At CES 2025, Samsung revealed its next flagship OLED TV, the Samsung S95F. While perhaps the fanciest feature is the very impressive Glare Free 2.0 OLED reflection reduction coating, Samsung has touted two other items: a new 83-inch size option (along with the 55-inch, 65-inch and 77 inches). sizes already available); and the promise of dazzling brightness up to 4,000 nits.
Since in our testing of the best OLED TVs we have yet to measure one that exceeds 2,000 nits of brightness, I had to find out more about it and spoke to Samsung to find out exactly what I was looking for. to wait for.
One reason I wasn’t sure was that the new 83-inch model didn’t use the same Samsung QD-OLED screen technology as the other sizes; instead, it uses a W-OLED panel, made by LG Display. Samsung hasn’t confirmed this, but given the brightness claims, it must be LG’s latest generation “quad-battery” OLED panel.
Samsung says each size of S95F will have the same level of performance, including the promise of reaching 4,000 nits of peak HDR brightness. However, Samsung clarified that this claim is definitely extreme – which is what the panel is actually saying. able to do in real life, but it’s unlikely to happen much. The company told me this could be achieved in a 3% HDR window for a few seconds and would likely require a special picture mode to achieve this.
The most useful real-world metric, and no less impressive in this context, is that Samsung claims all models will be capable of reaching 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness in a 10% window, and this can be maintained .
That’s even higher than we’ve measured on any OLED TV to date, and it really puts OLED TVs in line with the best mini-LED TVs for maximum brightness (at least, mainstream TVs – not like the Hisense 110UX and its claims of up to 10,000 nits).
The full-screen brightness of this year’s OLED TVs also appears to be improved: there’s talk of the S95F dropping to just under 400 nits, compared to around 320 nits for the S95D. The LG G5’s OLED flagship promises a 40% increase in full-screen brightness, which would put it at around 350 nits.
However, these numbers are still much lower than high-end mini-LED TVs, which can reach 500-600 nits of brightness at full screen, which is why we consider them the best TVs for sports, where the brightness on the whole screen is important. in order to make everything bright and vibrant at the same time, and defeat reflections (although that’s what Samsung’s Glare Free coating is supposed to help with).
Is it time to let go of old concerns?
In the past, when Samsung mixed QD-OLED and W-OLED panels on different screen sizes, it gave us a big headache. Take the Samsung S90C OLED TV, which we rated as the best TV in a long time… at least, in most sizes. Just like the Samsung S95F, this set came in 55-inch, 65-inch, 77-inch, and 83-inch sizes – and the three smaller sizes were made with a Samsung QD-OLED display, while the 83-inch size was an LG panel W-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 just had to say that we didn’t recommend the 83-inch size, as we felt the 83-inch LG C3 was a better value value for money considering it used the same panel. .
So in the past, whenever I heard that Samsung was using different panel types and sizes for one of its OLEDs, I would get an instant migraine. We knew the performance of these panels, and we knew they couldn’t be equal.
But Samsung says that’s not the case with the S95F. I was confidently told that the promise of 4,000 nits of extreme peak brightness and 2,000 nits of sustained peak brightness would apply to the 83-inch W-OLED size as well as the QD-OLED size.
Obviously, our goal is to measure and confirm this ourselves – I just hope we’re close to getting our hands on it sooner rather than later, because the S95F is absolutely one of the most exciting TVs of 2025 .
