Samsung QN90F review: Bye-bye reflections, hello home cinema

While Samsung’s love affair with premium LED TVs continues with its 2025 8K range, the Samsung QN90F – its flagship 4K LED TV – initially looks like a step down from its predecessors.

It’s called the QN90F series whereas the previous 4K flagship series was the Samsung QN95, and it doesn’t ship with an external One Connect connections box like the QN95 series did. Look a bit closer, though, and a new anti-glare screen and obvious picture and sound quality improvements make those initial step-down signs look pretty insignificant.

Samsung QN90F review: Key specifications

Samsung QN90F review: What you need to know

The QN90F is Samsung’s flagship 4K LCD TV for 2025. It earns this status by illuminating its premium 4K VA-type LCD panel with mini LED lighting controlled by hundreds of dimming zones and using quantum dots to produce colours. Everything is controlled by Samsung’s new NQ4 AI Gen3 processor, which has an eye-catching 128 AI Neural networks (up from just 20 on 2024’s QN90D).

Samsung’s latest AI-bolstered Tizen smart system is on hand to make sure you never run out of things to watch, too, while Samsung’s proprietary Object Tracking Sound system gets busy placing sound effects in precisely the right place on the screen.

Samsung QN90F review: Price and competition

The QN90F comes in a range of sizes, which are priced as follows:

• 43in QN90F: £1,249
• 50in QN90F: £1,349
• 55in QN90F: £1,799
• 65in QN90F: £2,599
• 75in QN90F: £3,499
• 85in QN90F: £4,999
• 98in QN90F: £8,999
• 115in QN90F: TBC

These are pretty reasonable prices for flagship 4K mini LED models, with their lack of external One Connect boxes likely helping them undercut Samsung’s previous flagship 4K mini LED pricing.

LG’s imminent C5 OLED and Samsung’s S90F OLED will likely present the strongest competition for the QN90F, offering as they do an OLED alternative for only around £100 more at their key screen sizes.

The 65in version of Sony’s Bravia 9 mini LED range costs £2,799 at the time of writing, while an interesting alternative if you want to mix things up with an epic screen size would be the 85in TCL Q9BK 4K mini LED TV, which currently only costs £1,999.

Samsung QN90F review: Design, connections and control

The QN90F I’m testing here feels heavy and robust during set-up, giving it an instantly premium feel. At the same time, though, there’s a minimalistic elegance about its narrow frame and slender rear.

The frame around the screen is slim and dark, so it draws practically no attention to itself, and the silvery desktop stand is compact, sturdy and again looks quite premium. You can also wall hang your QN90F, of course, with its skinny rear making it particularly well suited to that.

The QN90F is as impressively well-connected as you’d hope a modern premium TV would be. In particular, all four of its HDMIs can take in the latest gaming features as well as HDR10, HLG and HDR10+ high dynamic range formats. There’s a pair of USBs for connecting storage devices or powering HDMI video sticks, too, along with an optical digital audio output and the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth options for streaming video and audio – including via Apple Airplay – from your network or smart devices.

The QN90F ships with two remote controls: one standard button-heavy one and a much more stripped-back smart one, the latter of which also carries a solar panel so you never need to swap its batteries. The smart remote has a built-in mic and Samsung’s new AI button, which calls up an AI-boosted content recommendation system that includes an option to find content based on the cast of whatever you’re currently watching.

You can also control the TV by issuing it with verbal instructions via its built-in Alexa or Bixby systems, with pretty much no part of the TV’s complex set-up options being off limits.

Samsung QN90F review: Smart TV platform

The QN90F carries the latest (9th) generation of Samsung’s Tizen smart system. After a bumpy start a few years back, this full-screen version of Tizen is now turning into a seriously sophisticated affair. It does a great job of using AI to find content to recommend based on both your viewing habits and more sophisticated content searching.

The home screen is impressively customisable these days, too, and Samsung makes all your apps available in a simple row of icons if you prefer to take a more old-school approach to content discovery.

Each member of your household can now set up their own home menu and content recommendation system, and there are dedicated areas on the hub for both game sources and Samsung’s Ambient Mode. The Ambient Mode lets you choose photographs, artworks or videos to play on the screen in a low-power mode when you’re not watching the TV in earnest.

When it comes to supported streaming services, pretty much every global streaming service known to man is present and correct on the QN90F. British owners don’t get Freeview Play or Freely, but Samsung provides individual catch-up apps for all the big UK terrestrial broadcasters.

Samsung QN90F review: Image quality

While the QN90F’s main image focus is on excelling with 4K, high dynamic range images, it’s also a gorgeous performer with the more traditional HD, SDR part of AV life.

The QN90F’s Filmmaker Mode produces a beautifully balanced, clean, natural and nuanced image that may lack the instant allure of the punchier Standard preset, but renders the subtleties of the video SDR mastering art so well that it’s fantastically immersive.

Black levels are outstandingly deep for an LCD TV without being broken by areas of backlight clouding or blooming, BT.709 colour tones from the darkest to the lightest are rendered with expert granularity and subtlety, and the picture looks detailed and realistic. 

The sense of each image element being in balance with the rest in SDR Filmmaker Mode even holds up with (good quality) SD sources, thanks to Samsung’s latest and greatest 4K upscaling technology. This adds the usual amount of detail and sharpness to the image but does a better job of distinguishing between noise and ‘real’ image elements when figuring out what each additional pixel should look like.

Measurements taken in Filmmaker Mode using the Calman Ultimate software, Portrait Displays’ G1 signal generator and C6 HDR5000 colorimeter reveal a white level of 290, right in the correct ballpark for accurate SDR.

Meanwhile, all of my Calman colour measurements recorded Delta E 2000 average errors of between 2.2 and 2.6 – well below the threshold where discrepancies might be visible to the human eye. Two-point and multipoint grayscale measurements sneak just above three, but only by a couple of decimal points.

The only issue I had with the QN90F’s SDR Filmmaker Mode was that out of the box some shadow details become lost in the darkest parts of the picture. Fortunately, nudging up the slider for Shadow Detail to +3 sorts this out pretty well.

While the accuracy of the Filmmaker Mode is admirable, the Standard preset will probably be the preferred mode for many QN90F owners, at least for day-to-day TV viewing. This mode is much more vibrant and contrasty and ramps up the sharpness too. This is true of all Samsung Standard picture presets, but this year, presumably thanks to a big uptick in AI processing power, the enhancements made are cleaner and less likely to contain distracting colour, sharpness or light-peaking elements.

I’d suggest setting the noise reduction to its low level and choosing custom settings of around three or four for the TV’s judder and blur elements to keep the picture looking unprocessed. Aside from requiring those tweaks, the QN90F’s Standard mode is the most consistently enjoyable ‘boosted’ mode I’ve seen on a Samsung TV to date.

One final new QN90F strength is its anti-glare screen. The relatively low brightness of SDR images can make them particularly badly affected by on-screen reflections, but they’re almost completely wiped out by the QN90F.

Samsung QN90F review: HDR performance

The QN90F is packed with premium picture technologies, all of which play a part in delivering a spectacular 4K HDR experience. For starters, brightness is intense. Calman Ultimate measurements reveal Samsung’s screen hitting almost 2,500cd/m² on a 10% HDR test window in Filmmaker Mode, which translates into some of the brightest highlights I’ve seen on a consumer TV. These ultra-intense highlights contain plenty of subtle shading and colour detail, too, rather than looking clipped.

Remarkably, these highlights still look punchy when they have to appear against a dark background. Samsung LED TVs typically dim small bright highlights quite heavily to stop dark areas from exhibiting backlight blooming and clouding. However, the QN90F’s combination of mini LED lighting, plenty of local dimming zones (720 on the 65in model) and Samsung’s latest AI-bolstered picture processing enables them to avoid almost all traces of backlight blooming while barely needing to dim bright highlights at all. This is arguably the QN90F’s single greatest area of improvement over its predecessor.

As noted with SDR playback, the QN90F works so hard to deliver inky black levels with HDR that faint details in dark areas can disappear from view with the TV’s default settings. But again, simply nudging the Shadow Detail setting up a few notches largely solves this niggle without damaging the rest of the picture.

The QN90F’s brightness continues to catch the eye even when an HDR shot floods the whole screen with brightness. Calman Ultimate tests confirm that Samsung’s screen can sustain nearly 800cd/m² with a 100% HDR window in Filmmaker Mode, and not far off 900cd/m² in Standard picture mode. As well as helping the QN90F deliver an unusually consistent HDR experience, it’s worth saying that no OLED TV we’ve reviewed to date has got higher than 350cd/m² or so with 100% HDR test signals.

This brightness joins forces with Samsung’s latest quantum dot colour system to deliver a gloriously far-reaching colour range. It can cover almost 95% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut used for most HDR mastering, so even if you’re in its fantastically bright, contrast-rich Standard mode you don’t have to worry about any ultra-bright shades starting to look strained.

There’s almost infinite subtlety in the QN90F’s colour rendering, too. I spied little to no banding or striping of subtle blends to spoil the 4K HDR picture’s stellar sharpness and clarity. This subtlety of shading also helps images look spectacularly three-dimensional and natural.

As with SDR playback, the QN90F is capable of achieving impressive HDR accuracy in Filmmaker mode, tracking HDR’s EOTF curve almost exactly, and keeping within the Delta E 2000 error level of three for all our HDR colour tests.

The Standard Mode isn’t nearly as accurate. But as I found with SDR content, it delivers a much brighter overall presentation (though the Filmmaker Mode delivers higher peaks), bolder colour saturations and enhanced sharpness more intelligently than I’ve seen on a Samsung TV before.

There are, inevitably, one or two niggles with the HDR picture quality. In Standard mode, you can get distracting brightness jumps during sharp cuts from dark to light and light to dark images that can only be largely resolved by switching the Local Dimming setting from its default Standard setting to either its Low or High alternatives.

I’d recommend choosing a Custom setting for the QN90F’s Picture Clarity options, with noise reduction turned off and judder and blur reduction set to low levels. And I’d suggest not watching HDR content from a wide angle if you can avoid it since the backlight blooming that’s so fantastically suppressed when you’re watching the TV head-on starts to become much more noticeable.

One final pity is that Samsung TVs don’t support the Dolby Vision HDR format. Dolby Vision sources default to their more basic HDR10 cores, which the TV’s own (admittedly extremely effective) tone-mapping processing then needs to work on to optimise how the pictures adapt to the TV’s capabilities.

The vast majority of my niggles with the QN90F are fixable or avoidable, so ultimately do little to detract from the extent to which it improves on its 2024 predecessor which was already one of the LCD TV world’s brightest lights.

To test the Samsung QN90F we used Portrait Displays Calman colour calibration software.

Samsung QN90F review: Gaming

The QN90F is at least as much fun for gaming as it is for watching TV. All four of its HDMI ports support not just 4K/120Hz games from consoles, but even 165Hz titles if you have a PC potent enough to handle them. Variable refresh rates are supported right up to 165Hz, too, including in the AMD FreeSync Premium format.

Support for Auto Low Latency Mode switching means the QN90F can switch into its low latency Game modes when a game source is detected, and in this mode, the TV only takes 9.8ms to render graphics received at its HDMI inputs. However, you can opt to add a little more lag in return for a little motion-smoothing processing if you’re playing a low frame-rate title.

Samsung’s dedicated Game Bar menu can be called up to provide information on the gaming feed and access to a few useful gaming aid features, while a Game Hub section of the Tizen home screen provides a one-stop shop for all your potential gaming sources, be they streamed gaming services or consoles/PCs connected to HDMI ports.

The QN90F’s prodigious gaming features are backed up by a brilliant gaming performance. The high frame rate support and low lag result in an ultra-immersive and responsive experience where you never feel disadvantaged by anything the screen might be doing. The combination of vibrant colour, great contrast and intense sharpness that serves the TV so well for video is arguably even more impactful for game graphics, too.

Samsung QN90F review: Sound quality

The QN90F’s default Standard audio setting is underwhelming. It leaves sound feeling trapped in the TV’s bodywork, and consequently, sound lacks the dynamism, projection and raw volume to deliver the scale or impact the TV’s cinematic images deserve.

Fortunately, the QN90F’s Amplify option instantly makes things better. Now the speakers find significantly more dynamism and impact, as well as enough power to craft a significantly larger, busier sound stage. Samsung’s Object Tracking Sound system is much more effective in Amplify mode, too, with specific effects and dialogue sounding like they’re coming from the correct part of the screen.

Amplify mode also adds more weight to the QN90F’s bass efforts, enabling the TV to hit lower frequencies with surprising consistency and enthusiasm for such a slender model. Bass rumbles don’t tend to collapse into phutting or crackling distortions either. The TV’s high treble sounds are more likely to cause a problem, sometimes sounding a bit warbly or causing the TV’s cabinet to buzz a little.

While the QN90F’s built-in speaker system doesn’t quite have the power or range to do its pictures proud, it partners with Samsung Q-Symphony compatible soundbars surprisingly effectively.

Samsung QN90F review: Verdict

The Samsung QN90F had two jobs: improve on Samsung’s previous multi-award winning premium mini LED TVs, and continue to make a premium LCD range feel like a compelling, brightness-led alternative to OLED technology. Happily, it achieves both these goals emphatically.