(grunts)
- An Odyssey NEO G9?
She's a beaut.
- If the Samsung Odyssey G9
is the mother of all gaming monitors,
then this, this right here is her grandma.
This is the Odyssey NEO G9
and Samsung sponsored this video
where we're going to be taking it for a test drive.
It's got everything that you liked about
the original Odyssey G9.
It's got a 240 Hz refresh rate,
high resolution, G-Sync/FreeSync compatible panel,
obviously it's 49 freaking inches diagonally,
but, with an extra trick up its sleeve.
This one has a miniLED backlight.
And if it is anything like Samsung's QLED NEO TVs,
I am ready to be really impressed.
(intro music)
I feel lucky just to have one of these,
let alone doing a sponsored video of it.
The G9 was basically impossible to get
the entire time that it was the ruler of the roost.
And Samsung seems to have taken a bit of a,
"Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach here.
That's why we're seeing the same aggressive 1000R curve.
I mean, look how freaking curved, this thing is.
Absolutely incredible.
The same rated 1 millisecond response time
and the same 5120 by 1440 resolution.
That's a great balance between being dense enough
that you're not going to see individual pixels
sticking out like a sore thumb,
but also somewhat reasonable to drive
with a modern graphics card, though,
you will be treating yourself to a 3070,
or greater in order to properly power this thing,
probably 3080.
But hey,
you treated yourself to a NEO G9, so,
you can handle it.
Aw.
- Love that the screws are already pre threaded
into the holes for me. That's really nice.
Oops.
Okay. That set up process really wasn't that involved
other than "don't take the panel out of the box
until you've attached the stand to it."
(Linus yells manly)
- See you later box.
Oh, I forgot how heavy this boy was.
Oh.
- I mean everything's in here.
49" display,
miniLED backlight,
the power supply is internal.
It's just a lot of gear in there.
(relaxed electronic music)
Actually, before we move around to the front,
the cosmetic ring is the same,
but the RGB lighting at the back
can now synchronize with what's being displayed on screen.
So it can actually kind of
put a glow on the wall behind the monitor
that reflects what's happening in the game,
which is kind of cool,
if you're into that sort of thing.
Also before we turn it around,
I feel we did a bit of a disservice,
just talking about the miniLED upgrade,
because, we've got display port 1.4
that we already had.
That's how we run 240 Hertz, 5120 x 1440
with display stream compression.
But also now we've got HDMI 2.1.
Now, I actually don't know from Samsung's materials,
if we're going to be able to run
full resolution with a single HDMI link,
but we're certainly gonna try it.
It's also got a built in USB 3.0 hub,
and...
That's about it.
So let's go ahead and get all that stuff
plugged in, and cable managed.
Cable management's pretty slick.
Got your headphone hanger back here as well.
Boop.
Well, something like that,
although this thing is so big.
I don't know that I would wanna
reach around behind it to get my headphones.
Just like that.
I love it.
Just be careful with the cable management, right?
Because this is a height adjustable monitor.
So you don't want to have too much tension on this,
because you might end up
pulling the plugs out and with a locking connector
like display port,
there is the potential that you could damage
your cable or the socket.
(monitor hits the wall)
Oops. Oh my goodness.
Right out of the gate and fired up then,
but that doesn't necessarily mean
that it's running optimally.
So if we go into our, not that, display settings,
we can see that we're actually running it, only 144 Hertz.
I don't quite know why that is yet,
but I promise you, I will figure it out,
if I had to guess, I would say it's because
the HDMI connection is what got picked up first.
It's got a nipple style navigation for the menu.
So we're just gonna go into our sources here.
I definitely prefer this. And you can see...
Yep. We picked up our HTMI link first.
So it looks like that might be limited to a 144 Hertz.
Still respectable, but display port
is gonna be a better experience.
I know why, I didn't plug DP in on the other side.
There it is, it has picture in picture,
and picture by picture.
How handy is that?
So many desktop monitors don't support that anymore.
I can see why they do it.
'Cause you could totally just have
your desktop over here
and then have your laptop set to another input
or something like that.
And you know, just have the...
use it as two monitors.
Not its wheelhouse.
That's not the best possible use
of a display of this caliber,
but it's definitely there.
Oh, so the refresh rate toggle in the menu.
I can see why they would default it to 120 though,
because you have to have a graphics card that supports
display stream compression in order to run it at 240.
Oh, oh.
Yeah, I'm just gonna unplug that HDMI cable.
Got confused again.
Beautiful. Oh.
Silky smooth.
Of course that's not new.
Let's talk miniLED.
In the original Odyssey G9,
they had 10 local dimming zones,
which means that whenever you were moving around
a bright object on a dark background,
say for example, a mouse cursor,
you would see enormous halos around it,
and they were particularly noticeable
when you were viewing them off axis.
Now they have ramped that up to 2048 zones.
You are still going to see some blue.
That's the cold hard truth,
but unlike the previous generation model;
now,
it's only gonna be applicable to something like
an edge case where you've got,
oh, I don't know, a black MS Paint window,
and you're moving a white icon around on it,
compared to before, when it was actually
noticeable in content.
Actually, you know what?
The off-axis performance is not bad either.
It's better horizontally than it is vertically.
But given that you'll normally be sitting
in front of it like this,
I can see why they would have tuned it that way.
You know what we should do?
We got to turn off the studio lights.
- [Plouffe] Yeah totally
- Yeah, let's kill them.
No, no.
We're trying to make it look bad right now.
Here comes a worst case scenario.
I know, I know it's sponsored by Samsung,
but people gotta know what they're buying, so.
Yeah. Okay, perfect.
So what you can also see here
is that there's a bit of a trail behind it,
so you can actually see how they've tuned
the reactivity of the individual zones.
So it's fast, but it's not instantaneous.
This is an absolutely worst case scenario.
Tiny white dot moving around on a black screen,
but people should know what they're getting.
That being said, though,
you can really see the difference
Samsung's new panel makes on the NEO G9,
when you put it next to an Edge Lit Panel like this one.
Straight on from a reasonable viewing distance,
it's much harder to make out of it.
That's pretty impressive.
No, Andy, I'm fairly certain that
that is the dumbest idea ever.
He's like, "Hey, you know, it'd be
a good use case for this monitor?
You game on half of it
and then you'd make the other half just white.
And then you don't have to get a light for your streaming."
That's...
- [Andy] It works.
It's soft, it's big.
- It would work.
No!
I do not accept it.
He's not serious, you guys.
And he knows better than that.
Man this monitor has so much dynamic range.
That honestly, I feel like when the game
plays around and makes the scene
respond kind of like your eye would.
So if you look up at the sky,
this all kind of goes too dark.
It feels unnecessary, it feels like I could just
let my eye do the responding
and the monitor could display pretty much all of it.
Now, a big contributor
to the improvement in image quality
over the last generation Odyssey G9
is that even though Samsung doesn't have
a certification to back this up,
they're rating the new NEO G9 at 2000 nits.
That is double what they rated the original G9 at,
and while it isn't basis certified, it is VDE or
Verband Deutschle Elektrotrchniker Institute certified.
So this contributes not just to greater brightness,
but when combined with Quantum Dot color,
this should create greater color volume
than last year's model as well.
Plus with all the local dimming zones,
you can see very clearly,
once we're looking at actual content,
you don't see them anymore.
Like if we have a mouse pursers,
sure. It's noticeable.
Not in actual gameplay.
Now this is a game
that looks absolutely fantastic in HDR.
Oh, sorry, sorry.
Sorry.
Like, is that not fantastic? Racing games?
We already did a video with the last gen one,
just showing what an amazing
racing game experience you have
with a monitor like this,
but the immersion is just incredible.
Like when you're sitting a reasonable distance from it,
it's hard for me to host the video from here
just because it reflects all the sound back at me.
But when you're sitting a reasonable distance from it,
it takes up probably a solid 80% of your field of view.
There's nothing short of going
to a head mounted display
that is going to achieve that, the way this does.
And then you don't get the resolution.
It's very screen door effect still by these standards.
HDR is definitely working, but DOOM Eternal.
Yeah. Default resolution of like 640 by 480.
Not gonna look great on a display like this.
Oh boy.
Here we go.
Got some performance metrics.
At least we got lots of FPS's.
Hey, hey, hey,
that's more like it.
Oh man, this is...
Yup.
Very noticeably HDR.
For a gritty like ugly brown game,
it's like really pretty.
Aw, look at this.
That looks fricking awesome.
Compared to the last generation Odyssey G9,
it's not like this is a complete game changer.
They both offer an outstanding HDR experience, 240 Hertz.
Essentially half of 5K, right?
Like it's 5K, but it's mega ultra wide.
So if you already have one of those,
it's not like you're gonna swap it out for this.
But if you're in the market
for an immersive gaming monitor,
this, one's got all the bells, all the whistles,
all the kitchen sinks.
All those things that people want
in their products for whatever reason.
Why do people want bells, whistles, and kitchen sinks?
- [Plouffe] I don't know
- It's weird.
And you'll find the link for it down below.
Thanks again for watching.
Thanks to Samsung for sponsoring this video
and thanks to LTT store for just having such,
outstanding merchandise set, such fair prices.
Who else but LTT store would bring you
a quality product like this one?
(Linus does car noises)
It's part of the racing experience.