It’s bigger and brighter, but is it Samsung’s best TV?

But the pixels do leak, even on the QN900D, and anyone with eyes can see it.

Alas, that doesn’t leave us all with an easy choice between the two technologies, though, because everything else isn’t equal.

Because it’s Samsung’s “pinnacle”TV this year, the QN900D has some features unrelated to its display that simply aren’t in the OLED TV. There are tons of new AI-related features, some of which may be mere marketing spin on older features, but some of which we liked.

There’s a new “Active Voice Amplifier Pro” feature, for instance, that uses AI to extract voices from the soundtracks of TV shows and movies, and then amplify only those voices when background sound gets too loud.

We tested that over the sound of a lawnmower, and it made all the difference to following the show. (The feature only appeared to work when listening via the TV’s speakers, however, and not through soundbars, which is odd. But Samsung says it sells soundbars that feature AVAP, too, which I guess means they want you to upgrade your soundbar.)

But the biggest inequality between Samsung’s OLED technology and its LCD technology is size.

The biggest S95D OLED TV is 77 inches, and the biggest QN900D LCD TV is 85 inches. Many of you will stop reading right there because that’s all you need to know. Size matters.

Also, the sharpest Samsung OLED has a 4K resolution (though LG sells an 8K resolution OLED TV for $50,000), whereas the sharpest Samsung LCD, the TV we’re reviewing here, has an 8K resolution.

We’re not convinced 8K versus 4K resolution matters much at screen sizes of less than 80 inches, but we’ve reviewed the 85-inch model here, so let’s chalk that up as a win for LCD and move on.

Though, it’s not much of a win, it must be said.

To truly appreciate that extra resolution when we were reviewing the QN900D, we had to sit much closer to it than one normally might when confronted with an 85-inch screen. But if you do sit close, and you do somehow manage to watch 8K content on the screen, it can be a little magical. It reminds me of the first time I ever saw a 4K screen, though the way I remember it, the jump from 1080p to 4K screens was definitely more mindblowing.

Keeping in mind that most content you watch on the QN900D will be 1080p resolution, or 4K resolution on a good day, it’s fair to say that most of the time, at normal viewing distances, most people won’t see much difference between a 4K screen and an 8K screen at all.

Certainly not as much difference as they’ll see between OLED and LCD, at any rate. Given the choice between 8K LCD and 4K OLED, we’d take 4K OLED almost every time.

You see, to make lower-resolution content fit on a higher-resolution screen, TV makers do a thing called “upscaling”.

As we noted in the last episode, Samsung’s upscaling of 1080p content to fit on the 4K OLED was superb, and we were perfectly delighted to watch 1080p TV shows and movies on that screen.

(This, we have come to realise, is the key to happiness in life. If you don’t like upscaled 1080p TV, then you might as well give up now, because there’s no sign of it going away any time soon.)

Likewise, Samsung’s upscaling of 1080p to fit on this episode’s 8K LCD screen is fantastic.

Technically, it’s a much bigger feat upscaling from 1080p to 8K than to 4K. To achieve the latter, you have to magnify every pixel only four times, somehow without losing detail or sharpness. To achieve the former, you have to magnify every pixel by a factor of 16!

It’s impressive that it works at all. It’s a miracle that it works so well.

To make it work so well on the QN900D, Samsung claims to have done some fancy generative AI trickery that pulls high-resolution details out of thin air and inserts them onto the screen, so you think your low-resolution Netflix show is suddenly high-resolution.

Whether that’s anything more than a cynical marketing claim cashing in on all the AI excitement, we can’t tell. We were hoping that the putative AI might rescue old 480p content – a sure sign that something genuinely new was at play – but it didn’t.

In any event, the upscaling is very good, and watching 1080p Netflix content on the 8K screen was just as enjoyable as watching it on the 4K screen last month.

All of which is to say, once you factor in all the real-world constraints, the top resolution of Samsung’s OLED technology versus the top resolution of its LCD technology is kind of a tie: 4K, 8K, it’s all great.

Moving on to the last way in which LCD is not equal to OLED: the brightest Samsung LCD TV, the QN900D, is maybe 30 to 40 per cent brighter than the brightest Samsung OLED TV, the S95D.

(Samsung doesn’t release brightness figures for its TVs any more, but anyone with eyes in their head can see the LCD TV is brighter, and looking at the analysis available on the internet, it looks to be around 30 or 40 per cent brighter, depending on the test.)

Whether you should care about such a difference is up to you. We don’t, not as much as we care about the defects in LCD technology, and the absence of them in OLED technology.

In fairness, most of the historical defects in LCD are now eliminated. The viewing angles on the QN900D are great. Colours are rich and saturated. (The skin tones on the QN900D, something we care about a great deal, are sublime.) For the most part, the image on the QN900D looks every bit as good as the image on the S95D, only bigger and brighter.

But the LCD pixels still leak backlighting, meaning the blacks are never quite as black as the blacks on the S95D, and especially not when they are bang up against bright whites and the white pixels are leaking all over the black pixels to turn them grey.

To stanch this hideous ooze of grey, TV makers use “dimming zones”, which turn off the backlighting in some areas while turning it on in others, so that only areas on the screen near the zones that are turned on will get splattered with ooze. (OK, I’m getting carried away now, such is my preference for OLED. It’s not real ooze. It’s just light where it shouldn’t be.)

Judging from the size of a “hot” dimming zone in the QN900D we reviewed (a rare defect that Samsung says would be covered by warranty), our guess is the 85-inch QN900D has around 2500 dimming zones.

That’s a good number, and it means you won’t actually notice the ooze most of the time. Subtitles, a common vector of ooze, were ooze-free in all our tests of the QN900D, as were the black bars above and below widescreen movies.

There were plenty of times when the LCD blacks weren’t fully OLED black, but it was rare to see the ooze splatter, unless we hit a settings button or something, and an operating system icon oozed out onto the image beneath it.

Still, as my dermatologist always tells me, the only thing better than rare ooze is no ooze at all, so it’s a win for OLED – just as we predicted in the first episode.