The center core features RGB lighting, that almost makes it look like a jet engine or alien space craft. The RGB lighting can be controlled through the On-Screen-Display, where you can change between 52 different colors, or have it cycle through them automatically. One of the first things that stands out with the G9, other than the 32:9 aspect ratio, is the aggressive curvature of the screen. The 1000R curve radius is much more curved than the typical 1800R you find on other ultrawides. Samsung claims this is to match with the curvature of the eye, which helps with immersion and eye strain. But we don’t test for this, so you’ll have to take their word for it.
That said, a curved display definitely helps mitigate poor viewing angles, and it also brings the edges of the screen closer to your eyes, so you don’t have turn your head as much when using it. Just like with the design, the build quality of the G9 is great. The screen is made of good quality plastics, and the stand is made of metal and covered in a plastic shell. The stand is wide, but has thin legs so it won’t take up much space on your desk. It supports the screen decently well, but there’s a fair amount of wobble which is expected with a display of this size. The overall ergonomics are sub-par, but this shouldn’t an issue as the G9 will likely be your primary monitor, and it has good height adjustment. If you want to change the stand, you can thanks to the VESA adapter that comes included in the box.
Although if you do that, you’ll be missing out on the cool headphone hook on the back of the stand. To control the monitor, there’s a single Joystick located underneath that works well for navigating the menus. Here, you can change the picture settings, and enable some of the extra features such as a Frame Rate Counter, a Black Stabilizer, and a picture in picture or picture by picture mode. Now let's take a look at the inputs, which can be found behind the removable panel on the back. Here, you have 2 DisplayPort 1.4s, an HDMI 2.0, an Audio Out, and a USB Hub. The power supply is internal, which is nice compared to the massive brick used with the G7. For cable management, you can route cables through the removable panel and out the bottom of the stand to seamlessly hide them. Now let’s move on to the picture quality. Since the Odyssey G9 is in a class of its own, there’s not much to compare it to, other than Samsung’s previous iterations of this monitor. If you’d like an updated comparison with new models as we buy and test them, see the review page on our website, which is linked below. Let’s start with the contrast, which is the ratio between the brightest white and the darkest black that a monitor can display. A high contrast ratio will give deep inky blacks, that really gives depth to the image, and helps bring out details in the shadows. We measured a contrast ratio of about 2200:1 which is pretty decent and better than IPS panels, but not as high as other VA monitors we’ve tested. But it is close to Samsung’s listed spec.
So the contrast will look good, but the blacks will still be somewhat grayish in a dark room. The G9 has local dimming, which is a feature that turns on and off individual backlights in the display, to improve perceived contrast. However, we found the local dimming implementation to be pretty bad. There are only a few zones along the top and bottom edge of the display, which creates vertical columns of light when there’s an object moving across. This can be very distracting, and is quite obvious in our test video. The vertical lighting zones will actually decrease perceived contrast above and below the bright object, due to the increased black levels. With our checkerboard test pattern, we measured a contrast ratio of 446:1, which is abysmal, so we recommend keeping this feature off.
I should also note that the Local Dimming seems to only work with HDR enabled, as turning it on in SDR basically does nothing. Unfortunately, on top of the poor local dimming performance, our unit also had disappointing black uniformity. There’s visible backlight bleed in the outer edges of the display, which is more visible in the full crop of our test image. Enabling local dimming doesn’t really improve things, as the vertical bands of light are more distracting than the backlight bleed itself. You can especially see the backlight bleed in our local dimming video when the outer edges get lit up. Be careful not to confuse the reflection of the monitor bouncing off itself as backlight bleed, which you can see on the left side.
You likely won’t notice these issues if using the monitor in a bright office environment. But if you plan on using it to watch movies or play games in the dark, the backlight bleed can be distracting in darker scenes. It’s important to note that black uniformity can vary between units due to manufacturing tolerances, so our unit might not be representative of the one you buy. If you own this monitor, let us know in the comments below how yours compares. Now let’s check out the viewing angles, which is how accurate the image remains when viewed off-center. As expected with a VA panel, the G9 has sub-par viewing angles in both the horizontal and vertical direction.
Although as mentioned earlier, the aggressive curvature of the display helps mitigate the horizontal viewing angles, so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue, as long as you don’t sit super close to it. The picture still won’t be ideal if the display is above or below eye level, because of the poor vertical viewing angles. Now that we’ve gotten the negative aspects of this monitor out of the way, let’s move on to the positives, starting with the peak brightness. The G9 has excellent peak brightness with both SDR and HDR content. In SDR, we got a peak brightness of 400 nits in basically all window sizes, so the brightness will be very consistent, no matter the content being displayed.
Our unit came pretty close to this, reaching 954 nits in our testing, and variance between models is likely the reason for this discrepancy. Because of its outstanding brightness, the G9 will do a great job at bringing specular highlights in HDR content. Now onto the reflection handling, which how well the display counteracts distracting glare from bright light sources, such as a window. We found the G9 to have good reflection handling thanks to it’s matte coating which does a good job at diffusing light. Combined with the screen’s excellent peak brightness, you should have no visibility issues, even in brighter environments.
Now let's check out the Color Accuracy, which is how closely the monitors colors, white balance, and gamma align with our sRGB target. You want a display to have good color accuracy, that way SDR content, which is most of what you’ll find on the web, appears as the artist intended. Our unit had decent out of the box color accuracy, and the most accurate picture mode was FPS. Here, the white balance and colors were reasonably close to our target, but not ideal, because the wide gamut of the display causes a lot of hues to oversaturate. Gamma follows our sRGB target pretty well, and the color temperature is close to 6500k, except the whites have a slight bluish tint to them. After calibration, as expected, the color accuracy is excellent.
All issues are fixed and the G9 matches our sRGB target almost perfectly. You can find our calibration settings and ICC profile in our full review, which is linked below. Do note though, calibration can vary between units due to manufacturing tolerances, so our profile is for reference only, and shouldn’t be used. Also important for color reproduction is the color gamut, which is the range of colors a monitor can display. Having a wider color gamut means the display can reproduce more vibrant and rich hues, which gives the image a more saturated look.
This is great if watching HDR content, or if working with specific color spaces, such as Adobe. The G9 has a pretty wide gamut, covering the entire sRGB colorspace and 82% of the Adobe RGB colorspace. So it’ll be great for watching SDR content, but professionals looking to master in Adobe RGB may want to look elsewhere. For HDR content, the G9 works decently well. It covers 81% of the DCI P3 colorspace, and 63% of the Rec 2020 color space. Lastly, for picture quality, let’s touch on the G9’s gradient performance.
This is how finely levels of color can be displayed, and poor gradient handling results in visible banding in scenes with gradients, such as the sky or skin tones. The G9 can accept a 10 bit signal and it performs exceptionally well gradients. There’s only a little banding in some green and grays, but everything else is superb. Combined with the high peak brightness and wide color gamut, the G9 would make a great monitor for enjoying HDR content, as long as you don’t mind the poor local dimming. Now onto the motion handling and input lag, which are some of the main attractions of this gaming monitor. Let’s start with the response time, or time it takes for a display to change from one color to the next. A slow response can result in a blurry trail behind fast moving objects, also known as ghosting.
Ghosting artifacts can very distracting in games, so you want monitor with a fast response time. The G9 performs exceptionally well in this regard, especially for a VA panel. At 240Hz, we measured an average rise/fall time of just 1.7ms, and a total response time of 8.2ms, which is still pretty good. Unlike other VA panels, the G9 exhibits no black level smearing, because the darker transitions happen just as fast as any other transition. Unfortunately, there’s a lot overshoot in the rising transitions, but since the total response time is pretty good, this shouldn’t be too noticeable in games. The response time at 60Hz is also fantastic, so there won’t be much ghosting if gaming on a console. Now let’s check out input lag, which is the time it takes for the display to process an image.
A low input lag is important for gaming, as you’ll see the results of your actions faster, making for a more responsive and fluid experience. At 240Hz, the G9 has an amazingly low input lag of 2.1ms, so it’ll be imperceptible while gaming. However, at 60Hz, we did notice a weird behaviour where the input lag would ramp up over time, reaching upwards of 27ms. Input lag this high does start to become noticeable, so those using this monitor for console gaming may notice it. Now let’s discuss the refresh rate and resolution, and the G9 is beast. It’s resolution is 5120x1440, which is essentially two Quad HD monitors combined into one. And on top of that, it’s driving all of these pixels at an astonishing 240Hz.
Pushing this many pixels isn’t easy. Even though DisplayPort 1.4 offers a ton of bandwidth, it’s still not enough to drive this behemoth at it’s max refresh rate and native resolution. So how do you do that? Well you need to be connected through DisplayPort to a device that supports Display Stream Compression, or DSC for short. DSC is a type of image compression developed by VESA who considers it visually lossless, meaning it won’t result in visible compression artifacts under normal viewing conditions. To use DSC, you’ll need an RTX 2000 series card or newer from Nvidia, or an RX 5000 series card or newer from AMD. DSC automatically enables when switching the G9 to 240Hz. Before ending the review, I want to address the elephant in the room, flickering.
We tested for flickering ourselves, using the latest firmware and a 2070 Super, but we couldn’t reproduce any of the issues users had reported. We tried the Nvidia pendulum demo and even some games in SDR and HDR, but didn’t experience any flickering. It’s worth noting, we purchased our unit in September, after the G9 had seemingly been re-called and re-released. Our unit was manufactured in June and is the version FA01 Interestingly enough, even though we didn’t encounter any flickering in our testing, my colleague uses this monitor at his desk, and he has noticed occasional flickering in his day-to-day usage.
Keep in mind his work computer is fairly basic and is running off integrated graphics at only 120Hz. So while this isn’t a typical setup we’d expect with a monitor of this calibre, it did provide solid evidence of flickering issues that Samsung still needs to iron out.<BUMPER OVERALL > So overall, the Odyssey G9 is a unique and fascinating monitor. No other product on the market offers this combination of size, resolution and refresh rate into one incredible package. It’s a display that excels in both picture quality and motion handling, and it’s 32:9 aspect ratio gives the most immersive gaming experience. And while no other monitor offers this type of experience, it’s not always a favourable one. Despite having a high peak brightness and wide color gamut, the G9 has poor local dimming and bad black uniformity.
So HDR content won't look the best in dark scenes. The G9 is also plagued with flickering issues that can be a deal breaker to many, so hopefully Samsung can release a patch to fix these issues, like they seemingly did with the G7. Even though G9 is a unique monitor, there are a couple alternatives to consider, most notably the CRG9. The CRG9 is Samsung’s predecessor the G9, and it too offers a super ultrawide aspect ratio and great picture quality. It’s main drawback is that it’s 120Hz, and it has a slower response time, so the image won’t be as clear when gaming.
That said, almost all other aspects are similar to the G9, and it’s a cheaper price. So it’s an easy recommendation if you want the immersion of a super ultrawide, but don’t need to be on the bleeding edge of refresh rates. So that's it! What do you think of the Odyssey G9? so Thank guys.
No comments:
Post a Comment