When it comes to contrast and the best black levels, the best TVs are OLED TVs – and Samsung is hoping that in 2023, the best OLED TVs will be Samsung TVs.
Samsung previously announced a range of QD-OLED TVs at CES 2023, and according to trade site The Elec it is adding a 77-inch OLED TV and a 49-inch OLED gaming monitor to its product portfolio in the first quarter of this year. Like their siblings, the TV and monitor will be branded Samsung OLED.
If you've been keeping count, that makes it three distinct models of OLED TVs and two distinct models of OLED monitors for 2023 so far.
Ever more alphabet soup in TV tech
All of the newly announced Samsung models use QD-OLED panels, which is Samsung's name for the OLED displays created by its subsidiary, Samsung Display. The decision to brand them all as Samsung OLED is presumably to avoid confusion, because there's a whole alphabet soup of acronyms around TV tech now: QLED, OLED, QD-OLED and so on.
These particular panels are self-emissive displays, similar to the AMOLED tech you'll find in the best Samsung phones. Each individual dot can light up on its own in the desired colour, and Samsung then overlays tiny Quantum Dots that deliver better brightness, better colour reproduction and a wider colour range. The result is OLED-quality visuals with more brightness than normal OLEDs can provide.
I've got a Samsung QLED TV and I can testify to how bright its Quantum Dot tech can be, so the combination of QD and OLED is pretty exciting. It's also going to be pretty expensive: for example the Samsung S95B QD-OLED is currently £1,599 for the 55-inch model, compared to £749 for the same-sized, QLED Q65B.
The news of more QD-OLED displays is good news even if you're not planning to buy a new TV right now: as we've seen again and again with TVs, the more models use the tech the more quickly the price drops. So while these new TVs and monitors may be beyond my budget right now, they won't be for too long.
