In recent years, brightness has been one of the commercial arguments that television manufacturers have most often put forward: Sony, LG, Panasonic and Samsung are vying for the record for the highest “bright peak”. In fact, some big television and film productions really take advantage of this, displaying small areas of particularly bright images in order to better reproduce, for example, the shimmer of the sun in water, or the brilliance of a laser beam. Gold, according to the specialized site FlatpanelsHDSamsung would have lied about the real capabilities of some of its televisions.
The maximum brightness of TVs is generally evaluated by displaying a small white rectangle on 10% of the surface of the screen, then measuring, using a probe, the number of “nits”, a unit of luminous intensity, issued at this specific location. According to FlatpanelsHD, Samsung’s high-end QN95B TV is able to thwart this method by detecting that a test is in progress and then temporarily increasing its brightness by 80% – the TV would not be able to withstand such a spike for a long time without sustaining damage, Judge FlatpanelsHD.
Journalists from the Danish media noticed the deception by displaying a non-standard white square, occupying only 9% of the screen surface. The light peak then collapsed, falling from the stratospheric level of 2,300 nits to the value of 1,300 nits. An already very high level that this television has never managed to exceed during real tests involving the broadcasting of films and series.
A precedent on smartphone
“Samsung will provide a software update that will make HDR content consistent in brightness across more window sizes, beyond industry standards” Samsung replied to Danish journalists, thus acknowledging the manipulation.
This is the second time that the Korean manufacturer has been the subject of such accusations in 2022. Already at the beginning of March, its flagship smartphone, the S22, was caught speeding. The smartphone worked very quickly when measuring its performance with popular test applications like 3Dmark or Geekbench, but half as fast with many other applications – especially games that could have benefited from such speed.
The editor of the Geekbench testing application took umbrage, banishing the Samsung S22 – and its three predecessors – from its website, where it ranks smartphones according to their performance. Again, Samsung responded by offering a software update, leaving gamers more freedom in performance management of their mobile, while explaining that these slowdowns were intended to avoid overheating of his smartphones.
The problem of overheating is in no way original: it has been the main concern of electronic chip manufacturers for decades and every smartphone manufacturer is faced with this problem. In the past, several other brands have resorted to solutions that flirt with dishonesty, such as Xiaomi in 2022, OnePlus in 2021, Huawei and Oppo in 2018.