- 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.
Oh, hi.
No problem.
It's 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 freakin' 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
a 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 DisplayHDR 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 DisplayPort 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 gonna wanna use DisplayPort with a DP1.4,
wow, it's 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 ain'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.
- [Brandon] Perfect standing,
though do that when your sitting.
- Yeah. Okay.
So I'm like.
(laughs) 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! (clicks fingers)
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 we're 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, wow.
Oh!
I don't know who's gonna put this in high brightness mode
but that is not lookatable.
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.
Wow.
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. (laughs)
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 Threadripper 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 it's 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 DisplayHDR 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 DisplayHDR 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, we're good.
Shall I push to 240?
Should be fine.
Theoretically, it shouldn't be fine.
Oh.
(Brandon laughs)
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 freakin' awesome crate over there.
And you guys for watching, don't forget to subscribe.