Samsung promises update after alleged misleading calibration software

Samsung promises to release an update that should make the clarity of HDR content more consistent. Several testers claim that the South Korean tech giant uses software to recognize commonly used benchmarking techniques and adjust the image quality accordingly.

The company says in a statement to FlatpanelsHD“In order to provide a more dynamic viewing experience to our customers, Samsung will be making software updates to ensure consistent clarity when viewing HDR content. The update includes more block sizes beyond what is common in the industry.” With that last sentence, the brand seems to acknowledge that a benchmark technique is taken into account in which only a small part of the screen, a block or window, is used to perform measurements.

It is not entirely clear from Samsung’s statement whether TVs from the brand will show more realistic results in benchmarks, or whether performance should be increased during normal use. The ‘include more block sizes’ suggests that the potentially misleading benchmark detection is being used in more cases. Anyway, for now only the QN95B would be provided with an update; nothing concrete is said about specific other TVs, affected or not.

Vincent Teoh of Hdtvtest discovered at the end of April that the Samsung S95B QD OLED TV achieved too accurate and clear reproduction with commonly used blocks of five, ten or twenty percent of the screen. FlatpanelsHD underlines this based on its own tests of the Samsung QN95B; at a block size of, for example, 9 percent, significantly different values ​​would be measured than at 10 percent. For example, when the alleged cheating software hit, the block would produce a temporarily increased brightness of 2300 nits, while only 1300 nits was measured during normal use. The much higher value could damage a QD OLED panel with prolonged use.