Samsung's Odyssey Neo G8 Mini LED 4K 240Hz Gaming Monitor Is Finally Available
It was at the Consumer Electronics Show in January that Samsung caught our attention with its Odyssey Neo G8, the world's first 4K curved gaming monitor with a screaming fast 240Hz refresh rate and mini LED technology to make scenes pop. Then a couple of weeks ago, Samsung began accepting reservations for the monitor. Well, it's finally available to buy.
You'll need to come in with a fat stack of cash to bring the Odyssey Neo G8 home—it's priced at $1,499.99, or $1,449.99 if you reserved one last month (Samsung offered a $50 off bonus for those who did). Either way, this doesn't qualify as an inexpensive display by any stretch. It does, however, check a lot of desirable boxes.
This is a 32-inch display built around a curved Vertical Alignment (VA) panel. In addition to serving up a 3840x2160 resolution and 240Hz refresh rate, it also boasts a speedy 1ms response time (gray to gray), a large color gamut (up to 95 percent of the DCI-P3 color space), and an eye-searing 2,000 nits peak brightness for HDR content, along with a 1,000,000:1 static contrast ratio.
That insanely high brightness is the result of using mini LED technology for the backlighting. Mini LEDs are, as the name implies, much smaller than traditional LEDs. This was the driving force in my decision to upgrade my TV to Samsung's Neo QLED QN90A last year—it doesn't quite match the picture quality of OLED, but gets close and is super bright.
I'd be curious to see how the Odyssey Neo G8 fares, but looking at the spec sheet, I'm optimistic. In addition to being fast and exceptionally bright, using mini LEDs allowed Samsung to increase the local dimming zones to 1,196. This should help the display to more precisely highlight and darken specific parts of a scene to minimize blooming (otherwise known as the halo effect).
The cherry on top is FreeSync support (FreeSync Premium Pro).
Also now available is Samsung's Odyssey Neo G7. This is also a 32-inch curved gaming monitor with almost all the same specs, including the mini LED backlighting, 4K resolution, and 2,000 nits peak brightness. However, it has a slower (but still fast) 165Hz refresh rate, and is priced a little cheaper at $1,299.99.
