Nothing else is even close - Samsung Odyssey G9 Monitor

The Samsung G9 Odyssey is something exciting, and currently, nothing comes anywhere close to the performance, looks, and even future-proofing.

- This video unboxing the Odyssey G9 is sponsored by Samsung. This is one of the most exciting monitors. That’s it. On paper, it has absolutely everything it needs to make it the ultimate gaming monitor. Zero compromises. That is assuming you can find a safe way to get it out of the box. No problem. Its 49-inches, which has basically the equivalent of having 27-inch monitors, side by side. It is unlike anything I have ever seen before. This has got a 1000R curve, which basically means that the radius of a circle of these monitors would be just 1,000 centimeters, one meter.

That is freak in unbelievable. Puts a smile on my face. The whole idea of curved displays didn’t last long in TVs, not because it’s a bad idea though, in fact, if you look closely at a movie theater screen it’s probably curved and the reason is that it allows the entire screen to be an equal distance from your eyes so if you have to look around from one place to another you don’t have to refocus them. For a TV, by the time you’re  reasonable enough distance from it, there’s not really much difference from the edge of the panel to the middle of it at that size. Not so for a monitor.

It is taking up such an enormous part of your field of vision that it could make a ton of sense to have it curved.

Honestly speaking, though, as cool as that is,  that’s one of the least exciting things about this monitor to me. Everything else is equally mind-blowing. So it’s got a 5120 by 1440 panel. That’s cool, we’ve seen that before in a gaming display. But what we haven’t seen is that at a 240-hertz refresh rate with VESA Display HDR 1000 certification. So I’m expecting a spectacular HDR gaming experience on this puppy. And a rated response time of one millisecond with all the color accuracy that you can expect from a QLED panel. That’s right, quantum dot. Now’s a good time to get a look at the bottom.

It’s got dual Display Port inputs, USB 3.0 hub, audio, as well as HDMI port. But, guys, if you wanna run this thing anywhere near its maximum resolution and refresh rate you’re wanna use Display Port with a DP1.4, wow, its heavy, (groans) compatible graphics cards. It’s like the one-piece battle station. Look at it. The standard has a built-in headphone holder. And you can pop it off. Hey, I finally got the technique down for that after fighting with the one on the G7. Oh, yeah, upside-down, that doesn’t help. There we go. Nice. Brandon brings up a good point. Ah, reach around isn’t feasible if you wanna grab your headphones and the up and over is...Yeah, you know what? It’s doable. It’s doable, it’s doable. It’s not that tall.

So I’m like. I can’t reach, my arms are too short. This is a desk pad and it makes it look small. It’s like a gigantic mouse pad. 120 hertz and 60 hertz are the only things available in the drop-down. Turns out, you’re gonna have to do a little menu magic. Refresh rate, 120. Boom!  240, and assuming your graphics card supports it properly, there it is. 5120 by 1442, 44-hertz. I had a moment there where I thought maybe it was too good to be true, but it’s not. And making matters more interesting. Yes, you have to go from 10-bit down to 8-bit, but were still able to use RGB as the output color format. What that means is we shouldn’t see any kind of chroma subsampling, that’s gonna hurt the readability of text.

And in fact, we don’t. Now, there have been high refresh rate displays, with this resolution up to 144 hertz already. But to reach that maximum refresh rate you ended up with this fringing on text, which maybe isn’t a big deal for most games, but a lot of games actually do have a fair bit of text. Of course, one of my favorite quick and dirty evaluations is just dragging around a window filled with text and seeing how readable it is. Right off the hop, I don’t know. Oh, wow, vertical is really good. Horizontally, though, I’m definitely getting a little bit more smearing. Oh, I definitely wanna change to,  I don’t know who’s gonna put this in high brightness mode but that is not look at able.

For me anyway. Wow, the G7 spoiled me, I was expecting RGB on the front too. Wow, actually they did a way better job of the RGB on the back. That has like two more layers of acrylic that it kind of shines through. That is really sweet. You’ll never see it, it’s on the back of your monitor that presumably you’re gonna spend most of your time looking at the front of. But like, you know, you’ll know it’s there. At my normal, comfortable DPI setting, I have to move my mouse over a foot to get it all the way across the display. Now the question becomes, will there be any games that we can drive that what is effectively half of 5K resolution at 240 frames per second?

CS:GO seems like a reasonable candidate but, guys, that is lot. Hello, Mr. Terrorist, standing in a black void over there. Let’s do hard bots today. Oh, boy, I need so much mouse. I think a wireless mouse would be basically essential if you were gaming on something like this every day. No! I got killed by a bot. I wouldn’t say that it helps significantly in like a competitive sense, but it definitely increases the immersiveness. A lot of games will actually shrink your vertical view rather than increase your horizontal view when you have a super widescreen monitor and the more widescreen your monitor is, the more pronounced that effect is.

Another thing you’ll probably notice is that depending on how well the game supports widescreen, you’ll see a different degree of stretching in your peripheral vision. We might be able to help with that a little bit by changing the FOV in the game. We’re not even managing to sustain 240 FPS all the time. This is even in CS:GO which is not exactly a demanding game. All right, actually, okay, I can sitting at 260 right now. With a Core i9, like 10900K, the very fastest gaming CPU, it’s possible I wouldn’t see these dips. I’m running a Thread ripper right now. It’s a great CPU, just not entirely gaming-focused. Just like the G7, I’m really impressed with Samsung’s restraint when it comes to the color settings.

Instead of cranking up the vibrance of the colors, it’s all actually accurate looking in its sRGB mode. What we haven’t tried yet though is HDR and that’s where I’m expecting this one to really shine compared to not only its G7 cousin, which is only VESA Display HDR 600 certified, instead of 1000. But also compared to competition

cause like I said, this isn’t the only half of 5K gaming monitor on the market. It’s just the only one that is Display HDR 1000 certified. There’s a slight flicker at 240 hertz HDR. What I suspect is that if we disable Adaptive Sync that will probably go away.

Yeah. Interesting. Oh, that’s interesting. Of course, that makes sense. You can adjust the response time, the low input lag mode and all that stuff, when you aren’t using Adaptive Sync. Did I mention HDR is a little weird on Windows?

It’s working. So we’ve got these super-bright and yet, kind of crazy, it’s still got detail left in it, super-bright areas of the image and no loss of detail in the shadows, just as you’d expect from an HDR gaming experience. One thing I do wanna try. So I’m at 60 hertz now, cause that was a diagnostic step that I took. Let’s go ahead and pump it to 120, which should also be fine. Oh, were good. Shall I push to 240?

Should be fine. Theoretically, it shouldn’t be fine. Something that you’re always gonna get on full-array local dimming displays is halo effects around really sharp borders between bright and dark objects. Much harder to detect in-game. So, from a gaming standpoint, I really don’t consider it to be an issue. Unless you play a lot of games where you’ve got a white mouse cursor moving around on a really dark background, then I can find it distracting and I do tend to turn it off. Man, that’s smooth. This is on an RTX 2080 SUPER as well. Goes to show you with G-SYNC, you really don’t need all 240 FPS and a sightseeing, exploration game like this one. That’s more just for your competitive shooters. The experience today makes my first impressions pretty simple. If you’ve got $1,600 U.S to spend on a monitor this checks more boxes than anything else that I’ve ever seen before.

We do need to do some more investigation into this slight flickering effect in HDR mode, as well as really explore how good these pixel response times are, cause to my eye they look amazing. But that’s gonna have to wait for the full LTT video. For now, guys, thanks again to Samsung for sponsoring this first look, sending over their G9, as well as their G7 in that freak in awesome crate over there. 

This $10,000 laptop ISN'T overpriced