What just happened? Remember when monitors measuring 32 inches were considered significant? That’s not the case anymore, and Samsung is continuing to embrace the era of massive displays with a 57-inch “8K” Mini-LED model, a 49-inch OLED, and several other new products.
Samsung introduced a slew of new monitors in advance of CES 2023, which begins this week. The highlight is the replacement for its 49-inch, $2,499 Odyssey Neo G9 mini-LED display, for which we awarded a score of 95 in our review. The all-new Odyssey Neo G9 ups the screen size to an incredible 57 inches.
In November, Samsung teased the new Neo G9 during AMD’s Together We Advance Gaming Livestream, which revealed team red’s RNDA 3-powered graphics cards. The monitor features DisplayPort 2.1, and while it’s being pushed as an 8K display, that resolution in a 32:9 ultrawide monitor only applies to the horizontal dimension, making it 7,680 x 2,160, or about half the pixel count of true 8K, though that’s still an impressive number of pixels, admittedly.
Like its predecessor, this is a curved Mini-LED monitor with a 240Hz refresh rate. There is also a 1ms response time, a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1, and support for HDR 1000. There is no word yet on the price, but expect to have to sell a kidney for this item.
Samsung also unveiled the Odyssey G95SC monitor (above), a 49-inch 5,120 x 1,440 display it claims is the world’s first 32:9 aspect ratio OLED gaming monitor. It shares many of its specs with the upcoming 34-inch Odyssey G8 QD-OLED, including the use of QD-OLED technology, a 1ms response time, 1800R curve, adaptive sync, AMD FreeSync Premium, support for Samsung’s Gaming Hub, and VESA’s HDR True Black 400 certification. The larger monitor also has a faster 240Hz refresh rate—the Odyssey G8 QD-OLED tops out at 175Hz.
Both monitors feature Mini DisplayPort, Micro HDMI 2.1, and USB-C charging up to 65W. Again, Samsung has not yet released pricing information for these displays.
Elsewhere, Samsung announced its first 5K monitor, the 27-inch ViewFinity S9, which offers a 5,120 x 2,880 resolution on its IPS display, a 99 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut, and HDR 600 support. In addition to a 4K webcam, HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB-C port, the monitor can be calibrated with the SmartThingsApp and a smartphone camera.
Finally, an updated version of Samsung’s Smart Monitor is available. The company has released several versions of this display, which tries to combine the best elements of modern smart TVs and monitors. The new Smart Monitor M80C has a 32-inch 4K display, a 16:9 aspect ratio, and a detachable SlimFit Camera. In addition to a new personalization feature, it can run Microsoft Office 365 applications via a virtual machine without a PC connection, like other models.
