Samsung QE77S99H

Verdict

Samsung has somehow delivered simultaneously the most spectacular and most accurate OLED TV I’ve ever seen

• Spectacular but also subtle picture quality

• Incredibly accurate Filmmaker Mode

• Groundbreaking connectivity

• No Dolby Vision support

• Design may be divisive

• Premium price

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Key Features

• QD OLED
  

  Samsung’s proprietary OLED technology uses Quantum Dots to deliver pure red, green and blue colour elements
  

• Potential for 8 HDMI ports
  

  Samsung Wireless One Connect box adds four extra HDMI inputs, for a total of eight
  

• Tizen smart system with AI
  

  Smart features and apps are provided by Samsung’s Tizen smart system, with AI-backed search from Copilot and Perplexity
  

Introduction

Samsung kicks off its 2026 account with the 77-inch model from its flagship new S99H OLED TV range.

So brace yourself for talk of unprecedented connectivity, ground-breaking brightness, freakishly detailed sound and the sort of picture accuracy hardcore cinephiles tend to get all unnecessary over.

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Price

There’s a difference between the US and UK model names. In the UK, it’s the S99H, while the same TV in the US has the model name S95H.

The QE77S99H costs £4499 at the time of the review. This makes it a significant investment where you can pick up a decent mid-range 75-inch LCD TV for less than a grand.

The 77S99H is not your average OLED TV. It combines OLED’s innate self-illuminating pixel advantages with extreme colour and, especially, brightness capabilities precious few rivals can get close to.

Rivals that might potentially give it a run for its money are Panasonic’s Z95B, and LG’s new G6 series.

The 65-inch S99H costs £3499, with the 83- and 55-inch models included though pricing is yet to be announced.

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Design

• Striking but large FloatLayer shape
• Wide-set feet
• Anti-reflection screen helps placement

For years Samsung has pursued a policy with its flagship TVs of fitting them in super-sleek designs, with tiny bezels and exceptionally slender rears. That changes with the 77S99H, though.

The main screen still features an ultra-narrow black metallic frame. But this screen is literally just the start of a much wider FloatLayer design, sitting proud of a grey metal backing panel that extends out a good inch and more beyond the edges of the screen.

There’s a centimetre or so of ‘neck’ connecting the screen to the outer frame too, into which Samsung has managed to sneak a few speakers as part of its 4.2.2-channel Object Tracking Sound (OTS+) system, whereby sound effects emerge from not just the screen, but the correct place on the screen.

While there’s no denying the eye-catching nature of this unashamedly big design, its sheer unabashed size might upset people with more minimalist tastes. The design lends itself better to wall mounting than sitting on a bit of furniture in the corner of your room, too – a feeling backed up by the fact that the 77S99H ships with a pair of desktop feet that attach way out towards the screen’s bottom corners, requiring the TV to be placed on a seriously wide bit of furniture.

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I, personally, warmed to the design over time, chiefly because the two-layer effect sort of emphasises the images on the screen, creating a more cinematic feel to the viewing experience.

The S99H is unique among the Samsung OLED TVs in carrying the brand’s Art Store and Generative Wallpaper features. The subscription-based Art Store allows you to download your choice of thousands of digitised artworks for use as screensavers when you’re not watching TV; while the Generative Wallpaper feature lets you use AI to design your own screensaver images, even based on your own photographs if you wish.

A couple of other interesting features of the QE77S99H have design connotations, too. One is its compatibility with new optional extra Wireless One Connect boxes. Add one of these to the TV and you can both double the included HDMI count to eight, and essentially make the screen a cable-free zone given that the wireless receiver for the TV slots almost invisibly into the TV’s bottom rear edge.

The other flexible design feature is the screen’s advanced anti-glare filter. This allows you to essentially put the TV anywhere you like, even opposite windows and wall lights, without fear of the image being devoured by reflections.

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The 77S99H ships with two remote controls, as usual with Samsung TVs. Traditionalists can turn to a slightly chunky, plasticky item packed with a full set of buttons, but most users will, I think, prefer the slim, stripped back smart remote option.

As well as being less button heavy, this handset is sleeker to hold, features a built-in solar panel to save you from ever having to replace its batteries, carries a mic for voice control, and carries a dedicated button for directly accessing the QE77S99H’s extensive AI features.

Connectivity

• Four built in HDMI ports
• Compatible with wireless One Connect box
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and AirPlay 2

I’ve already mentioned the QE77S99H’s biggest connectivity story: Its compatibility with Samsung’s optional Wireless One Connect boxes.

But it’s worth reiterating the point that if you add one of these boxes to your TV, you can attach eight HDMI sources to the TV at once. Or if you’re struggling to find that many sources, you can connect four sources to the optional wireless box and transmit all your sound and video to the TV from there, saving you from needing to have any HDMI cables trailing out of the TV.

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All of the HDMI inputs, including those on the optional extra wireless box, are full HDMI 2.1 inputs, supportive of all the gaming features the QE77S99H supports. Both the TV and the Wireless Connect Boxes support eARC, with a menu option provided to let the TV know which one you want to pass sound out of.

Other physical connections include two USB inputs, an Ethernet port and an optical digital audio output on the TV, plus two more USB inputs, more tuner inputs and another optical audio port on the One Connect box.

The TV also supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth streaming, of course, plus Apple’s AirPlay content sharing system.

User Experience

• Tizen smart system
• Voice and gesture control possible
• App control possible

The QE77S99H offers more ways of controlling it than most TVs. There are the two remote controls but you can also talk to the TV using the Bixby or Alexa, or you can access an onscreen remote control in Samsung’s SmartThings app.

Finally you can even perform some basic menu navigation tricks by performing specific gestures if you’re the proud owner of a reasonably recent Galaxy Smart Watch.

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The Tizen operating system is packed with content and features – which has both good and bad connotations. It’s great, of course, that you can access pretty much any streaming app on God’s green earth (although without Freely or Freeview Play ‘wrappers’ in the UK), and that the TV’s AI system is particularly good at learning the sort of content you like to watch and making intelligent recommendations accordingly.

Samsung now supports not one but two AI engines: Co-Pilot and Perplexity. The decision to carry two services being down, Samsung says, to each having particular areas of AI expertise. The QE77S99H even supports all these personalised AI features across multiple individual user profiles too, if you wish.

It’s also great to find a dedicated gaming page in the Tizen UI, where all your connected consoles and PCs appear alongside a good selection of game streaming services.

All these features can make the QE77S99H feel complicated to use, especially initially. The home screen has a lot going on, and finding your way round everything takes a bit of learning. There is one big improvement this year, as the sub-menu selection icons now appear along the top of the screen, rather than ranged down the left side. This gives the home screen a markedly cleaner, less clutter look.

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One other niggle is adverts. Samsung does, thankfully, provide the option during initial installation to turn adverts off. But doing this means many of the Tizen OS menus end up essentially wasting around a third of their available screen space with a text or static image in the area where an ad would have appeared. It would be nice if Samsung had a different UI layout for people who opt not to receive ads.

Features

• QD OLED Panel
• Three HDR Formats supported
• NeoQuantum 4 AI Gen 3 processor

The QE77S99H’s full range of features are spread unusually widely across multiple areas, so I won’t just repeat things covered elsewhere here. Sticking to features that don’t get an airing, then, it’s worth dwelling on the QD OLED panel at the S99H’s heart for starters.

Shining a blue OLED light through red and green Quantum Dot layers achieves a pure RGB colour performance that can achieve high, HDR-friendly brightness without the need for any extra white sub-pixel action. Add this to OLED’s self-emissive nature, where every single pixel in the S99H’s panel produces its own light and colour shade, and you’re looking at a level of colour and light precision no current LCD TV can match.

OLED HDR Pro and OLED Brightness Booster features delivered by Samsung’s NeoQuantum 4 AI Gen 3 processor further extend the capabilities of the 77S99H’s already cutting edge panel, as well as delivering supposedly improved upscaling of sub-4K sources to the screen’s native 4K resolution.

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The QE77S99H is also – or will be following a firmware update later this year – capable of handling the new improved version of Samsung’s HDR10+ HDR format. Called HDR10+ Advanced, this response to Dolby Vision 2 delivers six improvements over the original HDR10+ format: consistently brighter images, genre-based image optimisation, intelligent (content-led) motion smoothing, an adaptive cloud gaming mode, more specific and detailed local tone-mapping, and better content-led colour controls.

The S99H also supports the core HDR10 and HLG HDR formats, of course, but as with every Samsung TV there’s no support for the Dolby Vision HDR format.

Gaming

• 165Hz support
• Dedicated Gaming onscreen menus system
• 9.7ms 1080p/60Hz input lag

The S99H delivers as great a gaming experience as I’ve had on a TV. For starters there are the immediate charms delivered by its outstanding brightness, colour vibrancy and sharpness with 4K HDR games. Attractive games look absolutely spectacular on the QE77S99H.

It soon becomes apparent that they play great too. A 9.7ms time to render images received at its inputs if you choose its default Game mode settings is as responsive as TVs get, while support for the AMD FreeSync Premium and NVIDIA G-Sync variable refresh rate systems ensured there was no hint of juddering, stuttering or screen tearing with any title I played. The screen supports refresh rates all the way up to 165Hz, too.

There’s no aggressive variance of brightness during HDR games, black levels always look phenomenal without crushing out shadow detail, and a dedicated gaming menu screen you can call up whenever the TV is in Game mode provides a variety of gaming aids, such as mini-map zoom, a superimposed cross hair and the ability to raise the brightness floor of dark gaming areas without brightening other parts of the picture.

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You can even call in a little motion smoothing if you’re playing a low frame rate game, at the expense of only slightly raised input lag. 

If you want the very best gaming performance from the QE77S99H you should connect your consoles or PC to the HDMI ports built into the TV rather than those on an optional wireless One Connect box, as input lag via these boxes increases to nearly 38ms.

Picture Quality

• Remarkable brightness and colour
• Outstanding contrast and black levels
• Exceptionally accurate Filmmaker Mode

The QE77S99H is for my money simultaneously both the most spectacular and the most home cinema-friendly TV Samsung has ever made. And I’m very much here for it.

On the spectacle front, in its Standard mode (once you’ve turned off all the set’s power-limiting eco features) it produces an a dazzling display of brightness, contrast and colour while hardly ever, crucially, pushing anything so far that it becomes outlandish or gaudy.

According to my Calman Ultimate software, Portrait Displays G1 signal generator and Klein K10-A colorimeter, brightness peaks on the S99H at almost 4,500 nits with high dynamic range content in small areas of the screen (1% ad 2% test windows). It holds up at around 2,730 nits on a 10% test window too.

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These are all huge figures for an OLED TV – yet they’re delivered by the QE77S99H with zero compromise to either the inky black levels that have long been OLED’s movie-friendly trademark, or the richness of the colours the QD OLED colour system can pump out.

The resulting contrast Standard mode images deliver is beyond anything I’ve seen before – especially as OLED technology means the brightest pixel in an image can sit right alongside the darkest without either compromising the other.

The TV measurably covers essentially 100% of the DCI P3 colour gamut used in most HDR mastering, too. And since this is achieved without a white ‘brightness booster’ element, this colour range translates into huge colour volumes, with no desaturation during even seriously bright HDR shots.

Going back to those inky black levels, they’re delivered alongside excellent amounts of shadow detail and remain beautifully consistent at all times, with no sign of ‘floating’ brightness during difficult dark scenes featuring subtle brightness changes.

There’s no excessive dithering noise over dark scenes either, and the way a highlight such as a torch can erupt out of almost total blackness is not just dazzling in its extreme contrast and the absence of the sort of haloing such a moment would cause on a premium LCD TV, but also actually feels really lifelike in its intensity.

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Other classic image brightness highlights such as sunlight reflecting off metal/glass/skin, street lights at night, candles, torches and so on actually tend to look more realistic with the QE77S99H’s phenomenal brightness behind them, rather than forced or too much.

The sort of brightness the S99H can achieve also lets it do full justice even to titles that may have been mastered with 4000 nit brightness peaks. There can still be just a touch of clipping (lost detail) in the very brightest image highlights in Standard mode, but not enough for it to really be a distraction.

While colours in Standard mode are certainly intense, they’re so well balanced that no shades stand out too heavily against the rest, and they’re so packed with tonal subtlety that they never look artificial or short of solidity and three-dimensionality.

The subtlety of the colour despite its vibrancy also contributes to the image’s phenomenal – but again, still natural – sharpness and texturing in Standard mode. An achievement backed up by almost total freedom from striping/banding interference in areas of subtle colour blending.

The QE77S99H’s dazzling contrast and colour can be enjoyed with practically no onscreen reflections too, thanks to Samsung’s latest anti-glare screen coating technology, and there’s also no loss of contrast or colour when viewing the TV from even extreme angles.

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While some will stick with the spectacle but also balance and nuance of the S99H’s Standard preset for pretty much all viewing, serious home cinema fans will be looking for more accurate, true to creator’s intent images – at least for serious movie nights.

Cue the Filmmaker Mode, which delivers one of the most consistently accurate set of measured results with both HDR and SDR content that I’ve seen from even a flagship TV. Across every single colour and greyscale tests I ran, DeltaE 2000 average errors never even got up to two, never mind the three target above which deviations from established mastering standards might be visible to the human eye.

You actually feel the power of this accuracy and balance in every frame of any film you care to watch, from the most exuberant animation to the darkest, dingiest horror flick. It’s a beautifully immersive, subtle, refined, and natural image that serious home cinema fans will lap up.

There are, of course, one or two niggles with the QE77S99H left to relate. One is that faint details can sometimes become lost in the dark in Filmmaker Mode – though the TV’s Gamma and shadow detail enhancement options can usually sort this out.

You can very occasionally spot a red or green pixel-width line around very starkly contrasting lines, and while colour in Standard mode is typically well handled and spectacular, it can cause skin tones to become a bit oversaturated during dark scenes that already have a quite warm tone to them.

Occasionally the Standard preset can also slightly exaggerate grain, and finally Samsung’s default motion settings tend to make images look unnatural and processed. To fix this, I’d suggest always choosing a Custom Picture Clarity setting, at least with 24p movies, and then turning off noise reduction and setting judder and blur reduction to their four or five levels.

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Subjecting the screen to pretty high levels of ambient or direct light can cause black levels to lift a bit, but if it’s a choice between this and aggressive onscreen reflections I think most people looking for a TV to go into a regular living room environment, at least, would choose slight greyness over glaring reflections.

So small and often improvable are these 77S99H assortment of niggles compared with the stellar quality of so much else about its pictures, though, that for the vast majority of the time most viewers will barely notice any of them.

Upscaling

• Very natural, clean results
• Copes well with both SD and HD
• No smearing or lag

Having used AI to nail 8K upscaling when 8K TVs were a thing, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find that the QE77S99H does a pretty much masterful job of upconverting HD and even good quality SD sources to 4K.

The upscaler’s AI-learnt abilities manage to calculate the look of all the millions of extra pixels required to turn sub-4K sources into 4K with outstanding insight, ensuring that no pixel looks out of place, no colour tone looks artificial, grain doesn’t look forced or noisy, and motion never looks laggy or smeary.

Perhaps the best thing about the upscaling, though, is the way it manages to detect and remove unwanted noise (but not natural grain) from HD and SD sources before upscaling them, leading to crisp, clean results every time.

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Sound Quality

• Excellent OTS+ effect
• 70W of power
• 4.2-2-channel speaker system

As I noted in the design section, Samsung has positioned speakers pretty much all around the TV’s frame, between the front screen and its back plate, including up-firing and side-firing speakers, resulting in a premium implementation of Samsung’s Object Tracking Sound system.

This works to place sound effects in exactly the correct place on and around the screen. So if someone to the left is speaking, their voices should come from not only the left but the right height to the left. Or if a noisy object goes across or circles around the screen, its sound will cross or circle the screen too.

The S99H is able to track and place multiple sounds at once with remarkable accuracy, even extending the soundstage effects beyond the screen’s edges if something’s happening off screen.

There’s nothing forced or incoherent about the OTS’s efforts, either; on the contrary, the soundstage it builds is compelling and convincing.

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The sound can get pretty loud too, and despite the precise placement of so many sound effects, the overall staging doesn’t sound clinical or artificial.

The QE77S99H produces a pretty wide dynamic range by TV sound systems too, with above average bass extension sitting opposite clean, usually harshness-free trebles.

The only audio issues are that very deep, pressurised and extended bass lines can cause mild crackling and whooping effects, while the brightest treble effects can occasionally succumb to slight brittleness and instability.

This really does only happen with quite extreme content, though; for the vast majority of the time the best efforts of the OTS system do a great job – especially with Dolby Atmos soundtracks.

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Should you buy it?

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Final Thoughts

The QE77S99H is for my money the single all-round best TV Samsung has ever made. Which pretty much makes it by default one of the best TVs ever made by anyone.
 
Especially if you’re looking for a TV that’s capable of doing genuine, no-compromise double duties as a dazzlingly vibrant but still surprisingly natural looking daylight TV screen and an immaculate dark-room home cinema machine.

How We Test

The 77S99H was tested over a period of 12 days in both dark test room and regular living room environments. It was out through its paces with a wide variety of content, including Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 games, 4K Blu-rays, streams of various resolutions and HDR formats (bar Dolby Vision, which Samsung’s TV doesn’t support) from all of the main streaming platforms, and broadcast tuner footage.

All of this content was watched on the 77S99H in both day- and night-time conditions, and I experimented extensively with the TV’s many picture setting options to ensure I got pictures looking their best for both regular living room environments and serious home cinema setups.
Finally, the Samsung 77S99H was tested for both SDR and HDR playback in multiple presets using Portrait Display’s Calman Ultimate software, G1 processor and a Klein K10-A colorimeter.

• Tested in dark and bright room settings
• Tested with real-world content
• Benchmarked with Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate Software, G1 signal generator and Klein’s K10-A colorimeter
• Gaming input lag was measured with a Leo Bodnar signal generator

FAQs

Test Data

	Samsung QE77S99H
Input lag (ms)	9.7 ms
Peak brightness (nits) 5%	4450 nits
Peak brightness (nits) 10%	3780 nits
Peak brightness (nits) 100%	500 nits

Full Specs

	Samsung QE77S99H Review
UK RRP	£4499
USA RRP	$4499
Manufacturer	Samsung
Screen Size	76.4 inches
Size (Dimensions)	1782.6 x 319.9 x 1089.6 MM
Size (Dimensions without stand)	1049.6 x 1782.6 x 26.6 MM
Weight	31.3 KG
Operating System	Tizen
Release Date	2026
Resolution	3840 x 2160
HDR	Yes
Types of HDR	HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ Advanced
Refresh Rate TVs	48 – 165 Hz
Ports	Two USB, Ethernet, RF input, optical digital audio output; (optional wireless One Connect box) Four HDMI 2.1 inputs, two USB inputs, optical audio port, RF, satellite tuner
HDMI (2.1)	eARC, ALLM, HDMI VRR, HFR
Audio (Power output)	70 W
Connectivity	Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Apple AirPlay 2
Display Technology	OLED, QLED