A month ago I bought a Samsung S90F OLED and a B750F soundbar and wrote a glowing review of the pair. I stand by every word of it. The TV is brilliant. The soundbar transformed my living room. I have no regrets.
Then Samsung flew me to Sydney for the launch of its 2026 line-up and spent two days showing the regional press exactly how the new panels improve on the outgoing range. At one point I walked into a demo room where Samsung had set up a direct side-by-side gaming comparison between the 2025 OLED and the 2026 OLED, running identical content under identical lighting. As the new owner of the 2025 model, I will admit my heart sank a little.
That feature responsible for the heart-sinking is Glare Free, Samsung’s anti-reflective panel coating, and in 2026 it is no longer reserved for the flagship.
What Glare Free actually is
OLED panels are gorgeous. They are also, by nature, glossy. The same surface that gives you those true blacks and that contrast you cannot get out of any LCD also catches every window, lamp and ceiling light in the room and bounces it straight back at you.
Samsung’s Glare Free technology is an anti-reflective coating that scatters that incoming light instead of mirroring it. It does not make the panel matte in the way a cheap office monitor is matte, with that grainy, washed-out look. It just stops your lounge windows from photobombing every dark scene.
Until now, this feature was effectively a flagship-only proposition. On the 2025 OLED range it was on the S95F and nowhere else. On the 2026 OLED range, it is on the S95H and the S90H, plus it now extends across The Frame Pro and the new Micro RGB R95H series too. That is a significant shift in who gets it.
Oh that big New Zealand sun
This is the part the marketing slides did not need to make. We have big windows. We build our homes around northern light. We have indoor-outdoor flow, ranchsliders the size of small ice rinks, and lounges that catch sun for most of the day. Many of us mount the TV opposite or adjacent to that glazing because that is where the room flows.
The result, on a glossy OLED, is that during daylight hours you are watching the room as much as the screen. You manage it with curtains. You manage it with picture mode. You learn where to sit. You live with it, because the picture quality when the lights drop is so good that it is worth the daytime compromise.
What Glare Free does is remove the compromise. In Sydney I watched a Premier League match on an S95H with sunshine pouring directly onto the screen, and the picture stayed clean, the blacks stayed black, and the room stayed where it belonged, in the corner of my eye instead of in the middle of the action. I have not seen anything like it on a glossy panel before. It is the single biggest practical improvement I would put my hand up for in any OLED purchase.
And, surprisingly, art comes to OLED
There was a quieter announcement at the Sydney launch that I think will turn out to be a bigger deal than its press-release billing suggested. Samsung’s Art Store, previously a defining feature of The Frame, now extends onto the S95H OLED. That sounds like a small ecosystem detail until you remember why static content on OLED has historically been treated with caution.
The self-emissive panels that give you those gorgeous blacks have, for years, carried a small but persistent burn-in question mark over them whenever a still image lingered too long. Manufacturers have spent the last decade reassuring buyers, refining pixel-shifting algorithms and quietly hoping nobody parked Sky Sport News on the screen overnight.
For Samsung to put curated artwork on OLED as a feature, with the full 5,000-plus piece Art Store library, is a confidence statement about panel longevity that you do not make lightly. The work shown on the S95H is paired with Pantone Validated ArtfulColor, which means the colours are tuned to match the original artwork rather than the panel’s idea of vivid.
I had a chance to spend time in front of one of these at the launch with an abstract seascape on display. I walked across the room to touch it. The brushstrokes looked that convincing, the canvas weave looked that real. They are not real brushstrokes of course; they are pixels arranged to mimic the texture and dimensionality of impasto strokes on canvas. But the effect was good enough to fool me at conversational distance, which is the sort of detail that does not show up in spec sheets.
The wider 2026 OLED story
If you are shopping for a new OLED in New Zealand right now, the 2026 line-up is broken into three tiers, all available from today:
S95H is the new flagship and sits at the top of the OLED tree. Glare Free, the new metal bezel design, Pantone Validated ArtfulColor, the FloatLayer Design that makes it feel lighter on the wall, Wireless One Connect, Art Store, and the burn-in confidence that goes with it. Priced from $6,299.95 for the 55-inch up to $14,999.95 for the 83-inch.
S90H is the sweet spot. This is the model I would buy today if I were starting from scratch. It now includes Glare Free, the Ultimate Gaming Pack with Motion Xcelerator 165Hz, FreeSync Premium Pro and G-SYNC Compatible, plus AI Football Mode Pro. Sizes run from 42-inch up to 83-inch, priced from $3,799.95 to $12,499.95.
S85H is the accessible OLED, opening the technology up to buyers who want the panel quality without every flagship feature. No Glare Free, but you keep the OLED fundamentals, the gaming credentials and the AI processing. Sizes from 48-inch to 83-inch, priced from $3,499.95 to $9,999.95.
The Frame Pro, which I have a soft spot for as a piece of design, also gets Glare Free alongside its Neo QLED panel and Pantone Validated ArtfulColor. If you want a TV that doubles as wall art in a sun-drenched lounge, this is now the one to look at.
Should I be jealous?
A bit, honestly. My S90F is wonderful and I love it. But if I had known the S90H was a month away with Glare Free included, I might have waited.
That said, the truth is most people do not buy a TV the same way they read a tech publication. You buy when your old set finally gives up, or when the deal in front of you makes sense, or when the lounge gets a refresh. You do not normally have the luxury of timing it to a new launch cycle. Mine came up early. That is just how it goes.
What I will say to anybody currently shopping is this: if you are weighing up an OLED in 2026, and you have any natural light coming into the room, look hard at the S90H or S95H specifically. Make sure the model number ends in H, not F. The Glare Free upgrade is one of those features you do not realise you needed until you have lived with the alternative, and right now Samsung is the only manufacturer offering it across this much of its OLED range.
For my part, I will be drawing the curtains a little earlier each evening and pretending I had a choice in the matter. The picture, after all, is still magnificent. Just do not expect a film invite from me on a sunny afternoon.
The 2026 Samsung OLED range is available now via Samsung.com/nz and major retailers nationwide.
Samsung covered travel and accommodation for the Sydney launch event. The S90F and B750F in my living room were purchased at full retail.
