Samsung QN95C  TV Review

The Samsung QN95C has a very premium design that looks great in any room. It has a modern and sleek look, and the bezels are incredibly thin.

The center-mounted stand is thin and occupies very little space. It doesn't support the TV very well, though, and it wobbles easily.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand: 2.48" x 2.59". The stand lifts the TV about 3.1" above the cabinet, so most soundbars fit in front of the TV without blocking the screen.

The back of the TV looks great, with a nice textured design to the back panel. There are grooves along the back and through the stand to help with cable management, and a cover that hides the cables on the stand for a really clean setup. There's also a connector near the top of the TV that allows you to connect a Samsung camera add-on, sold separately.

The Samsung QN95C has excellent build quality. It's built with premium materials, including a solid metal stand and premium plastic on the back. There's some flex to the back panel, but this is common on TVs and won't cause any issues. The plastic cable cover feels a bit cheap, though.

The Samsung QN95C has fantastic contrast. The native contrast of the panel is low due to the inclusion of Samsung's Ultra Viewing Angle tech, which improves the viewing angle but adds a slight haze to the screen that reduces native contrast. With local dimming fully enabled, though, this isn't noticeable, and the TV does a fantastic job displaying deep blacks even in complicated scenes with bright highlights.

Unfortunately, like the Samsung QN85C/QN85CD QLED, Samsung has removed the ability to fully disable the local dimming feature through the service menu. To calculate the native contrast ratio, we used this inverse contrast pattern. We took the average black levels of the four corners with the white area set to 200 cd/m².

The Samsung QN95C has impressive blooming control overall, but it struggles a bit in more difficult scenes. In very dark scenes with relatively large bright zones, it does an impressive job limiting the amount of blooming, but it spreads bright lights across more zones than necessary to reduce the harshness of bright lights. In more difficult scenes with large, bright areas or multiple small bright spots, this causes significantly worse blooming, and it's very distracting at times. One example of this that we found with real content is the intro to Stranger Things, Season 3 Episode 2 on Netflix.

The lighting zone transitions look good overall, but the TV struggles a bit with very fast-moving content. Zones can't quite keep up with very fast content, so the leading edge is darker than it should be, and there's a trailing halo as the zones don't turn off fast enough to keep up with the content.

Dark scenes look great even in the low-latency 'Game' Picture Mode, but it's a bit worse than in the 'Movie' calibrated picture mode. There's slightly more blooming, but it's not terrible, and zone transitions are about the same.

The Samsung QN95C is bright enough to deliver an amazing HDR experience. It's bright enough to bring out bright specular highlights in already bright scenes, and small bright lights in dark scenes stand out incredibly well.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Movie
• Brightness: Max
• Contrast: Max
• Color Tone: Warm2
• HDR Tone Mapping: Static
• Local Dimming: High
• Gamma: ST.2084 - 1

Setting HDR Tone Mapping to 'Static' delivers the most natural image, closest to the content creator's intent. If you prefer a brighter image, setting it to 'Active' results in brighter highlights, and most content looks brighter.

Scene	Brightness	Photo
Hallway Lights	1312 cd/m²
Yellow Skyscraper	1053 cd/m²
Landscape Pool	599 cd/m²

With test slides, the peak brightness in 'Game' mode is about the same, on average, as in 'Movie' mode. Unfortunately, most real content is dimmer in 'Game' mode.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Game
• Brightness: Max
• Contrast: Max
• Color Tone: Warm2
• HDR Tone Mapping: Static
• Local Dimming: High
• Gamma: ST.2084 - 1
• Game HDR: Basic
• HDR10+ GAMING: Off

Setting HDR Tone Mapping to 'Static' delivers the most natural image. If you prefer a brighter image, setting it to 'Active' results in brighter highlights, and most content looks brighter.

Scene	Brightness	Photo
Hallway Lights	925 cd/m²
Yellow Skyscraper	668 cd/m²
Landscape Pool	286 cd/m²

The PQ EOTF tracking on this TV is fantastic. Thanks to its high contrast ratio, dark shadow details are displayed nearly perfectly. Midtones are nearly perfect, with most content displayed slightly below the content creator's intent, but not noticeably so. There's a sharp cutoff near the TV's peak brightness, so some bright details are clipped, but since it gets so bright anyway, this isn't an issue with the vast majority of content.

The Samsung QN95C has superb peak brightness in SDR. It's bright enough to overcome glare even in extremely bright rooms with lots of natural light. Large, bright scenes are dimmed considerably by the TV's automatic brightness limiter, but it's still bright enough to overcome glare.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Movie
• Brightness: Max
• Local Dimming: High
• Color Tone: Warm2
• Gamma: 2.2

This TV has a great color gamut. It has excellent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space and excellent tone mapping, with very few noticeable inaccuracies. It has just okay coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, though, and the tone mapping is noticeably off with saturated green and cyan. 

The Samsung QN95C's color volume is amazing. Colors are bright and vibrant and stand out well against bright whites. Dark, saturated colors are also displayed well, thanks to its high contrast ratio.

With a few quick settings changes out-of-the-box, the Samsung QN95C has impressive accuracy in SDR. The white balance and color accuracy are very good overall, with just a few noticeable issues in blues. The color temperature is a bit warm, but it's not noticeable. Gamma doesn't follow the 2.2 setting, tracking much closer to 2.4, so most content is slightly too dim in SDR.

The calibration system is tricky to adjust. The white balance is nearly perfect after calibration, but the color accuracy is still slightly off. The gamma was especially tricky to adjust, and even after calibration, the deepest blacks and the brightest whites are a bit off.

You can see our full calibration settings here.

Unfortunately, the Samsung QN95C has mediocre gray uniformity. There's quite a bit of distracting dirty screen effect in the center, which is noticeable with most content but especially with sports. The sides of the screen are also quite a bit darker than the center.

The TV's black uniformity is amazing. Note that you can't turn local dimming completely off on this TV due to a more limited service menu, so the Native Black Uniformity picture is with local dimming set to 'Low'. With that setting, the TV's black uniformity is decent overall, with a few cloudy bands across the screen. With local dimming set to 'High', the TV's black uniformity is exceptional, and the bright bands noticeable on 'Low' are gone.

The Samsung QN95C has a wide viewing angle thanks to Samsung's inclusion of the Ultra Viewing Angle layer. It's decent for a wide seating arrangement, but colors are washed out and inaccurate if you're at a wide angle.

This TV has superb reflection handling. The glossy coating looks great and significantly reduces the intensity of direct reflections. It uses a different panel type with a different coating than the Samsung QN90C/QN90CD QLED, so although they perform similarly well overall, they do so for different reasons. The QN95C handles direct reflections better, so bright lights reflected in the screen are very faint overall. Unlike the QN90C, though, indirect reflections are more noticeable, and there's a slight haze and smearing effect around bright lights.

This TV displays gradients in HDR extremely well. There's some very slight banding in shades of gray and bright highlights, but it's very minor and not distracting.

Unfortunately, Samsung's Neural Quantum Processor 4k is mediocre at smoothing out gradients. Some fine details are lost, and there's still significant macro-blocking, especially in darker areas. If you care about low-quality content smoothing, the Sony X93L offers similar picture quality overall but much better processing.

The TV has good upscaling and sharpness processing. Fine details in low-resolution content are displayed well, and most text is clear and easy to make out.

The optimal sharpness settings for low-resolution or low-bitrate content, with no over-sharpening, are as follows:

• Sharpness: 5
• Picture Clarity: Off

This TV uses a BGR subpixel layout. It doesn't affect picture quality but can cause blurry text in some applications when using it as a PC monitor. The haziness in the pixel photo is caused by the TV's Ultra Viewing Angle layer. You can read more about text clarity here.

The Samsung QN95C has a great response time for the most part. Fast-moving action is crisp and clear with most content. It struggles more with dark shadow details, though, resulting in a noticeable black smear in shadows. This TV's successor, the Samsung QN95D, has a slightly faster response time overall.

Unfortunately, the backlight isn't flicker-free, as Samsung uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim the backlight. The exact flicker frequency varies between picture modes and with certain settings:

• Movie: 960Hz, with a secondary 120Hz flicker
• FILMMAKER MODE: 120Hz
• Dynamic: 120Hz
• Eco: 120Hz
• Standard: 120Hz

The backlight flicker behaves very differently in 'Game' mode depending on the extra features and settings enabled:

• Game: 960Hz, with a secondary flicker at 120Hz
• Game Motion Plus w LED Clear Motion: 60Hz
• FreeSync: 960Hz, with a secondary flicker at 120Hz

When connected to a PC, the flicker frequency also varies depending on the settings and picture mode used:

• Entertain: 120Hz
• Graphic: 120Hz
• Game: 960Hz, with a secondary 120Hz flicker

This TV has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion or BFI. Sadly, it only works at 60Hz, so you can't use it when gaming at 120Hz.

The Samsung QN95C has a feature to increase the frame rate of low frame-rate content like movies and TV shows. It's okay overall on this TV, but it looks best in slow-paced scenes. Like most TVs, it doesn't look as good in busy scenes with a lot of action, as there are a lot of motion artifacts, and it even stops interpolating at times, causing a sudden change in framerate that can be jarring.

Due to the quick pixel response time, low frame rate content, like movies, appears to stutter in slow panning shots.

The Samsung QN95C can remove judder from any source; however, for most external sources, you have to set Picture Clarity to 'Auto' or 'Custom' with both sliders at 0 to remove judder without adding any motion interpolation.

The Samsung QN95C supports all three types of VRR, and it works across a very wide refresh rate range, ensuring your games remain nearly tear-free even when your system can't keep up with the action.

The Samsung QN95C has incredibly low input lag in 'Game' Mode. This results in a very responsive gaming experience with almost no noticeable delay between your actions and what you see on-screen.

This TV supports most common resolutions up to 4k @ 144Hz. Most supported formats display chroma 4:4:4 signals properly, which is essential for clear text from a PC. The 144Hz mode is only supported with 1080p or 4k signals, though, and 1440p @ 120Hz doesn't display chroma 4:4:4 properly, so text is blurry from a PC in that mode. If you're looking for a TV with similar features that supports 8k, check out the Samsung QN900C 8k QLED.

This TV can take nearly full advantage of the PS5. The PS5 doesn't support a 144Hz refresh rate, though, so you're limited to 120Hz.

The Samsung QN95C can take nearly full advantage of the Xbox Series S|X systems, except for Dolby Vision gaming. The Xbox doesn't support a 144Hz refresh rate, so you're limited to 120Hz. There's a communication issue between the Xbox Series consoles and the TV; the Xbox reports that the TV doesn't passthrough LPCM 5.1/7.1 audio signals even though it does. Thus, LPCM signals do passthrough regardless of the error messages in the Xbox's audio testing results.

The Samsung QN95C supports the full 48Gbps bandwidth of HDMI 2.1 on all four HDMI ports, giving you the flexibility to take full advantage of multiple high-bandwidth devices, like if you own a PS5 and an Xbox Series X. Unfortunately, Samsung still doesn't support Dolby Vision; however, it supports HDR10+ instead, which is very similar overall but not as widely supported.

The Samsung QN95C supports eARC, which lets it pass uncompressed high-quality audio from a connected source to your soundbar or home theater system without sacrificing audio quality. Sadly, it doesn't support DTS formats, which is disappointing, as many UHD Blu-rays use DTS for their lossless audio tracks.

The frequency response is alright, but it's surprisingly worse in some ways than similar Samsung models like the Samsung QN95B QLED and the Samsung QN90C/QN90CD QLED. Like most TVs, there's very little bass, but the sound profile is well-balanced, and dialogue sounds clear. It doesn't get very loud, though, so it's not a good choice for a loud environment.

Overall, this TV's distortion handling is very good. There's little audible distortion at moderate listening levels, and it's barely noticeable even at max volume.

The Samsung QN95C runs the 2023 version of Tizen OS, which is fast and easy to use. The Smart Hub interface is smooth and has many advanced options, and it's easy to find your favorite content.

Unfortunately, like most TVs on the market, there are ads throughout the interface, and there's no option to disable them completely. There are a few privacy-related options, so you can limit things like ad-tracking, but this doesn't reduce the number of ads you see, as it just makes them less personalized.

The included apps cover most of the common streaming services, and there's a great selection of additional apps available in Samsung's app store. There's also a connector on the back of the TV that allows you to connect a Samsung camera add-on, sold separately, that enables video calls and other camera apps, including home workouts.

The remote is very slim and compact and is easy to use. It has a built-in rechargeable battery with a solar panel on the back of the remote. You can also recharge it via USB-C if it dies unexpectedly. This TV supports hands-free voice control thanks to a built-in mic, or you can use the mic on the remote.

The controls are on the bottom bezel of the TV near the right corner. There's a single button to power the TV on/off and change channels, volume, and inputs. There's also a small switch next to the power button that controls the TV's built-in mic for hands-free voice control.

• Remote
• Power cable (removable)
• Documentation