Samsung’s new OLED TV is the best TV ever. Or is it?

We’re in the camp filled with people who see the way LCD TVs get dimmer and sometimes develop a colour cast when you watch them from the side of the living room, and think, ick!

We’re in the camp filled with people who see blooming in high-contrast areas of LCD TVs, such that the blacks have all turned milky grey, and think, erk!

We’re in the camp filled with people who see the dull colours of many LCD TVs and think, ugh!

Ours is the camp filled with people who look at OLED TVs, which display rich colours, no blooming whatsoever and, in the case of recent OLED screens, perfect viewing angles, and think, oh, thank god!

But we realise not everyone is like us. Indeed, as LCD TVs get better and their flaws become less visible and less bothersome, we see camp LCD swelling with people, and for good reason.

LCDs are a lot brighter than OLEDs, after all (though more on the brightness of this new Samsung OLED in a moment).

And they’re bigger, cheaper and more durable than OLED TVs, too, all of which matter and cannot be ignored by us OLED purists.

All of which is to say, we prefer the new S95D OLED over every other TV we’ve ever reviewed for a bunch of good reasons, but we acknowledge they are reasons that won’t matter to most people.

One good reason we think the S95D is Samsung’s best TV is its brightness.

It’s dramatically brighter than last year’s model, which is very surprising because last year’s S95C was itself a big leap forward for OLED TV brightness. Samsung claims the S95D is 20 per cent brighter than the S95C.

We’d say it’s at least that.

In any event, this TV just pops, and combined with how black its blacks are – perfectly black, due to the zero-blooming nature of OLED technology – the contrast levels are superb.

We’re very curious to see whether the LCD panel on the Neo QLED 8K can match the S95D for contrast. It will be brighter, for sure – the best LCD TVs are much brighter than the best OLEDs – but its blacks won’t be as black, and we wonder whether the overall picture quality will be better or worse as a result.

A corollary to this extra brightness is a new anti-glare layer that Samsung has added to the screen of the S95D, in the hope that people will start taking OLED TVs out of the darkened rooms that are their natural domain, and into the bright rooms where LCD TVs tend to rule.

The very effective glare filter doesn’t appear to have washed out the black levels at all (always a risk with anti-glare filters, given the way they diffuse light falling onto the screen), and it has noticeably improved the viewing experience both in fairly bright rooms, and in darkened rooms where a single light source such as a lamp can otherwise prove distracting.

Also, the filter gives the screen a nice, matte-black look, which makes the TV feel a little less intrusive when it’s turned off.

The third thing we like about the S95D is its improved upscaling and picture-enhancement technology.

There are other ways to separate humans into camps, one being to divide them into a) people who can happily watch horrible, low-resolution, 576i or 480p content on a big screen, and b) people with eyes.

We are very much in the “people with eyes” camp, yet we were perfectly delighted to watch 1080p content on the huge, 77-inch version of the S95D. (We tried 480p content, and didn’t care for it. We’re not barbarians.)

Honestly, even standing quite close to the TV, 1080p content looks great, barely distinguishable from content in the TV’s native 2160p format – ignoring the HDR content that’s available in the latter but not the former format – which to us is a very big deal.

Most streamed and broadcast content is still 1080p, and there’s no sign of that changing soon, even as screens get ever bigger. But with upscaling technology like this, who needs it to change?

Samsung says it’s now using 20 separate neural blah-blahs to upscale and enhance the image on this year’s premium TVs, which does smack of “Now With More Science” marketing bollocks to us, but whatever the company is doing, it’s working.

So, yes, for all of those reasons, we’re still in the OLED camp. But we acknowledge that people not in that camp may, indeed, have eyes.

Some of them.