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My sponsored unboxing of the Samsung Odyssey G9 over on ShortCircuit got

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more views than lots of LT videos. And

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actually, why not? It's 49 in of the

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highest resolution this form factor comes in. It's 240 freaking hertz and

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it's display HDR 1000 certified. I mean, on paper, this is the new god of gaming

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monitors if it can overcome the shortfalls of its VA panel lineage. And

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we're going to find out today in our unsponsored full review, which isn't to

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say we don't have a sponsor at all. It's just not Samsung. Origin PC has got

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powerful high-end desktops and laptops with a multitude of options, including

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up to 2 terb of fast storage with Samsung's 870 Cuo SSDs. Check them out

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today at the link in the video description.

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The big concern with VA panels like in the G9 has to do with pixel response

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times. That's how long it takes a pixel to go from one value to another value.

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Like the blue pixels of my desktop background here turning white as I move

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a window across them. Gaming monitors, including our G9 here, often advertise a

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greater gray switching time of about 1 millisecond. But these are marketing

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numbers that never tell the whole story. In part because they are averages. In

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the real world, pixel response times vary depending on the value the pixel is

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starting at and the value it's driving toward. Looking at measurements from the

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first 240Hz VA monitor ever, the Samsung

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C27 RG50, we can see that the slowest

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transitions occur when going from the lowest values, so the deep blacks that

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VA panels are known for up through other dark and medium grays. Now, there is a

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way to get faster response times. Just send more voltage to the pixels, but as

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with most good things, you can have too much. Pixel Overdrive comes with a

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trade-off where you can overshoot the target value, introducing inverse

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ghosting coronas that I personally think look way worse than regular smearing.

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So, the question for the G9, and I guess also the G7 by extension, because it's

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similar, but just in a 16x9 form factor, is whether Samsung has been able to find

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that overdrive Goldilocks zone. To find out, we set up a pursuit camera to

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photograph response time artifacts without capturing the human brain

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imposed motion blur that you see when looking at moving objects on a screen.

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This is at 240 hertz with adaptive sync

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on. The blacks are smeared more when the ship is against a dark background, but

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overall there's very little smearing compared to the pursuit camera pics that

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TFT Central took on their review of the C-27 RG50. Instead, we see coronas on

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the back side of the ship, as well as a color inversion of yellow to blue caused

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by overshoot. And this is what you're going to get if you plan on gaming with

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G-Sync or Fresync or adaptive sync or variable refresh rate turned on.

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However, with variable refresh rate off, you can actually adjust the overdrive

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setting through three steps with standard introducing fewer coronas,

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though you still can notice them in games. If it bothers you too much, you

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could in theory turn the refresh rate down to 120 or even 60 Hz at the expense

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of clarity. But in our testing, it really didn't seem to help much. Now, as

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someone who isn't terribly bothered by VA Blackmearing in general, and in light

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of these test results, I stand by what I said in that sponsored video. This

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monitor delivers an absolutely incredible high refresh rate immersive

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gaming experience. But don't click away

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yet because there are some things that you should know about it. You may recall

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that our previous god of monitors, the ASUS PG27 UQ was capable of 4K HDR

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gaming at 144 hertz, but only with 42:2

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chroma subsampling, which introduces color fringing on fine details and can

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make text harder to read. That was because of the bandwidth limitations of

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DisplayPort 1.4. But this monitor also

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uses DisplayPort 1.4. 4 and it's refreshing at an eye peeling 240 times

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per second yet you get full RGB 10 bit

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color. How is this even possible? Is it because 5120x440

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is fewer pixels than 4K? Well, that does

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help, but the main reason is actually that this monitor's DisplayPort 1.4

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port supports a feature called DSC. DSC

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or display stream compression is only supported on 20 series NVIDIA cards and

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AMD cards from 2019 onward. Without it, you're actually stuck with 8bit color at

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120 Hz. And ours wouldn't even overclock to 144. By the way, hooking up two

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cables, that won't help. With DSC

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though, you can unlock the Odyssey's full potential. And to our eye, even

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though it is being compressed, there's no visual fidelity loss, just way more

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efficient use of the available bandwidth. Speaking of visuals, they're

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fantastic. ltdstore.com. By the way, the G9 uses a quantum dot enhancement film

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to achieve near professional levels of color accuracy and has 73% coverage of

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the Rec 2020 color gamut. The screen is also quite uniform, and of course, the

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1,00 nit peak brightness makes your HDR movies and games really pop. One thing I

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will say is that if you're watching a movie, I would recommend doing that

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alone because she ain't built for great

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viewing angles. She is built for immersion, though, with apparently the

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world's first 1000R curve, which is tighter than anything we've seen before.

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1000R is said to be similar to the curvature of the human eye, increasing

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the proportion of the screen that you can see without strain and decreasing

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fatigue. And there are actually some studies that seem to back this up. I do

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have one fairly big problem with this monitor, though. The noticeable

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flickering when HDR is on. Now, it's more obvious on the desktop than when

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you're actually watching or playing content, but I was able to tell while

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playing CS:GO. And I don't know if this is related, but there was some talk of

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this monitor being recalled. Though, now Korea tells us that they're just doing

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additional testing, not recalling it. So, whatever's going on, I hope that

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it's related to the flicker because somebody's got to address it. Leaving

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only then the final question. Should you buy this monitor? It's definitely not

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the highest performance 240 Hz gaming display on the market, but what it is is

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one of the most complete packages out there. Sure, it only has 10 local

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dimming zones, which sometimes looks bad, even compared to our previous God

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of Gaming monitors, which is a couple years old now. And the overdrive coronas

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are definitely going to annoy certain people. But at $1,800, which is a lot of

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money, it's still $200 cheaper than our previous God of Monitors, while being

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great for both gaming and productivity. Something we didn't really address much

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in this video. So, that's an extra

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benefit. It's not cheap, but I think these are going to be very popular

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indeed, especially if Samsung can fix that HDR flickering issue. What's in

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might enjoy uh oh, our budget gaming monitors roundup to address the other

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end of the spectrum. Yeah, why don't we go watch that one? Get this, you know,

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out of our