Is This Ultra Modern Monitor Worth $2500?

this is the samsung g9 odyssey neo it promises 2 000 nits of hdr brightness hdr 2000 whatever that is because it's not actually an hdr specification it's 2000 as far as i can tell and a whole bunch of other things that's the first thing you need to know about this review the same thing you need to know about this review is this is based on firmware 1008 that actually makes a huge difference so yeah i always watch a lot of reviews on products you're gonna buy especially for if you're about to drop two thousand dollars on a monitor which is what i did for this monitor because i wanted to test it with the level on text kvm mainly but uh yeah i figured why not let's get a monitor review out of it and see what we're into let's dive in [Music] all right first up out of the box this comes in a big box it's a 49 inch monitor after all although you'd think you know 49 inches it's pretty huge it's actually pretty much the same size as two 27 inch monitors side by side and that's no coincidence because its resolution is 5120 by 1440 exactly the same as what you would get with two 25 60 by 1440 monitors side by side now this does have a gamer aesthetic samsung and their design engineers have obviously put a lot of time into making this look you know sort of space age futuristic it honestly wouldn't look out of place on a movie set it's got a very glossy you know high contrast black and white rear finish there's rgb controls and the center monitor mount it actually comes with some accent plastic that you know snaps together to make it easy to assemble to put it together it is a hide adjustable and rotation capable stand but you're not going to be able to rotate the monitor into a portrait configuration or anything like that it's a 49 inch monitor why would you want to the curve on this is also pretty extreme which necessitates the packing that you see in the box one amazing thing that i love that samsung did they included the visa mount yamaka i mean the visa mount adapter thing because um yeah this lets you run with a standard hundred millimeter visa mount and it's it's metal it's a solid metal thing so you could use this monitor on a visa mount which should definitely be my preference i mean this stand is okay but you know it sort of takes up a lot of desk room and it's uh sort of big it also comes with this awesome glossy you know flexi plastic cable hider thing so you could completely hide your cables i mean if you're running like some sort of uh i don't know gaming hotel and you need a really amazing monitor for your front desk and you want to hide all the wires and make it look super futuristic this monitor this monitor would be a really good choice for that other accoutrement in the package [Applause] includes an amazing hdmi cable a big power cord which is a right angle power cord that is hard to find the actual power plug is a right angle a usb 3 5 gigabit cable because this monitor has two usb 3 5 gigabit ports as well as the thickest chunkiest displayport cable that you've ever seen and that is of course because this monitor supports 240 hertz now out of the box it doesn't come configured for 240 hertz and we'll talk about that but it is a 240hz capable monitor now this is marketed as quantum led and you think oh it's going to be an led monitor that would be wrong this is actually a va type panel it uses a whole bunch of micro leds for its backlight and it has local dimming and dynamic brightness adjustment of those backlight leds but this is uh this is where the conversation sort of starts to take a turn because in order for us to talk about those features we have to talk about the other features that this monitor advertises on paper it looks like it's the holy grail of monitors because it's you know got an insane 2000 nits brightness which should lead to amazing contrast ratios way better than hdr 400 which is actually an hdr standard that you would expect uh the other specifications you know 240 hertz for that extreme refresh rate very low input latency it even supports picture by picture and some other modes this looks like a really incredible gaming monitor that's no compromises pretty much everywhere else color accuracy how's the color accuracy not great it's a va panel it's really not great for production work you can get kind of close on srgb but dci p3 and the adobe color gamut it's not great i did create a color profile that you can download if you want to use it for that but it sort of uh puts the rocker back in the the gaming category now out of the box it's 120 hertz this is important to understand because 120 hertz at 4k is the limit of displayport 1.4 but you can find other monitor reviews other monitors that we've taken a look at in the past that are 4k 144 hertz also with displayport 1.4 what sort of magic craziness is that well it turns out that's actually display stream compression display stream compression is software compression that your gpu and your display have to agree on and the state of this display screen compression in team red is very good the state of display stream compression in team green is nvidia has fumbled that a couple of times as evidenced by posts on their community forum there are posts going back over a year where certain versions of the driver will have certain problems with display stream compression and this can also affect things if you're using something like the level one text kvm but we'll talk about that in a completely separate section check the chapter marks if that's what you're interested in but none of that matters what it comes down to is the panel actually capable of greater than 120 hertz so we got a high speed camera we tried one 500th of a second and one one thousandth of a second and looked at the display now much to my surprise this display actually does work really well at 120 hertz at 120 hertz we're talking about a frame render time of less than eight milliseconds it seems like the display panel is on the order of about four or five milliseconds best case scenario however when we switched from 120 hertz to 240 hertz in the display the quality of what was being displayed went down a little bit in my opinion and on the high speed footage really couldn't see a lot of difference it didn't really make the panel magically faster in fact if anything with the diminished image quality i think it was a little bit worse of an experience the input lag was maybe just a hair lower with 120 hertz versus 240 hertz that figures because hey the display is operating twice as fast but is the difference from 120 hertz to 240 hertz for this particular combination of resolutions on the specific g9 neo worth it and the answer is no i don't think so and that's based on my experiences with 120 hertz lg cx oled display side by side oled pixels versus these va pixels it's no contest 120 hertz in a purely oled fashion is dramatically head and shoulders better than anything that you're going to experience on even this admittedly high-end va panel it was really uh kind of high you know i didn't look too closely at it i was just it's a two thousand dollar monitor it's a high-end and samsung and you know a lot of people have bought the non-neo version i was kind of expecting it not to be a va panel because it's you know quantum mini led it's not actually an led display it's a va panel the backlight is what they're talking about did you see that horrible glitching no no that's at 120 hertz that's before display stream compression even enters the equation it's a compound problem too if you've got something like a mac laptop because macs are incredibly picky they really only try the displayport handshake like one time and then they give up they just say oh there's no display connected or you get a big black nothing because mac because obviously because mac and so because the display does that it can be really problematic and this is even before the kvm is actually hooked up let's take a look at text sharpness because text sharpness on a really high refresh display is always something to look at because that tells you another piece of the story and you can see here that the text sharpness on this display is pretty good we've definitely seen better and we've definitely seen better at a lower price point but because this is a va panel some other stuff it's actually pretty good now let's talk kvm compatibility at level one text we have the level one text kvm it is a fully displayport 1.4 capable kvm in an ideal world the cable length from your device to the display is on the order of one cable length and the reason for that is because we did not put a repeater in the kvm the reason for that is to maintain compatibility with whatever signal happens to be on the wire be that g-sync freesync something exotic that hasn't been invented yet the kvm is basically just a glorified dumb switchbox for the different inputs so this display didn't work out of the box yeah with the older firmwares the display would work as long as it was on but as soon as it would go to sleep it would never wake up fortunately samsung fixed this in the 1008 firmware so when we're talking about the level one kvm the thing to keep in mind is you might actually have to get fiber optic displayport cables you will probably have to get like the three foot club 3d cables because the monitor barely works as it is but 120 hertz is no problem in my testing with recent team red and team green cards display stream compression is a wild card that can be controlled through the kvm but as you see with the direct connection it's a little flaky and with display stream compression getting 240 hertz out of it i don't know i think that's pushing it because of the signal to noise loss from the from the pc to the display it can work i have reports of it working i have it working but it was fiddly let's talk about the hdr capabilities on this monitor out of the box with the older firmware the hd would like not even review it not even good samsung advertises this as hdr2000 hdr2000 is not really a thing you turn hdr on in windows 11 it works reasonably well hdr experiences in games is really good some games are not a good hdr experience right now because it's not really super well defined here we have samsung advertising hdr2000 but if you're playing something like forza the highlights and the mid-tones sometimes are kind of weird and something like shadow of the tomb raider the sky looks really good and the really dark areas look good but the sort of middle areas seem kind of weird and muted almost like a rec 709 type muted but it's really not super flattering now that changed dramatically when upgrading the firmware to the 1008 version and it's better but it's still not what i would call a first class hdr experience i'm not really sure that i've experienced the first class hdr experience except possibly from oled panels but that's just because they can go from such super super black to such super super brightness so quickly and that kind of leads to something else we should talk about when we're talking about hdr the local dimming and brightness in my opinion really juices that contrast number when we're talking about 2000 in its brightness it's because it can locally dim the backlight in those areas this is really a best case scenario for this display and it's misleading to advertise it that way because that's not actually going to be the real world experience if you have a really bright browser window open over here and you have another window beside that local dimming is going to be a little distracting because when you switch something in this tab something will move over here out of the corner of your eye and it's because of the whole local dimming auto brightness thing now the latest firmware you can turn that off and i turned it off and this is a much better display experience but instead of doing some of the stuff that you might be paying a premium for is really no longer available you're not talking about a contrast ratio with you know two thousand nits anymore it's closer to a thousand nits so yeah technically it supports that technically it's a do everything monitor but if you actually try to have it do everything you have less of a good experience than you do if you just pick and choose which things you want in the configuration if that makes sense now even though this monitor has a picture by picture mode and the on-screen display suggests that it can manage four inputs actually has three one display port and two hdmi the hdmi inputs are 2.1 but they're limited to 144 hertz and i don't think hdr works properly on them now 240 hertz talk to me about 240 hertz through kvm if you're going to do that you're going to need short extremely high quality cables i've had pretty good luck with club 3d we sell some some displayport cables on the level and tech store the club 3d cables are better we say that in the description but they're not bad cables you're going to have a bad time if you've got 12 feet of displayport cable in order to try to try to do this have you looked at the cable that came with this monitor it's like 17 inches thick with ferrite cores on both ends to attenuate extra signals so depending on what gpu that you're using it's going to work best with a 6000 series amd or a 3000 series nvidia yeah yeah seriously and the length of the cable and some other things you can get 240 hertz to work with this display 120 hertz is a lot more guaranteed but you're going to have some signal to noise loss in the cable between the computer and the display and with display stream compression there are little errors that will manifest into big errors in fact i'm not sure that the vertical lines problem that some people have encountered on their display which i looked for in this display but i did not encounter with 1008 on the firmware fingers crossed i'll post an update comment below with a link to the level one text forum thread with more information because this will be an evolving situation in fact you should probably check out the level one forum in general and the bottom line is should you buy it you know this is now we're entering the conclusion phase of this video for two thousand dollars i don't think this monitor is worth it the biggest feature of this monitor is that if you like running 2560 by 1440 dual 2560 by 4040 and that is a great monitor configuration you do away with your center bezel because you know this is curved which is maybe if you're into curved monitors you like that not having the center bezel and having that many pixels is great but this is actually a million less pixels than a single 4k display if you're all about productivity and maximum pixels and also being able to game a single 4k display is going to have more pixels than this they're more on the bottom than the sides but i kind of like that i don't really like this trend of displays getting shorter and shorter and shorter and wider and wider and wider i want the pixels in a vertical sense so yeah we've also reviewed several really nice 4k monitors at the thousand dollar mark you could get two 4k displays put them side by side and be out about as much money as you were with this single display you're back to the original problem of if you want a game on both monitors at one time you've got a bezel in the middle don't do that just game on one monitor and game on that single 4k display and be incredibly happy but if you wanted to game on something that's you know super ultra surround wide or you want a monitor that looks like it's from the future okay maybe but the cost the cost is still for what you get uh it's just a little excessive but that's my two cents i'm well this is level one i'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 64,259

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: 7Si9a2yFdpo

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/-masked_bandito]

The state of the monitor market is embarrassing and it will mostly stay plodding along at a glacial pace as long as gamers would rather spend the extra cash on a GPU over a monitor.

We still recommend monitors from the late 10s, even for professional work. We have 1440p transformer looking monstrosities like this for $2500.

Also I'm pretty sure Wendell literally uses an OLED TV as his monitor.

[u/DuranteA]

If the monitor had no issues delivering on its specs in a reliable way, it absolutely would be.

There is not that much competition when you want something that is useful for daily work in a monitor setting without being babied (OLED still fails at this), while also being good at high-refresh gaming and HDR media. And what is there is generally even more expensive while providing lower refresh rates, larger dimming zones, and lower native contrast due to the use of IPS panels.

Sadly, the G9 Neo does not deliver on its specs in a reliable way across different usage scenarios, so here we are.

[u/PositiveAtmosphere]

$2500 and it isn’t even 4K.

[u/Hefty_Tendy]

Considering the OG G9 can be had for $800-$1200, no it’s absolutely not worth $2500.

[u/dramatic-ad-5033]

No, buy a LG C1 and play on that instead

[u/kamikazecow]

These can be had for a little over $1600 when they go on sale and you use a discount (e.g. student). At that point they are really competitive.

[u/Aggrokid]

You can probably get two discounted C1's with that money, or three A1's.

[u/McHox]

µled monitors can't come soon enough. too bad they're still years out at this point

[u/akarypid]

I'm on the market for a monitor for programming work. I look at text 90% of my time on the screen. I just want clear crisp text, with decent color accuracy and brightness (I have to work in a well lit space).

The market is ruined for me. OLEDs with bleed concerns, huge curved displays, 200Hz rates and 1ms response times... I care for none of these things.

I haven't been able to spot anything decent except maybe for the 28" Huawei Mateview, which goes up to 400nits and is 3:2 ratio (not bad for text) but (get this!) has NO VESA MOUNT!

(It does come with HDR and Wireless connectivity, because that's what a 3:2 programmer wants).

What has happened to the monitor market?