Televisions

While it took Samsung much longer than, well, just about everyone else to fully board the OLED TV train, the South Korean company seems eager to make up for lost time. In 2024 it is significantly expanding its OLED offering, even dipping down to 48in on a new, entry-level lineup, and with its flagship S95D series, tested here at 65in, it's also seeking to rewrite the OLED performance rule book.

Great as the excitement is this year surrounding Samsung's debut QD OLED TVs – the first 'self-emissive' displays from the Korean company in close to a decade – it still determinedly sees Mini LED as its top-flight TV technology. And on the evidence of the flagship 75in QE75QN900B, it has a point. This TV is good enough to have you wondering if your budget will stretch to its premium price tag.

Samsung’s Series 9 TA950 drew big crowds when it was first unveiled at the 2011 CES. A hybrid 32in Freeview HD 3D TV and PC monitor, it’s a leading-edge screen for your desktop that offers all the functions of the brand’s high-end LED TVs. The design is inspired, with a panel that’s effectively suspended above its pedestal via a swooping right-hand bracket. This tilts backwards for a relaxed viewing position. Slimline 7W stereo speakers fire forwards from the front of the super-thin pedestal, while inputs are ranged along the rear. Just as on the brand’s regular TVs, the TA950 sports Samsung’s Smart Hub apps and IPTV portal, home to the BBC iPlayer YouTube, LOVEFiLM and the new and exclusive Explore 3D content channel.

Like its UE55D8000 sibling reviewed previously, the UE40D7000 is a mighty stylish TV, with a bezel that’s so slender (barely a centimetre) that it’s barely there at all. Moreover, the slimness is emphasised by the fact that most of the frame is transparent.

This attractive beast is rammed with cutting-edge technology – including four remote controls if you count your mouth and arms as two of them. Gesture and voice control can make you feel self-conscious and possibly embarrassed as you gesticulate and yell basic commands at the TV. Frankly, it’s a pointless gimmick.

Of Samsung’s forty new screens unleashed so far for 2013, the UE46F8000 is the flagship 46in model. Bestowed with a raft of new measures designed to deliver the best TV pictures the company has ever mustered from an edge-lit LED screen, it also ups the ante in terms of Smart TV and multimedia interaction.