- 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.
Man.. it feels we were stuck on 3440x1400 100-120Hz forever... now we have 5120x1440 at 240Hz..???
remember, that this is a full video advertisement.
meaning, that at beast u can take physical size impressions from it, but can't trust a word out of linus' or the writer's mouth.
How has Linus made it so far in tech sales and doesn't know the flip method for getting large devices out of a box on your own?
Oh wait he's probably baiting us to comment about it...
I just wish they improved the local dimming feature for HDR.
Edit: Linus also incorrectly thought the monitor was FALD
Am I the only one who can't play Tomb Rider in HDR because in DX12 it keeps crashing saying that I do not have enough resources to run the game?
Linus using this game as demo for HDR was the reason that made me decide to give a shot to HDR on PC and I'm a bit sad that I can't enjoy it :(
Make it twice as tall and i'm sold ! =D
sinus lebastian stares at curves for 10 minutes and 23 seconds
i mean , he doesn't looked impressed
I prefer the LG UltraGear 38GL950G since its IPS, have less of a curve and more vertical space. 3840x1600. But its more expensive than this one though but i guess VA panels are cheaper.