PERFORMANCE POWER - Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 Review

this video is sponsored by keeper the 34-inch Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 is one of the best gaming come productivity come smart monitors that I've tested in a really long time and as someone who has used a 49 inch Samsung G9 Neo for well the last few years struggling to find something to upgrade to this is weirdly the closest I've ever come to switching so in this video I'm going to show you why and if you're currently looking for a monitor this could well just be the one that you're looking for first up let's just get the specs out of the way the G8 comes with an OLED panel with an 1800 R curve a 0.1 millisecond response time and clocks up to 175 Hertz to give you some of the best quality and most responsive gaming and productivity monitors that money can buy input wise we have some strange inputs that we don't normally see on monitors One mini display port one micro HDMI and finally not one but two USBC ports now the picture quality on here looks absolutely beautiful with display HDR true black 400 there's also amd's freesync premium premium and a resolution of 3440 by 1440 so this thing absolutely flies there's also the new smart TV interface built into this screen including a gaming Hub which lets you stream popular titles from platforms such as Xbox GeForce now and used to stream Google stadia games I'll repeat to that but does also mean that you get access to Samsung's TV service called Samsung TV plus to access a wide range of channels to turn this great great computer monitor into an even better TV there's also an included remote control and support for Bixby Alexa and SmartThings Integrations and to address the elephant in the room because I keep making this mistake myself no this is not the same as the Samsung G8 Neo which is a 32 inch screen that I previously reviewed this is a totally different and in a whole new League of its own so first I want to address the things I love about this screen and then I'll get on to what I don't love even though there's honestly not that much that I don't love about the screen and it even starts from the unboxing experience when you get to set up the screen for the first time you take it out of the box you power it on and the first thing it does is takes you through a more Modern Way of connecting it to your home Wi-Fi and integrating into your SmartThings account and performing a software update over the internet if course one is available now this might sound really like really simple but my two and a half thousand dollar Samsung G9 Neo screen still has to be updated with a USB stick with a firmware file that you have to manually download and extract onto it so I am finally glad to see these newer screens are finally like in the 21st century speaking of things that are finally coming to pass you might have seen on the news online that one of the most popular and widely used password managers LastPass has had a massive data breach in December last year now it's been so bad where a huge amount of data was stolen and they've basically advised all of their customers to change all of their passwords and if you follow my channel for any length of time you'll know that I've been very anti-lastpass for for years with their bait and switch with offering a free product then charging for it whilst suffering breach after breach and a recent post from someone who's discovered a bug in their software only to be completely ignored repeatedly by LastPass when trying to reports it inside insane so when keeper reached out to ask if I'd spread the word and help people move away from LastPass it's an easy thing to say yes to because the fewer people that are using LastPass the more secure our data will be now I don't have the same concerns about Keeper in fact in the last four years of making password comparison videos including keeper I've Never Ever Raised keeper security as a concern of mine they're one of the only password managers out there that has zero embedded trackers in their Android app when lastpassed themselves embed a marketing tracker in theirs keeper have always been very open about their security by Design and they're also working with new customers to provide additional discounts and first year credits to help switch people away from LastPass even if you've already paid for LastPass now to help with the transition they've also got a simple migration wizard to get your data out from LastPass and into keeper and with security assessment tools like their breach watch service which monitors for leaked passwords which I guess we'll be doing overtime now with the last pass breach ultimately there were plenty of red flags for why you shouldn't be using LastPass and I have honestly none of these concerns around keeper so I'm more than happy to have keeper on as a sponsor for this video and to recommend them to my audience now back to the screen now firstly for me it's the overall looks of this screen and the incredible build quality like when unboxing this thing and setting it up it just feels so much better quality than any of the other Samsung screens I've reviewed so far including the G8 Neo the G9 G9 Neo and even the Samsung Arc all of those screens were quite chunky they were quite thick right to the very edges and quite chunky bezels on them whereas the ga OLED tapers off as it gets to the edges so when you pick this thing up when you move it around it not only feels much nicer but also means that it's a lot lighter compared to other similar size screens and because it's lighter it's easier to move around when you want to change the position or height on the desk now the second thing I love about the screen is the connectivity now of course I'm more of a Mac User as you might be able to see underneath there but I do like to bust out the odd PC game here and there as well as my Xbox or like PlayStation but having USBC which also provides 65 watts of power has been a huge breath of fresh air so I can easily connect in my MacBook Air or even my Mac Studio into this screen without this confusing decision decision or finding the right dongles or the adapters you know hold on your life with apple stuff to get this into a HDMI or DisplayPort connection I actually feel their decision of two USBC One display port and one HDMI is a much better overall fit like Max can go into USBC game these consoles into HDMI and then PCS into displayports compared to all of the other Samsung screens that I've reviewed so far which have had two HDMI and one display port and that was it which then causes issue when you're trying to hook up say a Mac a PC and a games console considering still Apple has yet to get onto the HDMI like a 2.1 train which is more of a frustration to Apple than Samsung but with the ga OLED you also get built-in speakers which are a good alternative if you don't have Standalone speakers to use and you get a remote control which is something I've started seeing a lot more recently with newer screens and it's a very very welcome Edition now having a remote control makes it much easier to switch on or off change the volume change the inputs or browse through the menu system rather than having to use like the built-in controls the little joysticks you know on the G9 Neo now it also means you have quick access things like smart TV features like Samsung Smart TV Prime video Disney Netflix it's easy to browse their cloud gaming features too something that I personally will never bother with mainly because in my personal experience it gives you a pretty bad image quality and some pretty laggy controls but if you need a hybrid kind of desktop cam TV then the built-in Samsung TV plus comes as a pretty great bonus feature now I do wish you had more direct control from the remote control like controlling the screen brightness or having preset inputs picture by picture modes or channels you can quickly switch to without browsing through the menu but it is definitely a step up from using the built-in controls I guess the remote has been designed more as a TV remote than a computer remote control so it would be nice to go maybe with a computer monitor first approach but maybe next time another thing I love about the screen which I still can't quite decide for me if this is an upgrade or maybe a downgrade from the 49 inch G9 Neo now firstly going from a 49 inch down to the 34 inch this actually feels a better overall size and starting to actually make me wonder if I would be better off having two of these maybe stacked on top of each other or maybe just go the other way around and have two next week each other instead but having a single 34 inch screen now means I can reclaim some of my desk space back again which was like really clutches just before Christmas a couple of Brands reached out to me to see if they can send me some desk accessories grovemade sent me this desk shelf which actually perfectly fits both the screen my Mac Studio the airpods and my charger all on top with neat little cubby holes for things like remote control my audio interface the Kindle and a few other things there as well they also sent out a felt desk pad because while the deskpad was just a little bit too deep which looks really really great but also Harbor London sent me this very premium looking leather desk pad which is also really comfortable to work on and has a Nifty little loop at the top to hold charging cables in place I can't quite decide whether it looks better with the gray Grove made felt desk pad or the brown leather desk pad from Harbor London so perhaps you can let me know down in the comments which one looks best because I'm really bad with decisions like this so thank you and yeah I'll throw some links down below if you are interested in picking any of those up for yourself now something I have done with this desk setup is use the monitor arm from ogotron the same one I used for my 49 inch G9 Neo mainly because it just saves me space it was already there with the including monitor stand but to be fair the Samsung the stand on the G8 OLED is actually much smaller and looks much smarter than this gigantic like G9 Neo stands but I just love how clean this desk setup looks with the monitor just like floating above the desk shelf like that of course one of the best things about this screen is the image quality now it is difficult to show through a UTV but this screen for me was a significant jump in image quality compared to the G9 the G9 Neo and even the gigantic Samsung Arc screen which are you know of course much much larger now it's a similar jump that happened when I switched to an OLED TV recently where the the blacks just look so much deeper than the TV before that and just the overall picture quality the the lack of haloing the light bleed from like bright and dark areas of the screen it is a just like a nighter day difference the fact that this screen is also 175 Hertz and 0.1 millisecond response makes it incredible for both gaming and and also productivity weirdly now for gaming I'm still waiting on my PC upgrade so that I can actually well hit anywhere near here 175 FPS in games but at least I can benefit fit from the 0.1 millisecond response time until then now games I play regularly such as fortnite Call of Duty Forza they all look and play beautifully on this screen taking full advantage of like the OLED panel which makes games look absolutely stunning I've also tried connecting my Playstation 5 into this screen and again it looks incredible over on the productivity side of things again this is USBC with 65 watts of power delivery which means you can then hook up a Macbook and use it as both a display and power delivery cable at once that's just it's just so refreshing and with my Mac Studio wired in through USBC I can get unfortunately only 120 hertz like not the full 175 Hertz refresh rate which is something I keep running into with all these screens like I'm not sure if it's a Samsung issue or an apple limitation but at least this time I didn't have to fiddle around with like extra display utilities to get it working properly and I have to say that even using the Mac for productivity you do still notice 120 hertz like Windows move around on screen more smoothly the image just looks crisper and for those pixel peepers around us you have to look much much closer to the screen before you start to see any like individual pixels then Within any of the other screens I've reviewed recently on this channel also with a screen you get built-in support for Samsung smart things now this isn't something I use a huge amount it just pops up on my screen from time to time to tell me the washing machine or the tumble dryer is finished now something that I can see being really useful though is if you work from home that kind of makes sense but also because it supports SmartThings I can actually hook this monitor into my home automation system which I use home assistant for now from here I can't do too much but I can do things like making sure the screen is Switched Off when the house is empty just in case someone's like left the screen on by mistake now something I wish I could do with other like TVs in my living room which currently isn't as smart as this one so as far as the good things go this is a really great screen I love the the form factor the image quality the the smart features the included remote control but there are some things I don't like about it honestly there aren't that many but I'll be honest here they are all the same number one I can't do much about the Samsung SmartThings notifications I can have them on or off but I can't change where they display on the screen or how big they are on the screen again like I said minor issue number two a weird bug but the volume on the screen seems to creep up by itself it might have even done it behind the scenes whilst we've been sat here but I've been using the screen almost every day for like six to eight hours a day and every couple of hours or so the volume just goes up just just by one for no reason at all like nobody's turned the volume up I've not bumped the remote control by mistake or anything maybe it's the home automation software doing something but again it doesn't say it's done anything but this screen is now at like 50 volume I think 53 and it started at like 10 or 20 but that doesn't affect me of course since I'm still using external speakers but still if you do use the kind of built-in speakers then that might be annoying for you which I guess is number three the speakers in the thing really aren't that great so I'd still recommend getting yourself a separate pair of speakers if you want the best quality sound and then number four which isn't a complaint so much as a feature request I love the form factor I love the OLED panel I love how it tapers to the edges the interface just everything about this screams modern and high quality so where is the 49 inch G9 oh LED Neo or whatever you want to call it okay so I've just caught up on the CES 2023 announcements and they have announced two new products that basically fix all the things I was just talking about so they've got a new G9 OLED the the 49 inch version which is basically this but 49 inches tapered edges new smart screen and all that kind of stuff so yeah really really good stuff here they've also got this new 57 inch G9 Neo which is the kind of older style shape and you know more chunky form factor but it's got mini well as we see mini LEDs in there and it looks stunning and 57 inches it's got a much improved resolution so I'm looking forward to checking both of those out on this channel so subscribe for those and I'll see the next one foreign

Channel: Pete Matheson

Views: 39,264

Keywords: samsung odyssey neo g8 review, neo g8, samsung odyssey neo g8, odyssey neo g8, odyssey neo g8 32, odyssey g8, 4k gaming monitor

Id: VeSYC6By4Kg

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 21 2023