Samsung QN95D TV Review

The Samsung QN95D has a very premium design, although it looks very similar to the Samsung QN95C QLED. Nevertheless, it has a modern and sleek look, and the bezels are incredibly thin.

The center-mounted stand is thin and occupies very little space. It lifts the TV about 3.07 inches above the table, so most soundbars fit underneath without blocking the screen.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand: 15.35" x 9.33".

The back of the TV looks great, with a nice textured design to the back panel. There are grooves along the back and through the stand to help with cable management and a cover that hides the cables on the stand for a really clean setup. There's also a connector near the top of the TV that allows you to connect a Samsung camera add-on, sold separately.

The Samsung QN95D has excellent build quality. It's built with premium materials, including a solid metal stand and premium plastic on the back.

The Samsung QN95D has fantastic contrast, and the TV does a fantastic job displaying deep blacks even in complicated scenes with bright highlights.

Unfortunately, like the Samsung QN95C QLED, Samsung has removed the ability to fully disable the local dimming feature through the service menu. To calculate the native contrast ratio, we used this inverse contrast pattern. We took the average black levels of the four corners with the white area set to 200 cd/m².

The TV has great blooming performance, but there's some noticeable blooming around bright objects and subtitles when displayed against a black background.

The TV has decent lighting zone transitions. Unfortunately, the leading edge of bright highlights when they quickly move across the screen is visibly dimmer, and there's noticeable haloing.

Dark scenes look great even in the low-latency Game Mode, but it's a bit worse than in the 'Movie' calibrated Picture Mode, as the blooming is more noticeable.

The Samsung QN95D has fantastic HDR brightness. Highlights really pop out during darker scenes, and the TV is bright enough that very bright specular highlights even stand out in well-lit scenes. Combined with its fantastic contrast, this TV provides a very impactful HDR viewing experience.

Results with HDR Tone Mapping set to 'Active':

• Hallway Lights: 1432 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 955 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 554 cd/m²

Unlike the Samsung QN90D/QN90DD QLED, this TV barely loses any of its HDR brightness when set to Game Mode. It definitely still delivers an impactful HDR experience when gaming.

Results with 'HDR Tone Mapping' set to 'Active':

• Hallway Lights: 784 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 806 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 193 cd/m²

The TV has excellent PQ EOTF tracking, but outside of near-blacks, all scenes are darker than they should be, especially midtones and brighter highlights. There's a gradual roll-off near the TV's peak brightness to maintain details in very bright highlights. This is important for content mastered at 4000 nits since the TV doesn't get that bright, but the TV is bright enough to fully display content mastered in 600 or 1000 nits, so the roll-off isn't necessary for content mastered at those levels.

The Samsung QN95D has superb SDR brightness and easily overcomes glare in even the brightest of rooms.

This TV has a great color gamut. It has truly fantastic coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, with impressive tone mapping; there are very few noticeable inaccuracies. It has decent coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, though, as the tone mapping is noticeably off with saturated green and cyan.

The Samsung QN95D's color volume is amazing. Colors are bright and vibrant and stand out well against bright whites. Dark, saturated colors are also displayed well, thanks to its high contrast ratio.

The Samsung QN95D's pre-calibration color accuracy is poor out of the box. Blues, greens, and reds are underrepresented in all shades of gray except in brighter whites, where greens and reds are slightly overrepresented. Gamma is off-track, as all scenes are too dark, except the brightest of scenes, which are on target. Finally, all colors are noticeably off-mark, with visible color mapping issues throughout.

The TV is more accurate in the 'Warm 1' Color Temperature setting, but this is unusual for Samsung TVs, and the TV does default to 'Warm 2' in its 'FILMMAKER MODE' and 'Movie' Picture Modes. We suspect this might be an issue with our panel and that most users will have a more accurate TV in 'Warm 2,' as is usually the case with Samsung products.

Note: Samsung has informed us that our pre-calibration results aren't normal and that the TV is out-of-spec. We've ordered a new unit from a different retailer, and we'll update our review with the new results.

The TV is easy to calibrate and has fantastic SDR accuracy afterward. White balance and color temperature are all nearly perfect, although all colors are underrepresented in near-blacks. Color accuracy is much better now, but all colors are still a little bit off the mark. Gamma is significantly improved, although dark scenes are still too dark, and very bright scenes are too bright.

See our calibration settings.

The Samsung QN95D has good gray uniformity. The screen is relatively uniform in scenes with bright uniform colors as well as in darker scenes, but there's minor, yet noticeable, dirty screen effect throughout.

The TV's black uniformity is outstanding. Note that you can't turn local dimming completely off on this TV due to a more limited service menu, so the Native Black Uniformity picture is with local dimming set to 'Low.' With that setting, the TV's black uniformity is still outstanding, with only a bit more blooming around bright highlights than with the local dimming set to 'High.'

The Samsung QN95D has an okay viewing angle. The image is consistent when viewed from a slight angle, but there's color shifting, color washout, and brightness loss the more you move off-center.

The TV has incredible reflection handling. Its semi-gloss screen finish significantly reduces the intensity of direct reflections, such as bright lights placed directly opposite the screen, and does a great job of reducing the intensity of indirect reflections, like from ambient lighting.

This TV displays gradients in HDR extremely well. There's some very slight banding in shades of gray and some near-black colors, but it's very minor.

The TV has alright low-quality content smoothing. It does a good job with preserving detail, but it only does an okay job at actually smoothing out artifacts, so there's still visible macro blocking present in low-bitrate content.

The Samsung QN95D does a very good job at upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs or lower-resolution streams. Details are clear enough, but finer details are hard to make out.

This TV uses a BGR (Blue-Green-Red) subpixel layout instead of the traditional RGB layout. For video or gaming content, this doesn't cause any issues, but for PC monitor use, it can be a problem as it impacts the text clarity, although not everyone notices this.

The TV uses quantum dots to achieve high color peaks with excellent separation between blues, greens, and reds. This gives the TV great color purity and allows it to display a very wide color gamut, which can be seen in the TV's spectral power distribution (SPD) chart.

The Samsung QN95D has an excellent response time for minimal blur behind fast-moving objects. Unfortunately, the response time is slower when coming out of dark states, and there's overshoot, so there's some noticeable black smearing and inverse ghosting in dark transitions.

Unfortunately, the backlight isn't flicker-free, as Samsung uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim the backlight. The exact flicker frequency varies between picture modes and with certain settings:

• Movie: 960Hz
• FILMMAKER MODE: 120Hz
• Dynamic: 120Hz
• Eco: 120Hz
• Standard: 120Hz

The backlight flicker behaves very differently in Game Mode depending on the extra features and settings enabled:

• Game: 960Hz
• Game Motion Plus w LED Clear Motion: 60Hz
• With VRR: 960Hz, with a secondary flicker at 120Hz

When connected to a PC, the flicker frequency also varies depending on the settings and picture mode used:

• Entertain: 120Hz
• Graphic: 120Hz
• Game: 960Hz

This TV has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion or BFI. Sadly, it only works at 60Hz, so you can't use it when gaming at 120Hz.

This TV has an optional motion interpolation feature to improve the clarity of motion. It does an okay job at smoothing out slower scenes, with only some minor artifacts present. In faster-moving scenes, it can't keep up, and there are distracting artifacts and haloing.

Due to the TV's quick response time, there's some noticeable stutter when watching movies or TV shows, and it's most apparent in slow panning shots.

The TV automatically removes judder from all sources when watching movies or shows that are in 24p, even if they're in a 60Hz signal, like from a cable box.

The Samsung QN95D supports all three types of variable refresh rate (VRR) technology to reduce screen tearing. It works well across a wide refresh rate range and supports sources with Low-Frame-Compensation (LFC), which ensures your games remain nearly tear-free even when your frame rate drops very low.

This TV has incredibly low input lag when set into Game Mode, which ensures a very responsive gaming experience with very little delay between your actions with your controller or mouse and the action on-screen.

The Samsung QN95D supports most common resolutions up to 4k @ 144Hz. Chroma 4:4:4 signals are displayed properly with all supported resolutions when the TV's input label is set to 'PC,' except at 1440p above 60Hz, which is important for text clarity.

Unfortunately, the TV can't display 1440p @ 144Hz natively with both AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards and instead displays a scaled 4k image. 1440p @ 120Hz works fine on the Series X and the PS5, although we had some difficulty getting it to run properly on AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards.

The TV is fully compatible with everything the PS5 offers, like 1440p @ 120Hz and 4k @ 120Hz, as well as HDMI Forum VRR. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about manually switching to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag.

The TV is fully compatible with almost everything the Xbox Series X|S offers, including 1440p @ 120Hz, 4k @ 120Hz, HDMI Forum VRR, and FreeSync Premium Pro. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about manually switching to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag. Unfortunately, Dolby Vision isn't supported on the TV, so gaming in Dolby Vision isn't possible.

The Samsung QN95D supports the full 48Gbps bandwidth of HDMI 2.1 on all four HDMI ports. This allows you to take full advantage of multiple high-bandwidth devices, like if you own both current-gen consoles and a high-end gaming PC. Unfortunately, Samsung still doesn't support Dolby Vision and supports HDR10+ instead, which is similar but not as widely supported.

The TV has eARC support, which allows it to pass uncompressed high-quality audio from a connected source to your home theater system or soundbar. Unfortunately, it doesn't support any DTS formats commonly used on Blu-rays.

The frequency response is alright. Like most TVs, there's very little bass, but the sound profile is well-balanced, and dialogue sounds clear. It doesn't get very loud, though, so it's not a good choice for a loud environment.

The TV has satisfactory distortion performance. It doesn't get very loud, but there isn't very much distortion near or at max volume.

The Samsung QN95D runs the 2024 version of Tizen OS, which is fast and easy to use. The Smart Hub interface is smooth and has many advanced options, and it's easy to find your favorite content.

Like most TVs on the market, it has ads throughout its interface, and although you can disable targeted ads, there's no option to disable them completely.

The Samsung QN95D has a great selection of apps, so it's easy to find your favorite content. You can also cast content from your phone onto the TV or play videos from a USB stick.

The remote is slim and compact, has quick access buttons for the most popular streaming apps, and is easy to use. It has a built-in rechargeable battery with a solar panel on the back of the remote. You can also recharge it via USB-C if it dies unexpectedly.

The TV is compatible with the Bixby and Alexa voice assistants, and its remote has an integrated microphone for voice commands. You can use your voice to launch apps, switch inputs, ask for the weather and time, and adjust certain settings like the TV's brightness.

A single button is located at the bottom right of the TV. You can use it to power the TV on/off, change channels, adjust the volume, and switch inputs. You can control the TV hands-free with your voice using the TV's built-in microphone, but you can also turn the microphone off using a small switch located on the bottom right of the TV.

• Power cable
• Remote control
• User guides