SAMSUNG S95F (TANDEM OLED 83") vs SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2)

Samsung S95F in the 83-inch variant with Tandem OLED panel also enchants with HDR effects. In test movie scenes, such as "Life of Pi" or "Sicario 2," where smaller light points dominate – stars in the night sky, the glow of the moon, or headlights – the television easily achieves brightness values exceeding 2000 nits. This is a result that not long ago seemed unattainable for OLEDs and places this model in the same category as the best Mini-LED designs.

The limitations of organic panels reveal themselves only in full-screen scenes completely filled with white. In the case of this model, for example, in the last shot from the movie The Meg, brightness drops to around 1000 nits – a bit lower than in the smaller QD-OLED variants, where the result remained around 1400 nits. Nevertheless, we are still talking about a remarkable result, unprecedented in OLED televisions of this size. Color reproduction is equally impressive. The new Tandem OLED panel essentially catches up with QD-OLED televisions, offering excellent coverage of a wide color gamut. The results are slightly weaker than those of QD-OLED, but in practice, they still provide an image whose intensity and naturalness of colors are hard to compare with any other television.

Bravia 3 II is certainly not a TV that tries to impress with brightness. In our measurements it reached about 450 nits, so it's far from the strongest designs on the market. That said, HDR here is not just a paper feature. Compared with regular SDR material, the brightest parts of the image can already punch through, and reflections, highlights, or stronger exposures have a bit more energy and stand out better from the rest of the scene. You can see this best in simpler shots where many bright elements appear on screen. Then the Bravia 3 II can give a hint of a higher-dynamic-range picture. The problem only starts with more demanding content, where much greater brightness headroom is needed. There the TV quickly shows its limits and instead of strong, striking HDR we get only a correctly rendered picture.

Colors

Bravia 3 II uses a QLED-type panel, although technically it does not use a traditional quantum-dot layer. Instead Sony applied a PFS phosphor-based solution that serves a very similar role: it allows for more saturated reds and greens and thus lets the TV display a much wider color gamut. Measurements showed about 94% coverage of the DCI-P3 gamut and about 74.4% of the very wide BT.2020. Those are good results for this class of hardware, meaning the Bravia 3 II has no problem showing adequately saturated colors in HDR content. Colors don't look washed out, and the more intense shades can look really attractive.

The best picture mode straight out of the box is undoubtedly Filmmaker Mode. This mode has been present in Samsung TVs for several years, and its intention is to reproduce the image as faithfully as possible to the creators' vision. In SDR content, it works reasonably well, although not without flaws. The picture is slightly dimmed, and the white balance tends to shift towards red and blue, resulting in a slight pinkish hue on the screen. Average color errors hover around ΔE values of 3–4, which is on the edge of what most people can perceive with the naked eye.

The limitations are much more apparent with HDR content. Here, a slight excess of blue in the white balance is not as big of a problem – the real issue becomes how the TV manages brightness. In many scenes, the picture looked as if it had been overexposed, and details in the dark could completely disappear. The final effect did not represent what the equipment of this class is capable of and led to significant color errors. It’s hard to understand why such a factory characteristic was chosen, as the HDR reception in this version definitely was not what it should be.

In Professional mode the Bravia 3 II, straight out of the box, delivers a fairly good level of color reproduction. In SDR the most noticeable issue is a slightly low gamma, which makes the midtone areas a bit brighter. White balance is not perfect either; as brightness increases there is a slight lack of blue and red, so whites can sometimes take on a slightly warmer, mildly greenish tint. However, these are not errors that immediately stand out while watching a movie. Average error values hover around 3, so the factory preset can be considered quite good. The situation is similar in HDR. Here again there is a slight deficiency in the blue component, so the image is a touch warmer than the reference, but the difference is not large enough to be significantly distracting during normal viewing.

After calibration, the S95F shows what it is truly capable of. The white balance was corrected, and minor inaccuracies were adjusted, making the image in SDR content look almost exemplary. Color differences have dropped below the level that the human eye can detect – looking at the screen, one simply feels a full sense of naturalness and color coherence.

In HDR, the improvement is equally noticeable. The television handles brightness much better, eliminating the "blowing out" effect of the entire frame. Bright scenes are more controlled, and blacks retain more detail, although sometimes there may still be slight brightening of the image as a whole. Nevertheless, after calibration, the S95F delivers an image that can confidently be called one of the best on the market – regardless of whether we are watching films in SDR or spectacular productions in HDR.

After calibration you can get a lot out of SDR content. The white balance was set almost perfectly, gamma practically matches the reference value, and average color errors fell from around 3 to about 1. That's a level at which differences from the reference image are, in practice, very hard to detect. The Bravia 3 II therefore shows that despite its position in Sony's lineup it has quite a lot of potential for precise picture tuning. Improvements are also visible in HDR, although here you can no longer work around all of the TV's limitations. After equalizing the colors it's easier to notice that the EOTF curve in film material runs slightly below the reference value in places, meaning the Bravia 3 II slightly darkens part of the image. That's not ideal from a reference standpoint, but in this particular TV it also has an advantage. With no local dimming and average black levels, this behavior slightly reduces the visibility of the backlight in darker scenes and helps maintain a greater sense of contrast. So you could say Sony partially masks the limits of the panel that way, rather than trying at all costs to stick to the reference luminance.

The Samsung S95F model features a noise reduction function aimed at improving the fluidity of tonal transitions. Its performance is hard to call ineffective – on the contrary, it can excessively interfere with the image. Older films or materials of lower quality, such as those from YouTube, take on a soft, smoothed character because of it, reminiscent of a painted effect. The problem is that along with the noise, the natural film grain, which gives the image a cinematic quality, also disappears. Fortunately, the function does not blur essential details, so its use is more a matter of taste. If someone prefers a slightly polished and smooth image, it’s worth turning it on, but in our opinion, the most sensible setting is “Standard”.

Upscaling leaves a better impression. The S95F efficiently enhances the quality of lower resolution content – even 576p video looks quite good, although some minor artifacts in the form of blockiness can be noticed. Overall, the effect is very solid, although when compared to the competition – such as the Sony Bravia 8 (II) or LG G5 – it can be seen that those models can extract a bit more from the image. However, it's worth remembering one inconvenience: with older films and photos, there is an overscan issue that causes a slight cropping of the left edge of the image.

The Bravia 3 II is Sony’s first TV to use the new MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset, and you can see a few changes in image processing. Starting with the basics: upscaling is solid. The TV can sensibly upscale lower-resolution material and doesn’t have a strong tendency to overemphasize jagged edges or other source imperfections. With regular broadcast TV or lower-quality streaming the picture remains quite pleasing. We have more reservations about the digital image processing. In this model Sony replaced the well-known "Smooth Gradation" feature with a new setting called "Digital Noise Reduction." Its role is essentially the same: to smooth unpleasant tonal transitions and artifacts caused by heavy compression. Unfortunately, this feature performs noticeably worse than before. At the "Large" setting — the only one that noticeably affected the picture — the TV can smooth away too many image elements at once, causing film grain to disappear and surface textures or even character skin to start looking unnatural. Worse, the effect is not very consistent. When a scene contains more motion the function’s effect weakens significantly and at times it looks as if the TV stops intervening in the image altogether. For everyday viewing we therefore don’t recommend using it at a high level. It can help on a static shot, but the price is often too much loss of detail.

In the case of the 83-inch S95F with a Tandem OLED panel, the motion smoothness also makes a huge impression. The panel in native 4K resolution offers a refresh rate of 165 Hz, and this combined with organic technology makes games and sports look remarkable. Additionally, the manufacturer added a film smoother and a motion blur reduction system, allowing each viewer to adjust the image to their own preferences – whether it's a more "frame-rate" cinematic effect or a smooth, almost theatrical spectacle.

Motion handling is definitely one of the Bravia 3 II's strongest points. The TV uses a 120 Hz VA panel, a solution that by nature, despite the high refresh rate, doesn't always cope well with motion blur. Here Sony has managed to get that problem very well under control. Fast-moving objects remain sharp, and the characteristic trails and blurring are reduced to a very low level, if not to zero. It's one of the least smearing LCD TVs we've had the chance to test. Interestingly, in this respect the Bravia 3 II can even outperform the much more expensive flagship True RGB series: the Bravia 9 II.

The low trailing and phenomenal motion fluidity, which are the hallmarks of OLED technology, are just the warm-up. The Samsung S95F has been designed with gamers in mind – and this is evident at every turn. Four HDMI 2.1 ports with a bandwidth of 40 Gb/s may sound like a compromise on paper, but in practice, neither consoles nor PCs will experience the slightest limitations. On board is a complete set of gaming features: variable refresh rate (VRR), automatic low latency mode (ALLM), and a flawlessly implemented HGiG standard, which allows you to enjoy HDR exactly as the creators intended. All of this is complemented by Game Bar – an intuitive control center where you can check and adjust the most important settings in seconds.

Particular attention should also be paid to Game Motion Plus, Samsung's own smoothing technology. It can add extra fluidity to animations, which can be a lifesaver in games running at 60 frames, where stability doesn't always hold up. Indeed, support for Dolby Vision in games is missing, but it's hard to consider this a serious flaw – the manufacturer compensates for this gap with other solutions. The S95F is one of the absolute favorites for the title of the best gaming TV on today's market.

Sony Bravia 3 II is a very good TV for gamers, although not everything has been handled the way we'd like. The biggest change concerns the connections. For the first time in a Sony TV we get four full HDMI 2.1 ports with 48 Gb/s bandwidth, thanks to the new MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset. That removes one of the long-standing issues that has plagued the manufacturer's TVs. You can connect several devices at once and use each input's full capabilities, including VRR and ALLM. There's also a simple Game Bar that lets you check key signal parameters and change a few useful settings, such as black level, when you want to improve visibility in darker parts of a game.

There are, however, two limitations worth knowing. The first is the lack of support for 1440p at 120 Hz. This won't be a problem for everyone, but people using that resolution on a console or PC, for example to get higher frame rates in certain games, will have to choose 1080p. We have more reservations about HGiG support. Sony does not allow disabling tone mapping on the Bravia 3 II, so the TV continuously processes HDR content even when you would prefer to leave that task to the console. You can most easily notice this during HDR setup. The checkerboard pattern does not disappear at the point corresponding to the TV's actual capabilities. That doesn't mean HDR in games will look bad. You just need to approach the setup a bit differently and, instead of relying on the pattern, manually set the peak brightness to about 450 nits. The issue can be worked around, but you should know about it before you start configuring your console.