Samsung Q95T

The Samsung Q95T pulls no punches to deliver bright and vibrant HDR images From £2,299 samsung.com

he first word that popped into our heads as the Samsung Q95T burst into life was ‘wow’. With a combination of high brightness, QLED colour technology, a new type of backlight system, and a new ‘object-based’ sound system, it attempts to earn its flagship wings. Well, mission accomplished: this is one of 2020’s best TVs.

Right out of the box, we were amazed by how bright and richly coloured its HDR pictures looked. This brightness hits measurable peaks of more than 2,000 nits in the TV’s Dynamic picture preset. That’s one of the highest numbers ever seen from a 4K TV.

But the biggest surprise about its pictures is how well it also renders dark picture areas. Bits of the picture that should look black really do look black. In some picture presets, there’s scarcely a hint of low-contrast greyness to disrupt even the darkest of pictures.

Samsung’s upscaling engine, meanwhile, is better than anything we’ve seen from previous Samsungs. There’s a denser, cleaner look to

Tupscaled pictures, especially where detailing in the source content is particularly high.

Compared with similarly priced competition, it also sounds very good. With Samung’s new Object Tracking Sound system, speakers placed in the top as well as the bottom edges combine with acoustic processing to make sound effects appear to be coming from the respective area of the screen.

Samsung is out to appeal to gamers, meanwhile, with a series of eye-catching features. Select its Game mode and the time it takes to render pictures drops to less than 10ms – the lowest we’ve seen on a 4K TV. There’s an option, too, that adds brightness to dark game graphics without raising it for lighter areas.

The Q95T doesn’t fully escape the consequences of having only 120 dimming zones compared to the 480 of last year’s 4K flagship Q90R. In particular, the extent to which it can sometimes dim bright elements in high-contrast images can be pretty noticeable.

The sort of images that create this issue, though, are relatively rare – and for the whole rest of the time, the Q95T’s pictures look superb. It’s the best 4K LCD TV of 2020, blowing us away with its gorgeous, rich HDR images and deep blacks that can make you forget you’re not watching an OLED. It’s utterly engrossing.