Don’t Buy A Samsung OLED TV Before Reading This

| Published: Friday, June 17, 2022, 16:11 [IST]

Samsung makes one of the best displays in the market. Whether it's Samsung's Galaxy handsets,TVs and monitors, the displays bring vivid color reproduction and other important characteristics for immersive viewing. However, the latest finding by a reviewer at HDTVTest has put the brand in a tight spotyet again.

Don’t Buy A Samsung OLED TV Before Reading This

The reviewer did a detailed analysis of Samsung's latest OLED television- the S95B and found some misleading results, similar to an earlier instance where Samsung was caught cheating benchmarks for its Galaxy smartphones. During the testing process, the S95B OLED detected the active benchmark and boosted the panel's luminance to up to 80 per cent to show a more vivid representation of the scenes.

The inconsistencies were found in APL (Average Picture Level) as the S95B OLED panel showed livelier than actual scenes while streaming the HDR content. Colors such as yellow or red looked more vibrant on Samsung S95B not because the QD-OLED technology offers a wider color gamut, but because the panel detected an active benchmark and tried to trick the tester.

Did Samsung Deploy An Algorithm To Detect Benchmarks?

In simple words, Samsung was allegedly trying to mislead reviewers and consumers by creating inaccurate color boosting that could be easily mistaken for purer colors. The reviewer found such misleading results by changing the window measurement size, which the smart algorithms by Samsung couldn't bypass.

What does This Means In Real Life?

The higher luminance and livelier color output by the new Samsung S95B QD-OLED panel might just be because of a well-crafted and manipulative color processing technique. The advertised QD-OLED technology might have nothing to do with it. That extra color pop might just be fake. While this sounds disappointing, should you care?

Well, that's debatable because not everyone out there is running behind the actual color representation. Some users might not care too much about it because as long as the picture looks brighter and your colors look lively, the viewing experience is good. That's the whole point of creating better panels, isn't it?

But for professionals like graphic designers, video editors and art directors that rely on color accuracy, the new panel might not be the right product to consume multimedia.

What Does Samsung Have To Say About It?

Samsung did release a statement to the FlatpanelsHD team and said, "Samsung remains committed to relentless innovation to provide the best picture quality to our consumers. To provide a more dynamic viewing experience for the consumers, Samsung will provide a software update that ensures consistent brightness of HDR contents across a wider range of window size beyond the industry standard."

Further, in response to a similar query by 'The Register' on cheating the hardware benchmarks, Samsung said that the company does not use any algorithm for the purpose of yielding specific test results.

Samsung’s History With Benchmark Allegations

It's hard to believe Samsung as this isn't the company's first rodeo with misleading benchmarks. The new allegations reminded us of an earlier incident when multiple Samsung Galaxy smartphones were banned by the popular benchmarking service- Geekbench for manipulating performance benchmarks. The CPUs were forced to run 20% faster to show better performance at the expense of battery life.

In the case of smart TVs, the boosted brightness can damage the TV panels in the longer run. Since the Samsung S95B QD-OLED range isn't officially available in India, you don't have to worry much about the whole incident. You can check out LG's OLED TVs or the newly launched Xiaomi OLED TV in case you are looking for a decent OLED Smart TV on the budget. Our detailed review should give you a better idea of the Xiaomi OLED Vision 55" TV.

Source- 1

Source- 2