processor that now draws on the pool of knowledge assembled by an impressive 20 different neural networks.
For HDR, we have switched from a standard 10% window to a 9% window for measurement, which simply means that our test pattern now takes up 9% of the screen as opposed to 10% – nothing else was changed. As recently highlighted by Vincent Teoh of HDTVTest, Samsung TVs recognize a 10% window (that reviewers and calibrators typically use) after which it adjusts its picture output to make measurements appear more accurate than the picture actually is. This can only be defined an orchestrated effort to mislead reviewers – deliberate cheating. Previous Samsung TVs only supported passthrough of Dolby Atmos via HDMI and passthrough from a few apps such as Netflix (sometimes, not always). The bitstream would get pulled down from the streaming server and passed on to a Atmos-compatible receiver/soundbar for decoding on the external device.However, the refresh does not represent a step forward in our opinion and Tizen still doesn't feel like a vibrant and inviting TV platform like Google's Android TV or Apple's tvOS. Instead the latest version feels more like a way for Samsung to tighten control of its Smart TVs and which partners have access to its platform and customers, in an effort to increase earnings through targeted ads and sponsored content. And that's a shame. The TV’s sides have obviously become slimmer as a result of the reduced depth, but what there is of them still look glamorous thanks to their silvery metallic finish. Samsung’s Tizen-based smart system happily includes pretty much every streaming service you’ve ever heard of, plus plenty more you probably haven’t. The only notable absentee is Freeview Play in the UK – though while this robs you of Freeview Play’s handy browsing and organisational skills, the catch up services for the terrestrial broadcasters Freeview Play works with are all still present in stand-alone versions. Samsung has completely revamped its smart interface and system for its 2022 TVs... but we wish it hadn’t. We won’t cover everything that troubled us about the new Tizen TV interface here for fear of you losing interest before you get to the all-important picture and sound stuff.
For HDR, we have included measurements of the different HDR picture modes (with 9% windows) below and in the table to the right. We also adjusted our HDR workflow in other ways (which is why the graphs look a little different from normal) to make sure that the Samsung TV did not detect our test patterns based on other parameters. Ultimately it seemed to react only to the window size. As you can see, none of the built-in HDR picture modes are accurate. Its biggest strength is how accurately the OTS system places sound effects. If two people are talking to each other from either side of the screen, for instance, you will hear one speaker’s voice coming from the correct place on the left, while the other voice appears to come from the correct place on the right. Even more cleverly, if either or both talkers start moving around the screen as they speak, the sound of their words moves with them. Winner: S95B is better on color reproduction and shadow details, the QN95B is better on highlight Conclusion The TV can reproduce a passable amount of bass without succumbing to buzzing or breakdown, too, and fine audio details are plentiful and reasonably clean.As with LG’s webOS when it went from an overlaid menu approach to a full screen system, Samsung’s switch to a full-screen look for its Tizen-based smart OS hasn’t been plain sailing. The first go at it last year really wasn’t helpful at all, feeling sluggish, hard to navigate and poorly focused when it came to helping you get to content you wanted to watch (unless you made good use of its voice recognition features, anyway). Subscriptions required. Some apps may not be available at launch. 3rd party content providers may remove apps from the Smart TV platform or stop updating them at any time. The Standard preset can cause minor sparklies in some very small details, such as Dune’s swirling sands, and occasionally a dark scene can look a little brighter than it should, exposing noise in the mastering that should have remained hidden. Bass feels a bit compressed and limited, though, despite the presence of an array of large drivers firing out of the TV’s rear, and there’s not quite enough impact or presence from the sound to make it a real audio A lister.
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