At CES 2025, Samsung unveiled its next flagship OLED TV, the Samsung S95F. While the most sophisticated feature may be the impressive Glare Free 2.0 OLED glare-reducing coating, Samsung highlighted two other elements: a new 83-inch size option (along with 55-, 65-, and 77-inch versions). sizes already available); and the promise of dazzling brightness of up to 4000 nits.
Since in our tests of the best OLED TVs, we have yet to measure one that exceeds 2000 nits of brightness, I had to know more about this and spoke to Samsung about what exactly to expect.
One reason I wasn’t sure was that the new 83-inch model doesn’t use the same Samsung QD-OLED display technology as the other sizes; instead, it uses a W-OLED panel, made by LG Display. Samsung didn’t confirm this, but given the brightness claims, it must be LG’s next-generation ‘quad-stack’ OLED panel.
Samsung says all sizes of the S95F will have the same level of performance, including a promise of reaching 4,000 nits of maximum HDR brightness. However, Samsung specified that this claim is definitely extreme, something the panel considers able to do in real life, but it’s unlikely to happen much. The company told me that this can be achieved in a 3% HDR window for a few seconds and will presumably require a particular picture mode to achieve.
The most useful measurement in the real world, and no less impressive in that context, is that Samsung says that all models will be able to achieve 2000 nits of maximum HDR brightness in a 10% window, and this can be maintained.
This is still higher than we’ve measured on any OLED TV to date, and really puts OLED TVs in line with the best mini-LED TVs when it comes to maximum brightness (at least, conventional ones, not ones like the Hisense 110UX and its claims of up to 10,000 nits).
Full-screen brightness for this year’s OLED TVs also appears to have improved: there’s talk of the S95F jumping to just under 400 nits, from around 320 nits for the S95D. The LG G5’s flagship OLED promises a 40% increase in full-screen brightness, which would put it at around 350 nits.
However, those numbers are still much lower than high-end mini-LED TVs, which can reach between 500 and 600 nits of full-screen brightness, which is why we rate them as the best TVs for sports, where the Brightness across the entire screen is important. to make everything bright and vibrant at the same time, and to combat reflections (although that’s what Samsung’s Glare Free coating is supposed to help with).
Is it time to let go of old worries?
In the past, when Samsung mixed QD-OLED and W-OLED panels in different screen sizes, it gave us a big headache. Take the Samsung S90C OLED TV, which we’ve rated as the best overall TV for a long time… at least, in most sizes. Like the Samsung S95F, that device came in 55, 65, 77, and 83-inch sizes, with the three smallest sizes being made with a Samsung QD-OLED display, while the 83-inch size was an LG W panel. -OLED.
The problem was that, at the time, mid-range QD-OLED displays were far brighter than LG’s mid-range W-OLED displays, so we basically had to say we don’t recommend the 83-inch size, because we felt the 83-inch LG C3 was a better value given it used the same panel. .
So in the past, whenever I heard that Samsung was using different types of panels in different sizes for one of their OLEDs, I would get an instant migraine. We knew the performance of these panels and we knew that they could not be equivalent.
But Samsung says that’s not the case with the S95F. I was told with great confidence that the promise of 4000 nits of extreme peak brightness and 2000 nits of peak sustained brightness will apply to both the 83-inch W-OLED size and the QD-OLED size.
Obviously, our goal is to measure and confirm it ourselves; I can only hope that we’re about to get our hands on it sooner rather than later, because the S95F is absolutely one of the most exciting TVs of 2025.
