My sponsored unboxing of the Samsung Odyssey G9 over on ShortCircuit got
more views than lots of LT videos. And
actually, why not? It's 49 in of the
highest resolution this form factor comes in. It's 240 freaking hertz and
it's display HDR 1000 certified. I mean, on paper, this is the new god of gaming
monitors if it can overcome the shortfalls of its VA panel lineage. And
we're going to 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 2 terb of fast storage with Samsung's 870 Cuo SSDs. Check them out
today at the link in the video description.
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 1 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 240Hz VA monitor ever, the Samsung
C27 RG50, 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 Overdrive 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 16x9 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 C-27 RG50. Instead, we see coronas on
the back side of the ship, as well as a color inversion of yellow to blue caused
by overshoot. And this is what you're going to get if you plan on gaming with
G-Sync or Fresync 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 Hz 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 Blackmearing 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 PG27 UQ was capable of 4K HDR
gaming at 144 hertz, but only with 42:2
chroma subsampling, which introduces color fringing on fine details and can
make text harder to read. That was because of the bandwidth limitations of
DisplayPort 1.4. But this monitor also
uses DisplayPort 1.4. 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 5120x440
is fewer pixels than 4K? Well, that does
help, but the main reason is actually that this monitor's DisplayPort 1.4
port supports a feature called DSC. DSC
or display stream compression is only supported on 20 series NVIDIA cards and
AMD cards from 2019 onward. Without it, you're actually stuck with 8bit color at
120 Hz. 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. ltdstore.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
1,00 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 1000R curve, which is tighter than anything we've seen before.
1000R 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 Hz 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 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
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