Samsung QE65QN95D

Verdict

Arguably against the odds, Samsung’s flagship 4K LCD TV manages to make a compelling case for itself despite the big advances made by the brand’s own S95D OLED TV models

Introduction

It’s fair to say Samsung has got off to a flier for 2024. Its flagship 8K LCD TV, flagship 4K QD-OLED TV and flagship soundbars have all already bagged rave reviews from this site. All that success has rather piled the pressure on Samsung’s new flagship 65-inch 4K LED TV, the QE65QN95D, to continue the trend.

The big advances Samsung has made to the brightness of its S95D QD OLED in particular have the potential to squeeze the traditional raison d’etre of Samsung’s flagship LED TV option.

Especially as the two ranges cost more or less the same this year. So let’s see if the South Korean brand’s LCD division has managed to rise to the occasion.

Availability

At the time of writing, when they’re only just arriving in stores, Samsung’s QE65QN95D TVs are widely available in the UK for £3,299. That’s £400 less than the pre-launch price Samsung was suggesting a few weeks ago, which significantly means that the QE65QN95D is now £100 cheaper than the price currently being asked for Samsung’s QE65S95D Quantum Dot OLED TV.

In other words, in an eye-catching reversal of previous practice. Samsung appears to be pitching the S95D OLED set as its flagship 65-inch TV for 2024, with the Mini LED QN95D range pitched just – though only just – below.

Possibly because of this narrow price distinction, it doesn’t appear as if the US or Australia are stocking the QN95D. In those territories the highest Mini LED range is the QN90 series. The QN95Ds are available in Canada (online only) and most of Europe, though.

Design

• Cool Monolithic design
• Impressive build quality
• Good cable channelling, but no One Connect Box

The QE65QN95D’s Infinity One design looks and feels suitably premium. For starters its fairly slim round the back for a TV that’s using Direct LED lighting, and enjoys a strikingly monolithic profile despite the TV not shipping with one of Samsung’s external One Connect boxes.

The polished slender side panels look opulent and heavy duty, the bezel around the screen is extremely slim, and some neatly integrated channeling in the rear panel lets you tuck your cabling away rather than having the screen’s sleek lines ruined by rampant cable spaghetti.

The screen is not nearly as sleek and trim as that of Samsung’s 2024 QN900D 8K TV. Nor is the QN95D’s desktop stand as luxuriously built as the striking mirrored item the QN900D screens attach to.

But the QN900D is substantially more expensive, and ships with an external One Connect box.

There’s a potential benefit from the QE65QN95D’s slightly thicker form in that it may give the array of eight mid-range drivers ranged across its rear more room for to shift air than the similar array squeezed into the QN900D’s svelte form.

Operating System

• AI powered content curation
• Support for multiple users
• Voice control

While the Tizen operating system isn’t the easiest to use since Samsung switched to a full-screen interface, the 2024 iteration is a decent refinement on its predecessor in prioritising the appearance of content you might actually want to watch – as informed by an AI-powered learning system that tracks content you like to watch.

There’s also support for multiple user profiles so that different members of your household can enjoy their own personalised menu set ups.

Tizen carries just about every streaming service known to man – aside from the Freeview Play umbrella app that brings together all the catch up services for the UK’s terrestrial broadcasters. Samsung does provide the apps for those broadcaster catch up services individually, though.

One last thing to mention is that the QE65QN95D boasts one of the most fully integrated voice control systems in the TV world, enabling you to shortcut your way to almost any bit of content, app or even picture or sound set up feature you can think of.

Features

• High local dimming zone count
• Mini LED backlighting
• Quantum Dot colour

The QE65QN95D’s flagship 4K LED TV status is built mostly on three main picture quality factors. First, it uses Mini LED backlighting, where the screen is packed with LEDs only one fortieth the size of regular TV LEDs to deliver both more potential brightness and much tighter control over where light goes for every frame of picture.

Second, the 65QN95D boasts 1344 local dimming zones – significantly more than in the step-down QN90D range, or most rival premium LCD TVs. This high dimming zone count is given extra potency by the fact that the dimming zones are controlled by the QE65QN95D’s third big flagship selling point: Samsung’s latest Neo Quantum 4 Gen 2 processor.

This processor boasts an NPU that’s four times faster than 2023’s equivalent, and draws on the combined knowledge of no less than 20 AI Neural networks to deliver better real-time results for multiple picture quality elements – including the local dimming controls, along with superior upscaling of sub-4K content.

Delving deeper in search of more subtle attractions of the QN95D, it also carries an anti-reflection filter. This does reduce the potency of the onscreen reflections from bright objects in your room – but it doesn’t go nearly as far down this line as the S95D does.

Having mentioned the S95D, it’s worth also pointing out those OLED models also get a similarly powerful processor to the one in the QN95D, while not even the QE65QN95D’s 1344 local dimming zones can compete with the S95Ds ability to have every single pixel produce its own light and colour.

Traditionally, premium LCD TVs have always been able to fight back against these OLED advantages with much higher peak brightness levels than their OLED counterparts. With the 65S95D delivering an unexpectedly big brightness leap, that brings its peak brightness on a 10% HDR window to a mighty 1800 nits and more. Is there still a space in the market for the QN95D to call its own?

Actually, based on objective testing there just about is. At its brightest – achieved in its Movie mode, handily enough – the QN95D manages to peak at just over 2120 nits on a 10% HDR window. That’s a peak brightness increase of just under 17% over the S95Ds (and an increase of just under 10% over last year’s QN95C).

The QE65QN95D makes a stronger case for itself with full-screen bright HDR images, achieving a measured brightness of more than 770 nits on a full 100% HDR test window that’s well over twice as bright as the S95Ds are able to manage with the same sort of content.

So while the radiant S95Ds have certainly greatly eaten into the traditional brightness advantage of the QN95D’s Mini LED approach (while also retaining OLED’s self-emissive qualities), they crucially haven’t completely eroded the QN95D’s headline brightness attraction.

Colours on the QE65QN95D are provided by a Quantum Dot system, which should help saturation levels cope with the screen’s high light output so there’s little or no sense of tones fading or thinning in the brightest shots or picture areas.

Going back to interesting features of the QN95D that don’t require comparison with the S95D, the screen also supports wide viewing angles by LCD TV standards, while a new Real Depth Enhancer draws on the way our eyes perceive the real world to gently reconfigure images so that they have a more defined and natural sense of ‘key subject focus’ and background depth.

The QN95D also carries a new Auto HDR Remastering system that uses AI learning to convert SDR sources to HDR much more convincingly and sensitively than Samsung’s first (soon abandoned) stab at this a few TV generations ago did.

The QE65QN95D’s HDR support extends to the HDR10, HLG and HDR10+ formats, but as ever with Samsung TVs, Dolby Vision is not on the menu.

As we’ve come to expect with any remotely premium Samsung TV, the 65QN95D is packed with gaming features. All four of its HDMI ports are equipped to cope with all the latest cutting edge gaming features of 4K/120Hz, 144Hz from suitably capable PCs, variable refresh rates (in the ‘core’ HDMI and AMD Freesync Premium Pro formats), and auto low latency mode switching.

In addition the TV’s menus contain a Smart Hub that brings together both your physically connected gaming sources and all the numerous streamed gaming services Samsung’s Tizen smart system now supports, and you can call up a dedicated Game menu that gives you information on your gaming feed along with a healthy variety of gaming aids.

These include a virtual crosshair, the option to add a little motion smoothing to low frame rate games if you’re prepared to sacrifice a few milliseconds of input lag, and the option to increase the brightness of dark game areas (without increasing overall brightness) if you’re struggling to see hidden enemies.

Picture Quality

• Dazzling brightness
• Vibrant and voluminous colour
• Remarkable contrast for an LED TV

The big question here is does the QE65QN95D up Samsung’s 4K Mini LED game enough to still make it a worthy alternative to the spectacular new S95D? And the short answer is that yes, it does.

Its brightness advantage over the S95Ds is fortunately instantly apparent, both in the boldness of some of the brightest highlights of HDR pictures and, more starkly, in the brightness with which full screen bright HDR images blaze off the screen. Sun-drenched exteriors in particular look phenomenally intense and life like – to a degree only rivalled or beaten by a couple of ultra-expensive 8K TVs.

As expected, the QE65QN95D’s Quantum Dot colour system comfortably keeps up with the screen’s potent brightness, pumping out tones that remain vibrant and rich no matter how much brightness they’re infused with.

While the QE65QN95D loves an ultra-rich red, green or blue primary tone, though, it also delivers subtler tones with just as much naturalism and care, and handles the subtlest of colour blends and tonal shifts with the utmost precision. There are no issues with colour banding or striping during even the trickiest HDR shots.

The subtlety of the QE65QN95D’s colours feeds into a fantastically sharp, detailed picture too. There’s nothing forced about this sharpness, either; it feels almost startlingly natural, with none of the exaggerated grain, laggy motion or ghosted object edges associated with TVs that use over-enthusiastic sharpness processing. That’s not necessarily to say the TV isn’t using sharpness processing (outside of its Filmmaker mode picture preset, anyway); it’s just that the AI-inspired processing is so good you only feel the benefits without feeling aware of really any negatives.

The latest Neo Quantum processor’s powerful AI-bolstered upscaling system does a stunningly good job of upscaling HD sources to 4K. The resulting images look clean, crisp, and startlingly natural, with none of the traditional noise or stressed edge reminders that you’re not watching a native 4K image.

Even fairly heavily compressed HD and SD sources end up looking remarkably clean and detailed after passing through the QN95D’s upscaling engine, thanks to its uncanny ability to distinguish between unwanted source noise and ‘real’ source picture information.

As usual with Samsung TVs, rather mystifyingly out of the box its Auto Picture Clarity setting makes a bit of a mess of the 65QN95D’s motion handling, causing 24fps films to look too smooth, and too affected by unwanted processing side effects. Switching to a Custom motion setting with blur and judder reduction reduced to around their three level, as well as turning off the noise reduction system that’s also part of the Picture Clarity settings, delivers a pleasingly natural looking judder reduction solution.

You can also just turn off the motion processing completely if you’re a purist – and while I personally preferred to leave a touch of motion processing on, turning it fully off doesn’t leave judder looking excessively stark, despite the screen’s brightness and sharpness.

While the screen’s brightness and sharpness initially caught my eye, the screen’s local dimming engine is also capable of producing dark scenes with some of the most convincing, deep and neutral black levels I’ve ever seen from an LCD TV.

What’s more, if you’re using the Movie or Filmmaker mode presets, the screen’s outstanding black colours are achieved without the brightness ‘jumps’ between dark and bright cuts or the aggressive dimming down of small stand out bright highlights to avoid backlight blooming problems that have tended to trouble previous Samsung Mini LED TVs to some extent.

This impressive achievement is made all the more impressive by the intensity of the extra brightness the 65QN95D infuses into bright shots and highlights. Overall, aside from Samsung’s own QE75QN900D 8K TV, I can’t think of any other LCD TV that’s produced such a convincing and spectacular contrast performance.

As with its colour performance, though, the 65QN95D’s push for extreme contrast doesn’t prevent it from also picking out subtle shading and shadow details in dark images to a degree that Samsung TVs have not always previously managed. In its Movie and Filmmaker mode presets in particular, I hardly ever felt that a dark scene was missing any of the subtle details that help give them a convincing sense of depth.

The 65QN95D’s Game mode, meanwhile, contributes to a fantastically bold and enjoyable gaming experience, full of the contrast, brightness and bold, well-defined colours that today’s HDR titles are made to deliver. The combination of excellent 120Hz and VRR support together with an input lag of just 9.8ms in the fastest response mode also ensures that your gaming experience feels beautifully fluid and ultra responsive.

Sticking with the preset analysis theme, while fun for a little while the Dynamic preset’s almost melodramatic pictures aren’t something I’d recommend most AV fans stick with for long. The Standard mode, though, is still eye-catchingly intense without looking consistently OTT for regular day to day viewing. I wouldn’t recommend the Standard setting for serious movie viewing, for two reasons.

First, during cuts between dark and bright shots the settings aggressive backlight controls can cause distracting amounts of backlight jumping. Second and more unexpectedly, the Standard preset doesn’t adapt its backlight controls strongly enough when showing very dark HDR scenes, leaving them looking too greyed over and, at times, full of noise that a film’s masterers intended to remain hidden in darkness.

Both of these issues are resolved by the Filmmaker mode and my personal favourite Movie picture preset. So while the Standard mode’s issues, especially the raised black levels, are unexpected, the key thing is that they’re easily avoidable simply by switching to one of the more cinematic presets. And don’t forget that it’s actually the Movie preset that delivers the QE65QN95D’s highest brightness.

The QE65QN95D’s Movie preset is also easily the best such preset Samsung has ever delivered with a 4K LCD TV, delivering a truly lovely balance between the extreme contrast, sharpness and colour elements while retaining LED’s brightness advantages over even the S95D.

There is a little more blooming around stand out bright objects in the Movie mode than there is with the flawed Standard mode, but it’s limited in terms of the distance it spreads and, crucially, it only appears at all with very extreme content. It’s also the case that even in Movie mode, very small bright objects, such as stars in a shot of space or scary eyes gleaming out from a dark corner, don’t look nearly as intense as they do on the S95D – or any decent OLED TV.

These last two issues are simply part and parcel of the OLED vs LCD debate, where premium LCD TVs make their stand on brightness, while OLEDs make their case more on local contrast and light precision. What really matters about the QE65QN95D is that it’s good enough to maintain the LCD side of this argument despite the aggressive advances made by Samsung’s own OLED division this year.

Sound Quality

• Excellent detail
• Good sound ‘projection’ from the TV’s sides
• Bass and volume are a little limited

The QE65QN95D’s sound is solid rather than spectacular. On the upside, it’s really good at pulling out even very small details from busy film soundtracks, yet also displays impressive sensitivity when it comes to retaining the correct weight between different effects in a mix. In other words, background effects, while always audible, don’t end up getting pushed too much into the foreground.

Samsung’s Object Tracking Sound (OTS) system does a good job of placing specific sound effects in the correct physical location on screen – and, actually, slightly beyond the screen’s boundaries if a sound in the movie world takes place off screen. This sense of sound stage spread extends a decent distant to left, right and even above the screen, with the latter vertical element lending at least a little credence to the QE65QN95D’s built in Dolby Atmos playback credentials.

The QE65QN95D’s sound doesn’t project forwards, though, which leaves it a little lacking in impact and immersion. The speaker system also struggles to deliver the sort of volumes the screen’s big, bright, cinematic pictures deserve to be accompanied by, and while there’s a bit more depth and presence to the QE65QN95D’s bass than we’ve heard from some of Samsung’s more slenderly built TVs for 2024, it still isn’t potent enough to stop big action scenes sounding slightly thin and flat.

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