Samsung S99H Review: The Brightest OLED TV Yet

On the LCD front, TCL, Hisense, Sony, Samsung and LG are still fighting over whether the future belongs to RGB mini-LED, micro-RGB or SQD mini-LED. OLED offers less room for confusion. LG has been making televisions with a white OLED subpixel for over a decade, and since 2022 Samsung has competed with its own QD-OLED, where the pixels sit in a triangle rather than side by side. The S99H is Samsung's new QD-OLED flagship, and this assessment is based on the 77-inch GQ77S99H.

Samsung has reworked the design and set the television in a silver frame. It looks high quality, though it is plastic with a thin aluminium layer over it. Combined with the matt screen that all but eliminates reflections — familiar from the S95D and S95F — the S99H recalls the company's art television, The Frame, which also has a matt panel and a four-part surround. Unlike The Frame, though, this frame does not come off.

That it is built for wall mounting shows in the intelligent cable routing: every cable leaving the set can be laid through cut-outs in the back, and there are recesses for the optional wall mount, so the S99H can hang completely flush.

If you would rather stand it on a sideboard, two supplied plastic feet clip on. On those it stood a little wobbly in testing — largely down to the thin form factor and the sheer size of a 77-inch set with a 195-centimetre diagonal, but the previous GQ77S95F was steadier on its central pedestal. The outboard feet do have one advantage: a sound bar up to 124.5 centimetres long fits between them.

If you are worried you will never reach the connections again once it is on the wall, relax. A Wireless One Connect Receiver can be attached, replacing the Wireless One Connect Box that shipped with the S95D and S95F and was mandatory to get them running. On the S99H the receiver is optional instead — and beyond making wall mounting painless, it expands the set's four HDMI ports to eight.

A Samsung account is advisable. Basic functions such as television reception work without a login, but installing apps requires one. With an account you get Netflix and the rest, plus smart-home integration for compatible lamps, thermostats and security cameras, and you can even use a phone as a remote.

Not that you need to. The small Samsung remote sits well in the hand with tactile rockers for volume and channel. There is no number pad and no backlight, but there are dedicated buttons for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube and Samsung TV Plus. The highlight is the solar cell on the back, so the remote essentially never runs out of charge.

Where Tizen can feel sluggish on entry-level and mid-range sets, the processor here is strong enough to keep navigation smooth, and the app selection is enormous — anything you would expect is in the store.

If you mostly watch broadcast television, upscaling matters: the set has to interpolate a 720p signal up to its 4K panel, analysing the input and adding calculated detail so content looks larger and sharper. The S99H passed that test with flying colours. Full HD Blu-ray material in particular appeared without visible over-sharpening or smoothing, and those effects were only weakly present on 1280x720 content.

Samsung now ships its better televisions in an AI-optimised picture mode rather than Eco. The AI-optimised mode uses the processor to analyse content and adjust sharpness, contrast, colour and noise reduction by scene, brightness and content type, while the AI adaptation mode additionally factors in room brightness and calculates brightness, gamma and sometimes colour temperature. Good as that sounds, both leave the picture brilliant but slightly cool. It is better to switch the AI modes off under advanced features, at which point Eco mode takes over and Filmmaker Mode becomes available. Beyond that there is little to do.

Samsung has added another shovelful in 2026. The S99H reached a blazing 2,856 candela per square metre in lab measurement — brighter than any television measured to date. For comparison, the S95F managed 2,212 and the LG OLED G5 topped out at 2,245, which makes the S99H around 30 per cent brighter than the best OLEDs of 2025.

Paired with the perfect contrast of an OLED panel, HDR looks extremely three-dimensional and lifelike: bright stars against a pitch-black night sky, muzzle flashes and headlights were all particularly striking. Colour coverage is very high too, at 109 per cent of sRGB, near-complete coverage of DCI-P3, and just under 90 per cent of the BT.2020 space that will matter more in future.

HDR10+ is on board for scene-by-scene adjustment of colour, brightness and contrast on compatible material. The set is so good natively, though, that HDR10+ content does not look much crisper than ordinary HDR10 — which makes the usual Samsung omission of Dolby Vision easier to bear.

Frame interpolation is good without matching a Panasonic Z95B or Philips OLED910. Films are shot at 24 frames per second, and while that judders gently on a cinema screen, it looks distinctly more restless on a fast-switching OLED panel. Purists prefer it, which is why interpolation is normally disabled in Filmmaker Mode; most viewers prefer smoothing, which is why modern sets ship with it on.

Samsung is no exception, and its automatic sharpness setting corresponds to a very high level of smoothing. It looks gloriously fluid but causes small artefacts in scenes where the processor struggles to predict the intermediate frames — for every real frame the set may have to insert up to three more to reach its native 100 hertz, or strictly 96 hertz for 4x24. When the prediction is off, small halos appear around people or objects.

The other downside of heavy smoothing is the soap-opera effect, where films lose the cinema look. For a good compromise, set judder reduction manually between 1 and 6 under the custom sharpness settings.

Samsung has eased off here. Where the S95F carried an armada of woofers, tweeters and surround drivers, the S99H makes do with two down-firing stereo speakers. It supports Dolby Atmos, but only virtually. Atmos tracks do sound more voluminous than conventional 5.1, though voices come across somewhat flat. The Amplify sound setting counteracts that at the cost of some overall dynamics. Anyone buying Samsung's best 77-inch OLED will likely have the budget for a sound bar, which connects over HDMI-eARC.

All four HDMI sockets accept frame rates up to 165 hertz at 4K, so a sound bar, a PlayStation 5 Pro, an Xbox Series X and a gaming PC can all be connected at once. Controller input lag measured a very low 9.6 milliseconds, and paired with the HDR performance the picture while gaming is a dream. The Game Bar, summoned by holding the play button, shows current frame rate, whether VRR is active and whether the signal is HDR.

The S99H already ranks among the best televisions of 2026. It comfortably surpasses its predecessor on maximum brightness, which makes HDR extremely brilliant, and its colour reproduction is at reference level for an OLED thanks to that wide BT.2020 coverage. As on the S95F and S95D, the matt display all but eliminates reflections, which makes it ideal for bright rooms. It is also perfect for gaming, with all four HDMI sockets handling up to 165 hertz. Where it falls behind the previous model is sound.

Samsung sells it in four sizes: 55-inch (140 cm, suited to about 3 metres viewing distance), 65-inch (164 cm, 3.5 to 4 metres), 77-inch (195 cm, 4.5 metres — the size assessed here) and 83-inch (211 cm, from 5 metres).

The 77-inch was £3,999.00 on Amazon UK when we checked on 2 August 2026, with the 65-inch at £2,999.00 and the 55-inch at £2,249.00. Check the price on Amazon UK or search on Amazon US