While everyone was celebrating OLED televisions as the pinnacle of industry creation, Samsung abstained from this screen discipline for seven years: the engineers at the Korean group preferred to push the older LCD technology to high-end heights and achieved impressive results with it.

But now the manufacturer is building televisions with OLED screens again, and those that it has developed and manufactured in-house.

We took a close look at the first model, a 55-inch model with the type code S95B.

The thing is exciting because Samsung solves some technical details differently than the big competitor LG, which previously supplied practically all major TV manufacturers exclusively with OLED blanks.

Screens of this type produce the images with tiny, self-illuminating semiconductor cells.

That's what makes it so charming: deep black values, rich colors and an image quality that remains constant from all viewing angles are its typical characteristics.

While LG uses filters to create the three primary colors red, green and blue, Samsung takes a different approach.

A panel of blue OLED cells provides the light.

The colors red and green contribute quantum dots, tiny particles that spectrally shift the light and can thus define colors without sacrificing brightness.

Solar panel charges remote control

We first set up our test pattern, guided by helpful screen dialogs, with the usual procedures - i.e. started the channel search, established the WLAN connection, made some preliminary decisions on playback parameters and focused on the equipment: double tuners for all three TV transmission paths ensure classic TV reception, four HDMI connections are available for the player peripherals, they can even receive 4k signals with a high frame rate from a games console.

One of them has the additional abbreviation e-Arc, so it can output 3D sound to a soundbar even in the highest resolutions.

Headphones must take the radio path via Bluetooth.

Two USB ports invite hard drives to play along.

The remote control for the device, a slim signal transmitter with just a few buttons, does not need batteries: a small solar panel charges the built-in battery.

Opulent streaming center, outstanding picture quality

The start screen shows the new television as an opulent streaming center: All common providers, including Apple TV, are on board, as are the most important music portals Spotify, Qobuz, Tidal and Amazon Music.

It's just annoying that intrusive ads keep popping up in the upper third of the otherwise very tidy interface.

Samsung should finally stop doing that, it's just annoying.

However, we were reconciled by the newcomer's outstanding image quality: You rarely see such clear, bright and sharp images even on the best OLED screens, test images show pixel-precise UHD resolution, the finest dynamic gradations and a wide color spectrum.

Some test magazines have discovered tiny color fringes at hard transitions between very light and very dark areas of the image, for example in writing.

We also found them, but only from a short investigative distance with our nose directly in front of the screen: In practical operation, they play no role, especially not with moving images.

Measured against the small volume of the electronics housing behind the filigree display pane, the sound with the picture sounds usable, albeit a bit weak in the bass.

But a television of this class should play with external speakers anyway.

The price of Samsung's premiere model, around 1700 euros, is absolutely reasonable.