According to a recent study by FlatpanelsHDa site specializing in televisions, Samsung allegedly tampered with some of its products to get better scores in brightness tests. In the viewfinder of the experts, the QN95Ba top-of-the-range model from the Korean manufacturer.
How did the QN95B tamper with the tests?
To falsify the tests, the investigation reports that the manufacturer “would temporarily increase its luminosity” at the time of testing to skew the measurements in its favor. It’s no secret: in recent years, Sony, LG, Panasonic and Samsung fight over the brightness argument. Indeed, this is one of the criteria that television manufacturers most often put forward. However, Samsung would have lied about the real capabilities of some of its televisions.
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The famous “bright peak” has virtually no impact on individuals. However, for television and film productions, it can make the difference. Excellent brightness can allow “to better restore the shimmer of the sun in the water, or the brilliance of a laser beam”. It is still necessary that the characteristics announced are the right ones. To carry out these tests, the experts are interested in the maximum brightness of the televisions.
Using a white rectangle measuring approximately 10% of the screen area, they measure the number of “nits”, a unit of luminous intensity. The survey carried out by FlatpanelsHD reports that Samsung’s high-end QN95B TV will be able to thwart this method “by detecting that a test is in progress and temporarily increasing its brightness by 80%”. Experts claim that the TV could not sustain this level of intensity without sustaining damage.
Samsung has already done the same with a smartphone
To realize this trickery, the journalists used a white square which covered only 9% of the surface of the screen. With this very simple technique, performance passes from 2,300 nits to 1,300 nits, which is already exceptional for a television. According to the authors of the report, this is not the first time that Samsung has tried to bias the tests. There is indeed a precedent with a smartphone. In March 2022, the S22 has also been accused of delivering false specs.
The smartphone showed exceptional performance with popular applications like 3Dmark or Geekbench, but that had nothing to do with games that could have benefited from such speed. At the time, the manufacturer justified these slowdowns by saying that they allowed to avoid excessive heating of the smartphone. The blow of overheating. Not very original. Xiaomi, OnePlus, Huawei and Oppo have also been caught out for the same reasons.