If a technology manufacturer provides you with benchmarking figures they conducted themselves, you should always take them with a grain of salt. – It’s not necessarily dishonest, but you know that if they’re choosing to use them for marketing, everything that could possibly be skewed in their favour probably has been. When it comes to Samsung though… Well, let’s just say that they don’t have a particularly good reputation in this regard!
Over the last 10 years, Samsung has regularly been accused of deliberately ‘fudging the numbers’ when it comes to their smartphone performance and most recently with their S22 which only hit the market last February.
Following a report via TechSpot, however, it appears that this kind of shenanigans may not be limited to that particular product as various reports have claimed that Samsung has also been attempting to misrepresent the performance of their high-performance televisions! – Albeit, for this new one, the rabbit hole does go a little deeper!
Samsung Programming Televisions to Detect and React to Benchmarks?!
At the time of writing, various independent review sources have cited irregularities when it has come to testing Samsung’s S95B QD-OLED and QN95B Neo QLED LCD TV models. We only say ‘at the time of writing’ because it’s still entirely possible that this is a far more widespread problem than currently thought.
What’s the problem though? Well, attempting to keep things as succinct as possible, it would appear that these television models have been specifically programmed to detect when certain benchmark tests are being performed on them, and, by proxy, alter their behaviour to provide results massively in excess of their generic day-to-day usage.
A key example of this has been identified within the 10% test (a fairly common television benchmark practice where only 10% of the display screen is utilised). – Within this test, it has been alleged that a massive 80% boost was created in the above Samsung TV model’s screen luminance (brightness in lamens terms). In addition, colour vibrancy was also significantly higher in this particular and very specific mode. – And just to make a point clear, at 80% luminance, this would clearly produce an exceptionally strong image, but one that could potentially cause screen burn if applied for a significant period of time (such as, for example, on a video games pause screen).
Upon further testing, however, is where problems (for Samsung) started to appear. It was found that with a 9% test (an exceptionally uncommon display screen test area), the results were notably more in line with what was seen in general usage. – In other words, the overall conclusion is that Samsung has specifically created an algorithm within their high-end televisions to specifically detect when benchmarks are being run, and, by proxy, configure itself to provide results hugely in excess of what they would be under generic usage.
Are more Lawsuits Incoming?
Samsung could potentially be facing yet another lawsuit here for their seemingly continued practice of attempting to make their tech products only perform better under very specific, and seemingly anticipated, test conditions. – It wouldn’t be so bad if this was a one-off, but if this information is proven accurate, this would be (at least to my knowledge) around the 5th or 6th time that Samsung may have been caught with its metaphorical hand in the cookie jar!
In conclusion though, and just for balance, we should again note that such practices within the tech industry are, generally speaking, not uncommon. – With this latest development, however, it would appear that Samsung does very much enjoy seeing how far they can push these ethical performance boundaries before risking legal problems!
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