Samsung S90H OLED TV Review: A More Affordable OLED Option for Bright Rooms - cnet.com
Except, that is, for the Samsung S90H. However, like most new TVs, the S90H also has AI widgets festooned all over it. I compared the S90H against both the Samsung S95H and the older LG G5.
If you’re buying a TV, and an affordable OLED in particular, then you should know that the model you’re interested in today can be very similar to the one from last year, or even several years ago. In general, TVs don’t change much over time. While there have been some improvements to OLED recently, it’s almost always applied to the premium models. Except, that is, for the Samsung S90H.
While the competing LG C6 is basically the same as the C5, this Samsung TV has done something a little different for 2026. The S90H has added an effective antireflective coating. The benefit? It helps eliminate glare and reflections while watching TV in the daytime or when the lights come on. You can keep watching that dark, spooky, scary movie, even in a room full of windows.
Specialized coating aside, the LG C6 and Samsung S90H are otherwise similar — both in terms of light output and their color profiles. If you’re spending at this level, the Samsung does have that extra oomph to entice new buyers. If you want to spend even more, the step-up Samsung S95H is a better TV. But if you need a TV with a good antireflective coating, a great picture and a more affordable price, the Samsung S90H is the one to pick.
I performed a hands-on evaluation of the 65-inch Samsung S90H, but this review also applies to the other screen sizes in the series. All sizes have similar specs and should provide similar picture quality.
The Samsung S90H is a slimline OLED TV, in the vein of competing TVs such as the LG C6, and it can be either wall-mounted or situated on a tabletop. The TV features a centralized stand consisting of two thin legs, which looks fine, but it also comes with an awkward stand cover. The cover is not attached and is purely cosmetic, so if you move or bump the TV, it’s easily disturbed.
The reasons to buy this screen vary, but one of the most likely is the antireflective coating, which I found lets almost nothing through. If you have a pesky, distracting light source behind you that you can’t tame any other way, this TV is an attractive solution. But it’s not the only Samsung TV that does this — the S90H now has a modified version, and the company’s The Frame TVs have sported their own coatings for many years.
The TV comes with the slim, laser-pointer-like remote that most Samsung TVs now ship with. It has most of the buttons you need, even if it still lacks a dedicated input button for people with multiple sources.
TVs are among the many devices subject to feature creep, where designers pile on features year after year in the hope of enticing new buyers. The S90’s antireflective screen is certainly one such feature, but it is actually useful. However, like most new TVs, the S90H also has AI widgets festooned all over it.
Some are more useful than others. For instance, the TV comes with an AI Soccer Mode, which makes the ball less fuzzy and the field greener, but is this something football fans are clamoring for? Samsung also has the NQ4 AI Gen3 Processor for image processing and upscaling, as well as Amazon Alexa built-in. Sometimes the AI comes as a rebrand of an existing feature, like motion smoothing (AI Motion Enhancer Pro) or upscaling (4K AI Upscaling Pro).
Unlike most high-end TVs, the S90H doesn’t have Dolby Vision HDR, and while I don’t think this is a big deal, completists may look to LG, Sony or even Panasonic instead.
For years, Samsung’s onboard interface has been a ways behind the streaming-forward interfaces from Google TV or Roku. But in 2026, the company that helped popularize the term “smart TV” had finally caught up. The device’s home page has had a spruce-up, and while the interface is very AI-centric, it is cleaner and better organized than ever.
At the top, from left to right, you start with a Settings cluster which includes your profile, connected devices (especially useful for changing inputs) and settings. The other settings are probably less useful, depending on your needs, with For you, Live, Games, Daily (a leaf, for some reason) and Apps.
I compared the S90H against both the Samsung S95H and the older LG G5. While the LG TV has now been replaced by the G6, I’ve found the two G-series TVs to be virtually interchangeable, following some much-needed updates to the newer model. (Look out for an updated G6 review shortly.)
Given that I was watching two flagship TVs against a step-down model, it wasn’t surprising to see that the G5 and S95H were noticeably brighter with mixed HDR content, such as the opening scene of the movie It. As the movie opens, we follow Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) as he moves from room to room, finding materials for a toy boat. As the character descends the stairs, I found that the S95 was best able to peel away the shadows under the stairs to show the structure of the wall. Next, the G5 and the S90 showed very similar amounts of near-black details, and while not as exposing, it still felt natural and didn’t instill any FOMO versus the S95H.
Next, I watched the WWI epic 1917, and specifically a scene (chapter 13) that includes wide dynamics, rich colors and near-black details. Of the three TVs, the S95 again looked best with the almost pitch-black images as the hero wakes on a stairwell. The S95 had a brighter skin tone and a more defined image, while the G5 and S90H again looked very similar. When the action moved to a ruined city, I found that the S95H wasn’t able to communicate oranges in the same way as the other TVs; oranges became yellows on the flagship Samsung, but the trade-off was that the dynamic range was greater. Brights were brighter while still maintaining the black areas of the picture.
The differences between the two Samsungs continued when I switched to the Spears and Munsil test disc. At one point, the disc displays a sun against a clouded dusk, but the sun is not visible against the yellow sky around it on the S95H, yet it is there on the S90H (but with some brown artifacts). Meanwhile, the G5 had the best orange here. On the following field of poppies, though, the S90H looked a little dull in the reds, and it was bested by the G5 and the S95H.
Samsung isn’t just all fancy coating and AI razzmatazz; there have been some other changes to the TV under the hood. For gamers, lag times have improved, and while there’s little daylight between modern TVs, the S90H now has one of the lowest lags I’ve recorded. Its 9.33-millisecond score (4K HDR, Leo Bodnar) may not be that indistinguishable from the 11.1 average of the last few years, but for the gamer for whom every millisecond counts, it’s about the best you can do on a TV.
I also played a bunch of games on the collected TVs, including Call of Duty, and found that while the S95H and the G5 had the best, most saturated colors, the S90H was brighter than the G5. However, on a mixed HDR image of landscape and sky, the S90H blew out the cloud details while the S95 and G5 preserved them.
Samsung has led the industry in antireflective coatings for several years, and for the first time, the S90H features a modified version of this tech. While shining a phone’s flash onto the flagship S95 showed almost no reflections, I did see a red tint in the S90H’s reflection that the S95H didn’t have. Albeit this is a torture test, and not everyone has a light shining directly on their screen, so they don’t need this level of antiglare.
The downside to Samsung’s technology is that on-screen black is very slightly gray in a lit room. If you want a TV that you can watch in a lit room, and enjoy a more dynamic image, the LG G5’s coating better preserves black levels. It will still show direct light sources; you’ll still make out the shape of a reflected light bulb, for instance, but on-screen ambient light performance is better.
As is typical with OLEDs, the S90H didn’t have any issues with uniformity. While some LED backlit TVs can have hot spots, where single colors or tones appear different in certain areas, an OLED TV like the S90H can keep colors consistent across the screen.
While the high-end LG G6, for example, has a distinct green tinge off-angle, I didn’t see anything like that with the S90H. The colors did oscillate slightly in saturation as I moved from right to left. But once I was still, I couldn’t tell the colors were any different, and at the very extreme angles, the image looked just as good, color-wise — as if I was sitting directly in front.
Many TVs released this year have tried to maximize the number of colors that are output, trying to hit the billions of colors of BT.2020, but this can come at the expense of color reproduction. For instance, the Hisense UR8 has a really wide color gamut, but its color is unusually green, and the step-up Samsung S95H has issues with yellows and reds. Not so this S90H, though, for while it doesn’t boast zillions of shades, it looks more natural when watching content.
With no real change to picture quality, the real reason to buy the S90H over the previous S90F is the addition of the antireflective coating. Gamers, too, may appreciate the slightly better lag times of the newer model. While the new screen means that users will experience a slight hit to black levels in a lit room, the TV is now very effective at reducing reflections from direct light sources such as lamps or windows. If you have a problem with reflections in your living space caused by windows or lights, the S90H is a cost-effective, picture-forward solution.