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There are a lot of glowing reviews of the latest flagship TV from Samsung, the S95B. Samsung Display’s new and much awaited QD-OLED technology brings extra brightness and colour volume to the inky blacks of regular W-OLED technology, but if you scour the TV reviewer videos, AV websites and shopper reviews you’ll find a surprising number of less than positive aspects reported too.

I’ve summarised those I’ve found so far below but leave a comment if there’s anything I’ve missed.

Starting with a thread of 15 issues based on this TV YouTuber’s findings:

Looks like a lot:

1/ Colour fringing with dark objects against a light background

2/ Low bit rate content shows aliasing and smoothing artefacts

3/ Shadow details can be crushed or overly bright

4/ Dark scenes can trigger dimming

5/ Motion can show ghost trails

contd.

— GI Chow (@GIChowDotcom) May 1, 2022

I’ve lumped these problems, plus those from other sources, into a set of categories:

Physical e.g. size

Only comes in 55 and 65 inch sizes: https://www.samsung.com/uk/tvs/oled-tv/s95b-55-inch-oled-4k-smart-tv-qe55s95batxxu/

11/ Panel can be bent in shipping: https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-55-Inch-Quantum-Built-QN55S95BAFXZA/product-reviews/B09VHBXY63

15/ Bright lights near the screen make blacks grayish

8/ Cleaning with water can leave spots, though this might help: https://lifehacks.stackexchange.com/questions/17639/how-to-remove-water-stains-from-tv

The S95B is a great performer in HDR and gaming, but has a lot of issues and bugs too.https://t.co/AP22OxUw3c

— Keep It Classy Tech (@KIC_Tech) May 1, 2022

User Interface e.g. OS and remote

13/ Tizen OS is laggy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen

“an uninspiring smart platform”: https://www.reviewed.com/televisions/content/samsung-s95b-oled-tv-review

Small remote with no back-light: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/reviews/samsung-55-class-s95b-oled-4k-smart-tizen-tv/6502216

Picture Processing e.g. black crush, blown highlights, colour accuracy, upscaling, motion handling, HDR modes.

9/ Out of the box, filmmaker mode is brighter than movie mode and shadow details are too dark: https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00079295/

10/ In some modes eotf is pushed too bright affecting mid tones

Inaccurate or oversaturated colour and luminance:

The greatest trick the S95B ever pulled was sucking in certain "calibrators" who don't know what a reference picture looks like.

— Vincent Teoh (@Vincent_Teoh) April 18, 2022

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/samsung-4k-s95b-qd-oled-owners-thread-no-price-talk.3240720/post-61604628

1/ Colour fringing with dark objects against a light background: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration

3/ Shadow details can be crushed or overly bright: https://www.howtogeek.com/728797/what-is-black-crush-on-a-display/

4/ Dark scenes can trigger dimming (tho not the only OLED to do this)

LG CX dimming the image from OLED

2/ Low bit rate content shows aliasing and smoothing artefacts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_anti-aliasing

S95B is the worst Ive seen low bitrate content be handled (regardless of resolution).

— Keep It Classy Tech (@KIC_Tech) April 30, 2022

14/ Smooth gradation can show posterization: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterization

5/ Motion can show ghost trails

LCD Motion Artifacts 101: Introduction

12/ Motion interpolation introduces artefacts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation

No Dolby Vision HDR mode: https://www.reviewed.com/televisions/content/samsung-s95b-oled-tv-review

Quality Control e.g. bugs

Screen cuts off the edge of images: https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-55-Inch-Quantum-Built-QN55S95BAFXZA/product-reviews/B09VHBXY63

6/ Auto colour gamut and auto input switching are unreliable: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut

7/ Picture settings reset unexpectedly 

Longevity – OLED tech is based on organic materials which wear out

Brightness – QD OLEDs can get bright but are nevertheless still much less bright than some LEDs

It’s the brightest OLED we’ve tested to date but S95B doesn’t get as bright as some of the brightest LCD/LED TVs:

https://www.reviewed.com/televisions/content/samsung-s95b-oled-tv-review

Value – price to performance is not the best

Cheaper LEDs like the Sony X95K and its kin have as many strengths and come in larger screen sizes

Finally, trust your eyes – look at some footage of a real life scene and see which TV looks more realistic and involving. And if the measurements of the TV you prefer are worse than some other TV then the measurements are measuring the wrong things – things that don’t necessarily reflect our perception.

And beware the shills and bots lurking in the comments – you need look no further than those in my last video to see the kind of unsubstantiated hype they come out with!

Image credits: cottonbro

In a nutshell, this latest evolution of Sennheiser’s Momentum True Wireless Bluetooth earphones offers an adaptive codec that should handle dropouts over distance better, improved ANC and call quality in noisy environments and more secure fit with a popular tuning that emphasises female vocals over the previous generation.

Love: sound quality is among the top tier with, by default, more forward female vocals than its predecessors which, while not to my taste, has a fresher, livelier sound that many may prefer.

Like: comfort, security of fit, the unobtrusive design that sits more flush in the ear, responsiveness of touch controls, lightness, microphone quality, water resistant IPX4 rating, long battery life, Qi charging, removing from the ear automatically pauses a track and replacing it resumes, activating transparency mode automatically pauses a track and deactivating resumes, transparency mode works well, ANC is good for an earphone (tho headphone ANC is much more effective) and does not affect EQ when switched on, the App offers good configuration of touch operation and EQ with my ideal touch configuration for volume (hold), pause (tap) and skip (double tap) by default, and there is no noticeable latency when watching videos.

Dislike: looks which are less distinctive and premium than the previous model, difficulty connecting to a 5y old Windows laptop, the charging port being at the front, the default tuning slightly emphasising upper mids with less bass rumble, single bud use only working with the right bud, there being no multipoint pairing allowing connection to and automatic switching between 2 devices at the same time like your phone and laptop, without unpairing and repairing, Sennheiser make you register to use the Sound Check custom EQ and Sound Zones location based EQ, there is some hiss at the higher levels of transparency mode, and finally value for pure sound quality, which is always my number one priority, is only fair.

I’ve characterised the review this way since a love can outweigh a dislike and vice versa, making simply totting up points in categories like sound quality, comfort, control scheme, security of fit, battery life, connectivity, etc. rather academic. In the final analysis, arguably the best buds are the ones you end up using the most.

The MTW3 maintains the solid foundation of the previous model but with a popular Harman style tuning that brings female vocals more forward in the mix. Such a tuning can emphasise female vocals at the expense of male however the MTW3 remains a good performer with both male (Peter Gabriel’s Heroes) and female (Nitin Sawhney’s Nadia) vocals being involving. They have a tight and deep but marginally less rumbly bass than their predecessor though the sub bass at 3:27 of Hans Zimmer’s “Why so serious?” still comes across as satisfying, if slightly less so than on my reference TWS earphones (that also conveys the plunging into water sounds at the beginning of Dario G’s “Voices” better). Soundstage is also slightly less wide on “Fly Me To The Moon” bringing the higher registers of Sinatra’s vocals more to the foreground.

So sound wise these are a sidestep from the previous generation, with a tuning that I find less natural but that many may prefer.

As someone who rarely uses earphone ANC, for me the new and improved features do not make up for the significant additional cost over alternatives, though admittedly these are much cheaper than the launch price of Sennheiser’s previous equivalent flagship model.

If you’re happy to forego some features like the ANC and top tier transparency, lower profile, more secure fit and auto track pause there are cheaper alternatives from the same manufacturer like the CX400BT and CX series that offer the same level of sound quality in a comfortable form factor.

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I’ve reviewed a lot of products and focus the channel on high quality high value audio, technology and wellbeing which, in a nutshell, is bang for buck, so the entirely new level of performance the QD OLED technology of the Samsung S95B promises looks really exciting BUT you need to know there are some uncomfortable truths that almost none of the reviewers are talking about.

Now I love the almost 3d look of OLED and the Samsung S95B quantum dot or QD oled is the latest evolution of OLED technology and looks to offer the most realistic picture yet, combining the impactful brightness of LED with the black levels, depth and gaming response times of OLED.

If you’ve been through the hours of reviews from Digital Trends, HDTVTest, Stop the FOMO, Quantum TV, Tech with KG and others and managed to stay awake you’ll have heard all the excitement about what this new technology, currently only available in the Sony A95K and Samsung S95B, delivers. In a nutshell:

1) Impactful brightness conveying energy due to use of light producing quantum dots rather than regular OLED’s light absorbing coloured filters

2) High Colour volume making the picture pop due to absence of the white sub pixel in traditional WRGB OLEDs that brightens but also washes colours out

3) Perfect blacks with high contrast and depth making the picture look almost 3 dimensional and life like

4) Convincing upscaling of less than pristine content and blur free motion processing.

Digital Trends 922k

HDTVTest 422k

Stop the FOMO 117k

Quantum TV 65k

Whisper Status 74 19k

Tech With KG 15k

Keep It Classy Tech 11k

Some reviewers have gotten very excited and I’d encourage you to check them out.

But we need to get into the technology of these quantum dots. Now bear with me on the science lesson because this will become relevant to the dark truths we’ll get to in a minute, that  few reviewers have hinted at.

QD-OLED vs OLED vs QLED vs Mini LED TVs: What’s the difference?

Colour conversion in QD-OLED displays is done by quantum dots that are placed or patterned at a sub-pixel level over Blue OLEDs.

So, we have a blue OLED emissive layer in the backplane where all pixels are blue. And then green and red quantum dot materials are printed on pixels that need to be green or red.

Just like in regular OLED however, in QD OLED organic materials are the source of the light and these materials wears out. The Blue OLED lights get dimmer with time and over the lifetime of your TV, its display will get less bright.

But this is a new tech right? Well yes its new in that no white sub pixel is employed to increase brightness at the expense of colour purity and there’s no colour filter to reduces brightness, but rather quantum dots which emit photons HOWEVER the underlying light production is still organic and will degrade over time. And there’s the rub.

Now Avforums, a respected av enthusiast website, has over 20 pages of posts on problems due to OLEDs wearing out with sets purchased as recently as Summer 2018, under 4 years ago, and furthermore warranty claims being rejected.

https://www.avforums.com/threads/help-green-spot-in-middle-of-lg-oled.2154188/

There’s even a whole video on how you can wear your TV out just by watching normal content and I don’t mean screen burn or image retention by having static images frequently on screen. Many people, including me, relate to the problem and there are several comments against this video describing their experiences 

Now while the panel will get dimmer over time, that of itself is no big deal since especially with QD oled it was much brighter than traditional OLED panels to begin with, BUT if some areas of the screen typically use certain colours more than others like pink faces in the middle of the screen from news and chat show programs then those areas are going to have pixels that are more worn out potentially causing a colour shift in those areas.

Ah but there’s compensation nowadays I hear you say with pixel shifter and pixel refreshers and screen savers. Well yes, but if you have a patch of red say and shift one red pixel with the red pixel next to it you’ll still have a red pixel being shown and then the only way to compensate is to burn out all the other leds to the same extent making the whole display dimmer each time.

And different rates of wear by different colours, for example with human pink faces typically centre screen can cause those portions of the screen to show a colour cast which is an unpleasant green tinge exactly where faces, which as humans we’re very sensitive to, typically appear. I’ve got another video on how to mitigate the problem, one I experienced myself on a 3 year old Panasonic OLED (tx55hz980b), to make the picture more watchable but it’s a workaround and introduces a wholesale colour shift of the picture so is far from ideal.

And did I mention the price.

Now clearly the QD OLED picture more or less successfully combines the impactful brightness of lcds with the blacks, depth and almost 3d realism of oleds. But the price is double that of competing mini LED, Full Array Local Dimming and OLED TVs so unless you buy into the 100% better view there’s no way it can reasonably be considered worth double the cost of some other still great looking televisions, especially when you consider things like the user experience of the TV operating system, sound quality and picture processing.

So to summarise the S95B may well be a fantastic looking set but bear in mind that 

1. Depending on the content you watch and for how long, because of the technology used and nature of typical TV content, the screen may wear out in such a way that the picture becomes noticeably degraded with jarring patchy colour casts within 4 years so make sure you get a warranty against this – or are rich enough to consider your expensive tv disposable
2. At double the price of some lesser but still great looking alternatives there may be a new king in QD OLED but for now at least value isn’t its strong suit.

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I’ve written the most helpful Amazon UK reviews for some of the latest and most premium Bluetooth earphones including Apple AirPods 3, Sony WF-1000XM4 and Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro but as a recognised Amazon vine reviewer Sennheiser hasn’t offered me their most highly anticipated wireless earphones in years, the Momentum True Wireless 3 for review. Now why? 

Well I focus the channel on high quality high value audio, technology and wellbeing which in a nutshell is bang for buck or sound per pound in the case of audio and the TW3 is retailing at well over £200.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love my Sennheiser cx400bt and its very natural sound. I rotate it with my ipx4 rated Sony wf-xb700 which has a more artificial V-shaped but exciting and spacious sound with deep bass and forward female vocals and between them I have everything I personally need for sound quality and practicality in Bluetooth wireless earphones.

Let’s do a quick review of the specs of the new Sennheiser momentum.

In a nutshell it offers a fancy high res codec, longer battery life, more secure fit, improved ANC and better call quality in noisy environments.

Now I suspect the codec will make no to little noticeable difference to sound quality and much less of a difference than basics like tuning and amplifier components.

The longer battery life is great since there have been times when I’ve wanted more than the 4 hours my cx400bt offers however if that means they’ve gone for weaker magnets and a lower current amplifier that doesn’t push and pull the driver so strongly then we’ll lose that wonderfully realistic sound of the cx400 and it will be a sound quality downgrade.

Now fit is one area where the TW3 may be a step up on the TW2, especially if you wear them while exercising however fit alone is not enough since the IP rating would also have to improve to make them practical to deal with sweat and rain. And sealing sound producing components typically adversely affects sound quality so is that a trade off a hifi audio manufacturer would want to make?

And of course we’ll expect the ANC to be world class, both the noise cancelling and transparency but none of the clever triggering features of the Samsung or Sony are mentioned where transparency starts if you or someone else starts talking for example.

And while the microphone quality may improve in noisy environments the previous generation wasn’t exactly poor.

Now I don’t use earphone ANC and unless there’s some very significant difference from the cx400 I can’t imagine the TW3 being worth over twice the price – even if you have no other wireless buds and the full package of capabilities just happens to marry up with your particular use case.

Now one area where, perhaps with the change of owner to Sonova, Sennheiser has been a bit slow is pre release to the influencers and sponsored deals, something that brands like Anker are world class at. If that means more of the purchase price goes into the product then I’m all for that though it’s a balancing act and if they don’t sell enough units consumers won’t benefit from economies of scale. The reputation of Sennheiser may be enough to carry them this time.

Well, whatever the case, mine is ordered with my own money and arriving later this month so subscribe if you want to see whether any of these predictions prove true when I post my recording of how they sound.

Thanks as always for reading!

Yes, a Wordle streak ends when you miss playing for a day, confirmed in this Reddit post.

A ‘streak’ in Wordle is the number of consecutive times you have correctly guessed the word in a game of Wordle.

If you don’t play then your ‘current streak’ will end but your ‘max streak’, which is the highest streak you have ever had (and can be the same as your ‘current streak’) will remain unchanged.

But if you didn’t make a guess one day or didn’t even open the Wordle website then arguably you didn’t participate and a game didn’t take place.

And what if you left a game unfinished with guesses left in hand, perhaps intending or forgetting to get back to it? Seems like happily it won’t then count towards your ‘Played’ count or ‘Win %’.

See what some A-List celebs have to say about it:

Leave a comment below on whether you think it does or should make a difference to whether a streak ends and what a good average score is – mine is 3.9 in the example above.

If you’ve created any “Wordle art” feel free to share that in a comment too and I’ll add the most popular:

Yeah very clever but not as beautiful as my lovely picture of a grassy hill on a planet with four suns pic.twitter.com/lujjNBPcGG

— GI Chow (@GIChowDotcom) January 15, 2022

Thanks for reading and sharing – for more high value tech and wellbeing at the lowest price you can follow me on YouTube:

If where that whoop pipe sound in the January 2022 Virgin mobile advert with the bouncing car comes from has been bugging you, the music is from “Drop It Like It’s Hot” by Snoop Dogg featuring Pharrell Williams. The penny whistle two-tone whoop starts at 1:47 which may evoke memory of the sound of inhalation through a bong. Might make one wonder whether Virgin is targeting dealers 😄

Interesting how gangster/drug culture has become part of mainstream media advertising and of course Virgin Media as far back as 2012 used a reworking of Dan Black’s “HYPNTZ” (reworked as “Symphonies” for copyright reasons) which was itself a reworking of the lyrics from Hypnotize by The Notorious B.I.G. combined with the theme from the John Carpenter film Starman by Jack Nitzsche.

If you got value and enjoy music on good audio consider subscribing to my YouTube channel

https://youtube.com/c/GIChow

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https://youtube.com/shorts/mIlYuuoWZ4Q

So volume is pretty important right?

I mean if you listen at too high a volume for too long you risk permanent hearing loss.

But AirPods 3 have no wireless touch volume controls – controls that are on everything nowadays from cheap wired and wireless earphones to the premium TWS earphones from Samsung, Sony, Sennheiser and every other major manufacturer.

So how do you change volume wirelessly?

Like this

You have to talk to your phone to change the volume. And if you’re using your buds on another device, like a laptop, you can’t even do that.

But Apple is a pioneer right. After all it got rid of earphone jacks to make its phones slimmer and so you had to go wireless – and stop listening when your wireless buds run out of juice.

Unless you use a proprietary Apple lightning port to jack plug adapter:

which they charge you for.

To plug in good old fashioned wired Apple EarPods with inline volume controls

which they charge you for.

Or you can change volume by rotating the crown of your Apple watch

which they charge you for – handsomely.

But Apple has some grander vision right? A world where volume isn’t needed because its players auto level.

What like the “Normalize volume” setting in Spotify you mean?

Or maybe their vision is of a world where AirPods magically know how much volume you want at any time?

Erm they don’t – and they tell you how to change volume remember. You need to talk to it, or buy an Apple watch.

Or is it that Apple got it wrong – but they can’t admit that because of the God argument. You know the one: God can’t change because any change is for the better or for the worse. Ergo, Apple can’t change for the better since that would mean some goodness was originally missing. And of course it can’t change for the worse because that would mean it losing some goodness.

Or does Apple hold its users in some kind of trance, some kind of Apple reality distortion field. I mean, this is a chat with an Apple user I know.

But guess what, Apple gives you a feature request form

Though they don’t publish upvotes like Microsoft do (or used to) – so you can’t see how much discontent there is or demand for a particular feature.

So take a listen to some recordings of the 3rd generation AirPods

Or take a look at some of their flaws

and see whether things make any more sense – if they do please leave a comment there to illuminate me!

Did you find that nothing appears at your printer when you print from Google docs?

To fix this, I’d anticipated having to update a myriad of device drivers and perhaps even my browser and operating system itself but as it turned out there was a quick and simple solution – though it’s only quick when you know how.

When the Microsoft Office 365 license expired on one of my laptops recently, I had no option but to use Wordpad or Google docs to write a simple letter – well no option short of installing free office software, like Apache OpenOffice, which I thought overkill for my needs and creaking laptop.

I wanted to embed a cropped photo in the document, which meant Google docs was the only candidate up to the job.

I quickly knocked up the letter (see my other article on Amazon recharging me if you’re curious to know why I had to post an old fashioned physical letter) and was very happy with the result.

When I came to print, however, it said it had printed but nothing appeared at the printer.

I’d used the print option from within Google docs itself so the letter would print in the chosen A4 portrait format, rather than my Firefox browser’s print option which would just print the contents of the browser rather than the document itself.

I checked my default printer was correctly set, tried a test print and printing some simple text from Notepad, both of which worked fine, but printing from Google docs did not do anything however many time I tried – not even an error message.

So the big reveal – Google docs ‘print’ does not send your document to your printer.

What?! Yes I know. It ‘sends’ the document to a pdf file in your browser’s downloads directory.

You need to open that directory, double click the pdf file to open it in Adobe Acrobat and then print to your printer from Acrobat.

Easy when you know how.

Hope this helps! And for more free info about how to lose fat check out my blog https://www.gichow.com

If you find your Samusung phone storage keeps increasing and you can’t reduce it by deleting files there could be a simple solution.

You probably have one of your recycle bins turned on – even if it looks to be turned off.

Video files are the worst culprit since when you delete a bad take it does not free up the space the file was taking up.

The first you’ll know about this is when a video you’re filming stops mid recording and you wonder whether you forgot to press the record button at the end of the scene- until you make sure you press the record button and it happens again.

As a workaround you might switch your camera application to store files in internal storage – assuming you have enough free space there.

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Or you can delete some old unneeded large video files from your SD card to get you going again – but the problem will just occur again.

Note: if you were using Internal storage as your camera storage location, rather than SD card, the workaround would be to switch storage to SD card.

The issue is that your Samsung phone has different recycle bins for different apps. You might think your recycle bin is switched off when you go into the “My Files” app.

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If you delete a file from My Files you get a simple “Delete file?'” warning, press “Delete” and all is well.

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If, however, you delete a file from the Gallery app you get a “Move one video to the Recycle bin?” warning.

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If you press “Cancel” and go back to the My Files app nothing looks to be stored or even storable in the Recycle Bin, since when pressing it you just get a message asking whether you want to turn it on – and if you do, then nothing shows up there.

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If you then turn off the Recycle bin from settings:

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..and then go back to Gallery and delete a file you get the same “Move one video to the Recycle bin?” warning.

So what is going on?

This took me a long time to work out and after a lot of googling I was close to taking all the files off my SD card and reformatting it in the hope this would solve things (I’d previously transferred this SD card with all its data to a new phone).

Happily I discovered that there is a simple setting to resolve the issue.

There is in fact a separate recycle bin used by the Gallery app, which can be turned on and off by clicking the 3 dots top right of the initial “Albums” screen and then Settings.

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And if you click the 3 dots and then “Recycle bin” you can see what’s in it, taking up all that space you found being consumed despite your attempts to free it up from the “My Files” app.

Just tap “Empty” top right and then to confirm tap “Empty Recycle Bin”

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..and your space will be freed, giving you that wonderful feeling of not having to do any phone storage housekeeping for some time! If you like you can also turn the Gallery recycle bin off to avoid deleted files ever taking up storage space.

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Now the opposite problem can also occur where the Gallery app recycle bin is turned off but the My Files recycle bin is turned on:

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Again, just tap “Empty” top right and then to confirm tap “Empty Recycle Bin”

..and your space will be freed. As before you can also turn the My Files recycle bin off to avoid deleted files ever taking up storage space.

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If you had both recycle bins on you can turn either or both off if you want files to be gone forever when deleted rather than just moved to a bin and so still taking up phone storage.

Hope this helps! And for more free info about how to lose fat check out my blog https://www.gichow.com