Early reviews suggest Samsung may have ditched QD-OLED panels for WOLEDs on the S90H TV series even in the US

Samsung’s 2026 OLED TVs are starting to pop up in retailer stocks around the world and early reviews for both the S95H and S90H series are also starting to get published. While the top-of-the-line S95H series is shaping up to be yet again a great contender for the best OLED TV of the year, the more affordable S90H series appears to have gone through a series of controversial changes that might force QD-OLED purists to strictly look at the more expensive options.

For the previous few generations, Samsung has been known to introduce the so-called panel lottery on the S90 series. This was mainly for all the markets excluding the US and Korean ones, where only certain sizes came with QD-OLED panels and the rest were equipped with WOLEDs produced by LG. In Europe for example, only the 65-inch S90 models featured the QD-OLED panels, as the others all the way from 42-inch to 83-inch or 90-inch would be WOLEDs. Sometimes even the 65-inch models would sneak in some WOLEDs. This year however, it looks like even the US models are plagued by this problem, as Samsung appears to have completely ditched the QD-OLED panels on the S90H series.

Reviewers like The Display Guy on YouTube and the Ecoustics website got to play around with the 65-inch version of the Samsung S90H OLED TV and they discovered that their review samples were equipped with WOLED panels.

Ecoustics notes that “the measurements we made on the S90H in a 65-inch screen size suggest that this new model actually uses a WOLED panel. While it can reach 98.6% of the P3 color standard, it only manages to reproduce 74.77% of the BT.2020 color gamut. And while this isn’t a serious limitation on most of today’s content, it does suggest that the underlying panel is actually WOLED, not QD-OLED.”

Adding to the panel downgrades, The Display Guy also points out that the S90H series now come with matte coating, meaning that all the Samsung OLEDs this year will only feature matte coating. On the WOLED panel problem, The Display Guy states that he could not confirm with Samsung whether the entire S90H series features WOLEDs and the company will probably never confirm if there is any panel lottery. US buyers will soon find out how frustrated the European buyers have been in previous years.

Another concerning aspect that is revealed with the lower BT.2020 color gamut is that Samsung might ship the entire S90H lineup with 2025 WOLED panels as opposed to the newer 4-layer WOLED panels equipping the LG C6 and G6 this year. The Display Guy is guessing that at least the 42-inch and the 83-inch models will feature 2025 WOLED panels, and he hopes to be proven wrong about the other sizes as he actually received a pre-production 65-inch sample.

To top things off, most of the S90H models are receiving a $200 price increase over last year’s models introductory price, thus the 65-inch will cost $2,700 instead of $2,500. This makes little to no sense if Samsung is indeed including only WOLED panels on the S90H series.