Samsung – 65 ” Class S94BD OLED Smart TV

I was originally looking at the S95B, but it went out of stock during a sale. During the same sale I picked this one up instead and they were going for the same price.
There was only 1 review for it at the time I bought it, but figured I’d take a chance. From what I could find online, this is actually the same TV, but without having owned an S95B, I can’t say 100% for sure. This came on 7/15/23 running firmware 1448. The UI and everything looks just like I have seen in review videos for the S95B, but again, I haven’t checked every little setting to see if something is disabled or enabled under certain conditions that might be different than the S95B. Normally the D models on a Samsung indicate it’s for a big box store, and I think this is one made for BB, probably to say it’s a “2023 model” and also prevent price matching requests. I did call 2 different BBs and ask if they were the same, and they just read the spec sheet and said yes, then one transferred me to some offshore support folks and they also read the spec sheet and said it was the same thing.
With that out of the way, it’s a really nice TV. I’m coming from a 65″ LG OLED65B6P-U that was showing some signs of burn-in from subtitles over the past 6 years. This is a MUCH brighter screen, but you have to be super careful what mode you are in ( Dynamic is like watching TV on crazy pills ). I suggest doing the calibration using the Smartthings app on your phone, and then tweaking the calibrated Movie mode to taste. I disabled the power savings stuff to prevent it from changing the brightness automatically on me, and setting the Peak Brightness setting to High really makes a big difference. I wish the “expert” picture settings were available on the little “quick settings” bar at the bottom, but the full settings page does a good job of getting out of the way while making specific changes.
The built-in UI is full of garbage, rows and rows of suggestions and apps I do not care for. I use a Fire TV anyway, as I like my Android apps like TiViMate. There is a small selection of iptv apps on the Samsung app store, but they aren’t that great imo. I do like their Plex app a little better than the Android version, but that’s about it. The integration with my Galaxy S22 Ultra is also interesting, albeit some features seem a little gimmicky. I don’t know why I’d want to show my phone’s camera on the TV screen, but it works and is pretty low latency. The Tizen OS, once fully booted, is plenty responsive, but not quite as quick on the draw as my Fire TV.
The remote is the same as the S95B, and feels fairly cheap in the hand, but I’m using the Fire TV remote for everything other than setting it up, so whatever. The HDMI-CEC works well and routing audio to my receiver was very easy. The built-in sound is pretty good too as far as TV speakers go.
So all in all, it’s exactly what I expected and was looking for, and I hope it gives me several years of the same performance without firmware updates giving me a hard time.