- My sponsored unboxing of the Samsung Odyssey G9
over on ShortCircuit, got more views
than lots of LTT videos.
And actually, why not?
It's 49 inches of the highest resolution
this form factor comes in.
It's 240 freaking Hertz,
and it's DisplayHDR 1000 certified.
I mean on paper, this is the new God of gaming monitors.
If it can overcome the shortfalls
of it's VA panel lineage.
And we're gonna find out today
in our unsponsored full review,
which isn't to say we don't have a sponsor at all,
it's just not Samsung.
ORIGIN PC has got powerful, high end desktops and laptops
with a multitude of options,
including up to two terabytes of fast storage
with Samsung's 870 QVO SSDs.
Check them out today at the link in the video description.
(upbeat music)
The big concern with VA panels, like in the G9,
has to do with pixel response times.
That's how long it takes a pixel
to go from one value to another value.
Like the blue pixels of my desktop background here,
turning white as I move a window across them.
Gaming monitors, including our G9 here,
often advertise a greater gray switching time
of about one millisecond.
But these are marketing numbers
that never tell the whole story,
in part, because they are averages.
In the real world, pixel response times vary
depending on the value the pixel is starting at,
and the value it's driving toward.
Looking at measurements
from the first 240 Hertz VA monitor ever,
the Samsung C27RG50, we can see
that the slowest transitions occur
when going from the lowest values.
So, the deep blacks that VA panels are known for
up through other dark and medium grays.
Now, there is a way to get faster response times,
just send more voltage to the pixels,
but as with most good things, you can have too much.
Pixel over drive comes with a trade off
where you can overshoot the target value
introducing Inverse Ghosting Coronas,
that I personally think look way worse
than regular smearing.
So the question for the G9,
and I guess also the G7 by extension,
because it's similar but just in a 16 by nine form factor,
is whether Samsung has been able to find
that overdrive Goldilocks zone.
To find out, we set up a pursuit camera
to photograph response time artifacts without capturing
the human brain imposed motion blur that you see
when looking at moving objects on a screen.
This is at 240 Hertz with Adaptive-Sync on.
The blacks are smeared more
when the ship is against a dark background,
but overall there's very little smearing
compared to the pursuit camera pics
that TFT Central took on their review of the C27RG50.
Instead, we see Coronas on the backside of the ship
as well as a color inversion of yellow to blue
caused by overshoot.
And this is what you're gonna get
if you plan on gaming with G-Sync, or FreeSync,
or Adaptive-Sync, or variable refresh rate turned on.
However, with variable refresh rate off,
you can actually adjust
the overdrive setting through three steps,
with standard introducing fewer Coronas,
though, you still can notice them in games.
If it bothers you too much, you could in theory,
turn the refresh rate down to 120 or even 60 Hertz
at the expense of clarity, but in our testing,
it really didn't seem to help much.
Now, as someone who isn't terribly bothered
by VA black smearing in general,
and in light of these test results,
I stand by what I said in that sponsored video.
This monitor delivers
an absolutely incredible high refresh rate,
immersive gaming experience.
But, don't click away yet
because there are some things that you should know about it.
You may recall that our previous God of monitors,
the Asus PG27UQ, was capable of 4K HDR gaming at 144 Hertz,
but only with 422 Chromo Subsampling,
which introduces color fringing on fine details
and can make text harder to read.
That was because of the bandwidth limitations
of display port 1.4.
But this monitor also uses display port 1.4,
and it's refreshing at an eye peeling 240 times per second.
Yet you get full RGB, 10 bit color.
How is this even possible?
Is it because 5120 by 1440 is fewer pixels than 4k?
Well, that does help,
but the main reason is actually
that this monitor's display port 1.4 port
supports a feature called DSC.
DSC, or Display Stream Compression
is only supported on 20-series and video cards
and AMD cards from 2019 onward.
Without it you're actually stuck with eight bit color
at 120 Hertz, and ours wouldn't even overclock to 144.
By the way, hooking up two cables, that won't help.
With DSC, though, you can unlock
the Odyssey's full potential, and to our eye,
even though it is being compressed,
there's no visual fidelity loss,
just way more efficient use of the available bandwidth.
Speaking of visuals, they're fantastic.
lttstore.com, by the way.
The G9 uses a quantum dot enhancement film
to achieve near professional levels of color accuracy
and has 73% coverage of the rec 2020 color gamut.
The screen is also quite uniform.
And of course, the 1,000 nit peak brightness
makes your HDR movies and games really pop.
One thing I will say
is that if you're watching a movie,
I would recommend doing that alone
because she ain't built for great viewing angles.
She is built for immersion though
with apparently the world's first 1,000R curve,
which is tighter than anything we've seen before.
1,000R is said to be similar
to the curvature of the human eye,
increasing the proportion of the screen
that you can see without strain, and decreasing fatigue.
And there are actually some studies
that seem to back this up.
I do have one fairly big problem with this monitor though,
the noticeable flickering when HDR is on.
Now, it's more obvious on the desktop
than when you're actually watching or playing content.
But I was able to tell while playing CS:GO,
and I don't know if this is related,
but there was some talk of this monitor being recalled,
though now Korea tells us
that they're just doing additional testing,
not recalling it.
So, whatever's going on,
I hope that it's related to the flicker
because somebody's got to address it.
Leaving only then the final question,
should you buy this monitor?
It's definitely not the highest performance
240 Hertz gaming display on the market, but what it is,
is one of the most complete packages out there.
Sure, it only has 10 local dimming zones,
which sometimes looks bad,
even compared to our previous God of gaming monitors,
which is a couple of years old now.
And the overdrive Coronas
are definitely going to annoy certain people,
but at $1,800, which is a lot of money,
it's still $200 cheaper than our previous God of monitors
while being great for both gaming and productivity,
something we didn't really address much in this video.
So that's an extra benefit.
It's not cheap, but I think these are going to be
very popular indeed, especially if Samsung can fix
that HDR flickering issue.
What's in your online security toolkit?
Adding a VPN lets you mask your IP
and encrypt traffic to and from your devices,
and Private Internet Access has reliable service
with thousands of servers in dozens of countries.
They offer no bandwidth caps, configurable encryption
with a kill switch
to keep you in control of your connection.
And when combined with private browsing,
PIA can make websites think
you're in a different country.
Try it out risk-free
with their 30 day money back guarantee at the link below.
You can connect up to 10 devices at once
with clients for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Linux.
What are you waiting for?
If you guys enjoyed this video, you might enjoy,
oh, our budget gaming monitors roundup
to address the other end of the spectrum.
Yeah, why don't we go watch that one?
Get this out of our system.