Samsung Odyssey G8 OLED review

Colours pop and shadows look deep. Diablo IV's gothic world looks absolutely stunning on this monitor. It covers 99% DCI colour gamut so you get accurate colours and also deep blacks. The monitor is also fast with 0.1ms of response time. Valorant was timed with pixel-perfect accuracy. Shooters especially feel engaging and entertaining. Samsung has somehow perfected the visual quality and the immersive element by curving this QD-OLED. It’s bright but never crushes the darker and muted tones of the scenes in Diablo IV when Lilith is on screen. The 3440x1440 resolution is sharp too. Even stretching across 34 inches, the display never feels like you need more pixels here. For its display quality, it’s a perfect premium gaming monitor.

Who knew that curving a QD-OLED monitor would bring so much joy back into gaming? Simulators are probably the best games to play on this monitor. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and Forza Horizon 5 are some of the best-looking games and thanks to the QD-OLED picture quality, it looks as the devs intended. Samsung’s pretty much taken its flagship television tech and crammed it into a 34in monitor. Even the Neo Quantum Processor from the TVs is here. It basically runs the show for keeping all the software UI running buttery smooth and maintaining crisp image quality for gaming. Movies from Netflix through the monitor’s native app don’t support Dolby Vision or HDR so you’re better off watching entertainment on a proper TV.

It can also do a 175Hz refresh rate and has HDMI 2.1. So if you connect a PlayStation 5, it will let you churn out 120 frames with VRR support. There's no ALLM here for console gamers but that's alright. However, consoles don't really make use of the ultrawide 21:9 aspect ratio. So you're left with black borders on either side.  PC gaming is where this shines the best!

The most problematic situation on this monitor is its port selection. There is one mini HDMI, one mini DisplayPort, one USB Type-C for display and another for charging. The absence of full-sized ports is bothersome. You do get all the cables in the box so you don’t have to add any new cables into your cart.

However, you’ll keep feeling the pinch of not having a proper port selection here. There's no headphone jack either. The built-in speakers are loud and punchy but you’re better off with proper bookshelf speakers or headphones. You can connect Bluetooth speakers to the monitor as well. It's clever that way.

So clever that the Samsung Odyssey G8 OLED also tries to be more than just a monitor. It's loaded with smart features and apps. It's like a smart TV! However, there are ads in the UI and it even slows down system navigation during start-up. You can directly stream Xbox games from the cloud here but Xbox Cloud service is not available in India so we can’t tell for certain how good it is.

We even connected it to a Mac Studio for our magazine work and although it ran problem-free, there was a wee bit of colour fringing on text and other objects. During gaming, it will never be a problem so it’s better to let the G8 OLED be your gaming monitor and nothing else.

It's thoroughly brilliant with its picture quality and gaming chops. Fast, beautiful and feature-rich. You can tune its picture quality down to the last knob. However, ads and the lack of proper ports are troublesome. Not to mention, it doesn't let you change inputs from the remote. That may annoy the most hardcore gamers but it's perfect for simulators.