Samsung QN90A  TV Review

The Samsung QN90A has a premium design that looks very similar to the Samsung Q90/Q90T QLED, except it's much thinner. It has a clean look with thin bezels that look good in any setup, and it's what you expect from a premium TV.

The TV is a bit wobbly on the metal stand, but it's not too noticeable. The center-mounted stand also elevates the screen high enough off the table so that you can place a soundbar in front and not worry about blocking your view.

Footprint of the 55 inch TV: 11.8" x 9.2".

The back is made of an etched plastic panel and there are tracks for cable management. The inputs are side-facing, but because they're set into the TV with a wall around them, they're hard to reach if you wall-mount the TV.

The Samsung QN90A is an extremely thin TV, even with the inputs built-in. It'll sit flush against a wall when wall-mounted.

The Samsung QN90A's build quality is fantastic. Although the entire TV, except for the stand, is made of plastic, it feels very solid and well-put-together. The textured plastic feels premium. There aren't any obvious issues or loose parts, which is what you'd expect from a high-end model. It's a bit wobbly on the stand, but that's because the panel is so thin and easy to move, and it won't be an issue unless you regularly move your TV around.

The Samsung QN90A has an excellent contrast ratio. Although its native contrast is lower than most VA panel TVs due to the 'Ultra Viewing Angle' layer, its local dimming feature helps it display remarkably deep blacks.

The Samsung 55QN90A has remarkable HDR brightness. Small highlights stand out the way they are expected to, but in SDR, large areas are less bright due to the aggressive ABL. Surprisingly, real content gets even brighter than the test slides, so this TV delivers an impactful HDR experience. Real scenes are brighter than the Samsung QN90B QLED, but small highlights in dark scenes aren't as bright.

The EOTF follows the target PQ curve fairly well, but the overall image looks brighter than intended. It has a slow roll-off at its peak brightness, meaning you won't lose details in bright objects. If you still find the image too dim, then set Contrast Enhancer to 'High' and ST.2084 to its max. This results in a noticeably brighter image, as you can see in this EOTF, but it doesn't change the peak luminosity.

These results are from the 'Movie HDR' Picture Mode with Local Dimming on 'High', and Brightness and Contrast at their max, with all other image processing disabled.

The HDR brightness in Game Mode is incredible. It's only slightly more dim than outside of Game Mode, and it's still bright enough to make highlights stand out in HDR games. There's no frame dimming with small highlights either, but you have to update the TV to its latest firmware to be like that.

The EOTF follows the target better than outside of Game Mode, but some bright scenes are still over-brightened. You can make it brighter by using the same settings as outside of Game Mode.

These results are with Game Mode enabled, Local Dimming on 'High', Brightness and Contrast at their max, Color Tone set to 'Warm2', Sharpness at '0', and Color Gamut on 'Auto'. There's a new Game HDR setting, and it's meant to optimize the brightness according to the content. It resulted in a less bright image than originally tested, but feel free to enable it if you find it looks better with your game.

The Samsung QN90A has outstanding SDR brightness, and it gets much brighter than the Sony X95J. It easily gets bright enough to combat glare in well-lit rooms. However, the Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL) causes large areas of bright colors, like in a hockey or basketball broadcast, to be more dim.

These results are from after calibration in the 'Movie' Picture Mode with Color Tone set to 'Warm2', Brightness to its max, and Local Dimming on 'High'.

If you want the brightest image possible and don't mind losing some image accuracy, set the Picture Mode to 'Dynamic' with Color Tone on 'Standard'. It reaches 1,511 cd/m² in the 10% window using these settings.

The Samsung QN90A displays an excellent wide color gamut for HDR content. It has exceptional coverage of the DCI-P3 color space used in most HDR content. It even has decent coverage of the Rec. 2020 color space, which is important because more content will start to come out with this color space.

The Samsung QN90A has a great color volume. It displays bright and dark colors well, thanks to its high peak brightness and contrast ratio, meaning colors look vivid and highlights pop.

The Samsung QN90A has exceptional out-of-the-box accuracy, so you won't need to calibrate it for the best accuracy possible. Any white balance and color inaccuracies can't be spotted by the human eye, and the color temperature is close to the 6500K target. Gamma follows the target curve well overall, but dark scenes are too dark, and bright scenes are over-brightened, but neither are too noticeable.

The accuracy post-calibration is remarkable. Gamma now follows the target curve a lot better and the color temperature is even closer to the target.

You can see the recommended settings here.

This TV has decent gray uniformity. The edges of the screen are slightly darker than the rest of the screen, and there's dirty screen effect in the center, which gets distracting during sports. Luckily, uniformity is much improved in near-dark scenes.

The black uniformity is fantastic. It displays deep blacks, and there's only minimal blooming around the center cross with local dimming enabled. However, without it, the screen looks blue-ish, and there's a bit of clouding.

The Samsung QN90A has a decent viewing angle thanks to Samsung's 'Ultra Viewing Angle' technology. The image remains accurate when viewing from the side, but you'll see that the screen looks darker at really wide angles. Still, it's a good choice if you want to watch shows or sports with a few people around.

The Samsung QN90A has fantastic reflection handling. It handles external light sources well, but light scatters across the screen, creating a rainbow-like effect. It can be distracting during dim or dark scenes, as even indirect and dim light sources can cause this rainbow-like effect. However, it gets bright enough to fight glare with bright scenes, meaning they won't be as much of an issue.

480p content like DVDs is upscaled without any issues.

The Samsung QN90A uses a BGR sub-pixel layout, which negatively impacts how it displays text when using the TV as a PC monitor. You can read more about that here. The pixels look a bit blurry due to the 'Ultra Viewing Angle' layer.

The Samsung QN90A has an excellent response time. For the most part, motion looks smooth, and there's minimal blur. However, there's some overshoot in the darker transitions, which leads to inverse ghosting, as seen with the trailing letter R, but it's not distracting.

The Samsung QN90A uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight. It flickers at such a high frequency that you won't notice it. However, the flicker frequency drops to 120Hz in the 'Dynamic', 'Natural', 'Standard', and 'Filmmaker' Picture Modes, or if you enable the Game Mode or Picture Clarity settings, but it flickers again at 960Hz with VRR enabled. This low flicker frequency can cause headaches if you're sensitive to flicker, and it also causes image duplications with 60Hz content.

The Samsung QN90A has a backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion, to reduce persistence blur. You can make it flicker at either 60Hz or 120Hz, and it helps reduce persistence blur, but it also introduces some image duplication. You can see that there's a duplicate R trailing the RTINGS logo. Note that the BFI scoring is based on whether it can flicker at 60Hz and 120Hz and not the actual performance.

The Samsung QN90A has a motion interpolation feature. It can interpolate 30 fps and 60 fps content up to 120 fps, known as the 'Soap Opera Effect'. It works properly in slow scenes, but many small artifacts appear when there are fast-moving objects on the screen. It can get distracting during busy scenes.

Due to the fast response time, lower-frame-rate content appears to stutter as each frame is held on longer. If it bothers you, try enabling the motion interpolation feature.

The Samsung QN90A automatically removes judder from all sources, and there aren't any settings you need to enable. It helps with the appearance of motion in movies, as each frame displays for a consistent amount of time.

The Samsung QN90A supports FreeSync VRR natively to reduce screen tearing. It works without any issues at its full refresh rate range. Although G-SYNC didn't work at launch, G-SYNC compatibility works, despite not being certified by NVIDIA, as long as you're on firmware version 1066 or higher.

The Samsung QN90A has incredibly low input lag in Game Mode. You can enable the motion interpolation feature in Game Mode, and although it increases the input lag, it's still low enough if you don't play competitive reaction-based games. Sadly, we couldn't properly measure the VRR input lag because it was giving us inconsistent readings. We experienced this with other TVs, and it's unclear whether it's an issue with the testing or the TV.

The Samsung QN90A supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 120Hz. It also displays proper chroma 4:4:4 at every supported resolution, except for 1440p @ 120Hz, which helps it display clear text when you're using it as a PC monitor. Unlike other TVs like the Sony X90J and the Hisense U8G, this one doesn't have any issues displaying 4k @ 120Hz content properly. Samsung uses a different chipset than other brands, meaning you won't experience the same resolution halving issues.

Unlike Samsung's 2020 models, the Samsung QN90A doesn't have any issues displaying content from either the PS5 or the Xbox Series with 4k games up to 120 fps. It also has an Auto Low Latency Mode that switches the TV into Game Mode when launching a game from a compatible device.

Additionally, there's a new feature that you can access on Samsung TVs in 2021. If you hold the Play/Pause button on the remote, it brings up the 'Game Bar' page, showing you whether VRR is working and other useful gaming info. You can see what it looks like here.

Some owners have reported an issue with colors washing out in certain picture modes, like in Game Mode. We tried to reproduce the issue on our unit, but it's nowhere near as bad as other owners have reported. If you experience the same thing, let us know.

HDMI 4 is the only input that supports HDMI 2.1 bandwidth. It's disappointing if you need to connect more than one HDMI 2.1 device, like if you have both a PS5 and Xbox Series X, so you can't take full advantage of them. You can connect an HDMI 2.1 receiver if that's the case, but you can't use the Xbox's VRR support. On the Samsung QN95A model in Europe, which comes with the One Connect box, there are four HDMI 2.1 inputs.

Both of the USB inputs are USB 2.0. It's also advertised to support ATSC 3.0, allowing you to receive over-the-air 4k channels in supported regions.

The Samsung QN90A supports passthrough for Dolby audio formats, including Dolby Atmos via TrueHD through eARC. However, it doesn't support any DTS passthrough, which is disappointing as many Blu-rays use this format.

The Samsung QN90A has an okay frequency response. It has a very well-balanced sound profile and gets loud enough for most environments, but it doesn't produce much bass.

The distortion performance is good. There isn't too much audible distortion even when playing at its max volume, but there's more distortion in the treble range when playing content at its max volume.

The updated 2021 Tizen OS interface is easy-to-use and feels smoother than previous versions.

There are ads on the home page and app store, and there's no way to disable them. They're not always there and may disappear at times.

Samsung's app store has many streaming apps available, and they run smoothly.

Samsung released a redesigned remote for the QLED TVs in 2021, with a similar design to 2020's Samsung The Terrace. It still has the same quick-access buttons as the previous model but with brushed plastic at the bottom. The remote doesn't use disposable batteries anymore, and there's a solar panel on the back so you can charge it that way or with a USB-C cable. The voice control with Samsung's Bixby does most common demands, like opening apps, changing inputs, and changing settings, but it can't search for specific content in apps.

There are buttons underneath the Samsung branding in the center to change volume, channels, source, turn the TV On/Off, and you can also navigate the menu a bit.

• Remote control
• User guide
• Not shown: Power cable and panel covers for cable management