While 2023 will see Samsung largely resting on the laurels of the fantastic pure RGB OLED TVs it shipped in 2022, the company has announced a smaller 76-inch version of its remarkable micro-LED smart TV, dubbed the CX.
Micro-LEDs are self-emitters like OLEDs; as such, they produce the same intense blacks, making for far greater contrast at lower peak brightness levels. Pricing was not announced, but we’re guessing the CX will remain prohibitively expensive for the average user.
Most folks might therefore be more interested in Samsung’s new 8K flagship, the Q900C. While there’s still very little 8K content to be had, this quantum dot TV’s additional pixels should deliver excellent upscaling of lower-resolution content. We’ll be getting our first look at Q900C in Las Vegas this evening, but we’re not expecting anything less than what we’ve seen with the earlier Samsung 8K models we have tested. And the rare 8K content (especially scenery and cityscapes) has looked spectacularly detailed on those TVs.
Samsung claims a rather fantastic 4000 nits of peak brightness for the Q900C, or 2.5 times what we normally see in LED-backlit LCD TVs. Hopefully, the company avoids its former tendency to over-emphasize bright detail–something it dialed back a bit for 2022. You can still tweak it in if you’re a fan of the effect (it is impressive with some material).
Beyond the smaller “mLED,” nearly all of Samsung’s improvements (including the Q900C) will be incremental: Better processing, improvements in brightness and contrast, HDR upscaling, and so on across the board. We can live with some mild boredom after the spectacular 2022 debut of the S95B RGB OLED, which is quite possibly the best 4K TV ever produced outside of the awesome Sony Bravia XR A95K.
As you might have noticed, this year’s Samsung models are labeled “C”, while 2022’s are “B”. So, the company’s new top-of-the line 4K UHD LED TV is the Q95C, while its best OLED is the S95C (with a 144Hz refresh rate). Unless we spot some spectacular changes during our reviews, you might save some money buying Samsung’s 2022 “B” series–as soon as the “C” series starts showing up in stores, that is.
Samsung will also continue tweaking its Gaming Hub and lifestyle TVs, including the Freestyle and the Frame. We’re hoping for a complete rethinking of Samsung’s SmartHub smart TV user interface to improve the efficiency of browsing for settings and other secondary functionality.
Check back at TechHive in a couple of months when we’ll hopefully have had our first looks at the Samsung’s latest and greatest.
Author: Jon L. Jacobi, Freelance contributor
Jon Jacobi is a musician, former x86/6800 programmer, and long-time computer enthusiast. He writes reviews on TVs, SSDs, dash cams, remote access software, Bluetooth speakers, and sundry other consumer-tech hardware and software.