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In the world of television, size is relative. As time passes, our definition of what qualifies as a large TV has evolved, while our appetite for more immersive home-viewing experiences has only increased. Along the way, screen size and picture quality haven’t always worked hand in hand, with technologies often pushed to breaking point in the pursuit of sheer scale. Fortunately, Samsung’s enormous AUD$41,995, 115-inch Micro RGB MR95F TV is here to shake things up.
I spent a day with the new panel, and this thing is big. Really big. Gargantuan enough that you’d be forgiven for assuming some compromise must’ve been made somewhere along the line to bring it to life. Fortunately, the MR95F also introduces Samsung’s take on cutting-edge Micro RGB technology, which appears to make it possible to enjoy ever larger TVs without compromising on clarity, detail, and colour accuracy.
With that, let’s dive into what it’s like to experience Samsung’s new behemoth, which is so enormous you’ll probably need to remove a wall or two from your house in order to get it into your living room.
Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Size: The MR95F is enormous and brings a level of immersion that smaller panels just can’t beat. | Price: It’s very expensive, making it inaccessible for most. That’s not to say it’s overpriced, though. |
| Micro RGB Tech: This new technology successfully delivers fantastic picture quality even across an enormous 115-inch screen. | Audio: You won’t get the full home-theatre experience without adding a sound bar at the very least. This is true of most modern TVs, however, not specific to the MR95F. |
| User Interface: It’s not the most beautiful UI in the world, but it’s easy to navigate, meaning you can find what you want to watch more quickly. |
Out With the OLED, In With the New
For years now, OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) has been celebrated as the superior image technology and rightly so. Its perfect blacks, vibrant colours, and lack of a blooming or halo effect have long earned it a place in the hearts of cinephiles, box-set bingers, sporting enthusiasts, and trash-TV fans alike.
However, OLED panels at the larger end of the TV size spectrum (say, 80 inches and up) have a high failure rate in production. That means larger TVs have long had to settle for being built around alternate technologies, compromising on image quality. Enter Samsung’s new flagship, which brings an innovative technological shift, offering OLED-like visuals without the same production woes for the manufacturer.
With this new Micro RGB technology, Samsung might have unlocked its next era in TV technology, but just because this 115-inch monster comes with a price tag of AUD$41,995 doesn’t mean you have to fork out a small fortune to experience the tech for yourself: Micro RGB is already available via considerably less expensive Samsung models in a range of more manageable sizes. Plus, brands like LG and Hisense have developed their own take on the tech.
What is Micro RGB?
When you strip it all down, Samsung’s Micro RGB technology is essentially a way of delivering a broader palette of colours with greater accuracy. Having seen it in person, I can confirm it’s extremely effective in this endeavour. The colour accuracy and the flow-on effect it has on clarity are undeniable.
How it works is by introducing colours at a far more foundational level of the image process. Whereas LED technology once relied on a single-colour backlight, which was filtered to produce the range of colours that appear on screen, Micro RGB uses red, green, and blue lights at the source, which are then filtered, providing purer colours and more of them.
This method has proved so effective that the MR95F is the first TV with VDE certification, confirming it can achieve 100 per cent coverage of the BT.2020 gamut ratio. If that sounds like gibberish to you, it basically means this panel can produce around 75 per cent of the colours the human eye can see, a significant step up from the 45 per cent offered by standard mini LED TVs.
To break it down another way, each Micro RGB LED is capable of producing 134 million shades per colour (red, green, or blue), which means it produces a number of hues that’s too big to write: 134 million x 134 million x 134 million.
The panel’s Micro RGB LEDs also measure less than 100 micrometres in size, and Samsung has developed an AI engine that controls each RGB LED independently. That creates the opportunity for more detail in every frame and better performance from one frame to the next.
Picture Quality
These elements make the MR95F’s offering very impressive indeed. I tested out a wide range of content on the panel and found it elevated everything I threw at it, from 4K Blu-rays to streamed football games. The most revealing of all the content I tried was Sinners, last year’s Oscar-winning blockbuster from writer/director Ryan Coogler starring Michael B. Jordan (twice).
For those who haven’t seen it, there are long sequences in the film that have been shot in very low light. In fact, the film’s entire second act, and much of its third, are set at night. Most of the light in these scenes comes from either oil lamps or fires, to the point where I found it tricky to make out much of the detail in the more dimly lit areas of the frame when I saw it in the cinema. Watching it on the MR95F, however, was a dramatically different experience.
The MR95F’s ability to conjure a wider range of colours and control each RGB LED on its own means the panel crisply delivers detail even within the potentially muddy shades of black and brown through to orange that populate so much of Coogler’s film.
The panel’s built-in AI also does an outstanding job of upscaling older content. While a TV of this calibre could potentially reveal shortcomings in a piece of content that was created years or perhaps even decades ago, the MR95F intuitively fills in the gaps, adding colours from its enormous palette of options, many of which weren’t there in the source, but once added, create a far richer viewing experience.
Ultimately, the MR95F combines superb picture quality with sheer scale in a way that was previously almost impossible. An enormous OLED TV could do the same, but the failure rate pushed the prices of those panels to such stratospheric levels that the AUD$41,995 asking price here appears downright reasonable by comparison.
Design and UI
If I’m honest, the design of TVs becomes more homogenous with every passing year, so there are only so many ways you can style what is essentially a giant piece of glass without any potential flair ultimately getting in the way and undermining the viewing experience.
So it is with the MR95F, which is a giant glass panel, but what more could you really ask from it? We’ve officially entered an era where, if the design of a TV is worth any kind of significant discussion, it’s probably for all the wrong reasons.
Where design does come into play is with the user interface, and here Samsung continues to do a respectable job. It’s unspectacular, but easy to navigate and at the end of the day, do you want to spend time moving through some beautified, but over-designed series of menus? Or do you just want to get to the content you’re after? That’s what I thought.
Full disclosure: Having a Samsung TV at home does mean navigating these menus has become second nature for me. However, I also feel compelled to register my displeasure at being served Sky News ads every time I turn on a Samsung telly – be it this one or my one at home. Being reminded of Sky News’ vapid culture warriors is a bit of a downer, and I wish that outlet weren’t able to infiltrate my home by buying ad space on my Samsung TV home screen. Oh well.
Audio Quality
Let’s be real, if you’re in possession of a 115-inch TV, there’s no way you’re not going to have a home theatre system to accompany it. If you don’t, well, I don’t know what to tell you. With TV designs having evolved to be so thin, there’s just no room for a high-quality audio system within a TV unit, and metal and glass are hardly the best materials for delivering immersive sound anyway.
Fortunately, Samsung had its Q-Series Soundbar, HW-Q990H, 11.1.4-channel subwoofer, and dual rear speaker system in place for my session, and it did an excellent job. If you have the AUD$41,995 for the MR95F, I recommend you at the very least fork out the AUD$1,999 required to pair it with that system as well.
Man of Many’s Final Verdict on the Samsung MR95F Television
The MR95F is massive and massively expensive, but that’s not to say it’s overpriced. After all, you’re paying top dollar for a super-high-end home cinema experience that will genuinely blow you away. The MR95F delivers.
Micro RGB technology is clearly not here to play around, and I’ll be curious to see if the coming years see it overtake OLED as people’s technology of choice, even at the lower end of the TV sizing range.
In the meantime, this is a TV that has scale at the centre of its reason for being, and in that regard, it can’t be faulted much. It’s overwhelming, immersive, and leaves you feeling enveloped by whatever content you prefer to watch. It’s a winner and a promising sign for things to come.
NOTE: The author of this article, Rob Edwards, was given access to the Samsung MR95F for the purposes of this review. All reviews remain independent and objective. Samsung was not shown this review before publishing, and we received no money for posting the review. For more information on how we test products, view our editorial guidelines here.
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