SAMSUNG 57″ Odyssey Neo G9 (G95NC) Series Dual 4K UHD 1000R Curved Gaming Monitor, 240Hz, 1ms with DisplayPort 2.1, Quantum Mini-LED, DisplayHDR 1000, AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, LS57CG952NNXZA

Excellent replacement for two 32″ 4K monitors
**purchased for $1900 with my own money** (maybe a double flash sale, $2000 on sale for December, additional $100 off for a few hours one day)So I’ve used this monitor for about a week, 12-16 hours a day (work during the day and online MBA school at night). Here are my initial thoughts.1. HDMI was very buggy. When the monitor went to sleep, it would try a few times to wake up. Then, it eventually crashed (rebooted) my M2 Ultra Mac Studio (a great machine).Switching to a DisplayPort from the USB-C port (back of Mac) has been flawless. (I was hoping to get that port back by using the HDMI, but my previous setup took two USB-C ports, so it’s still a net win of one port for me.The screen itself is bright and clear (what you would expect) no dead pixels, artifacts, or flaws of any kind. For work and school, 120Hz is more than good enough, as I didn’t see a difference when I switched to 240hz.2. The curve works great about two feet from my face. Since it’s on a desk against the wall, it goes out a little further than the previous setup, it was doable, and I got back some desk space undernead having one base instead of two previously. The “wrap” around my field of view is definitely worth the extra space but see the next point.3. The rear lighting and futuristic design were useless since they were against the wall. There’s some extra bulk back there that could have been saved (and money) and made the profile slimmer had they not built all that.4. I don’t play games much, but Angry Birds was great. Getting the whole screen to show the entire landscape without having to scroll around horizontally was nice. Any side-scrolling games would benefit, assuming they programmed the game to use the extra space.5. I would have liked them to integrate booming loudspeakers (like the other Samsung gaming monitors) so I don’t have to use external speakers.6. Also, for this price range, I would have liked to have a high-quality built-in 4K WebCam (even snap-on in the back, but still included) and mic for Zoom calls as well so I can work with two fewer peripherals on the desk.7. Using the Mac Spaces feature, I can have three windows per space and one space per activity (work, school, reading, file management, photos, etc. It’s a game-changer, for sure. All without a fat bezel in between the middle of the screen. (If Mac fixed the full-screen function to allow for three full-screen apps instead of two, that would be even better) Multi-page docs or wide spreadsheets are a huge benefactor of this super wide screen.Overall, this was a great purchase for me. I last bought monitors when the Dell 4K ultrashare UP3216Q came out (8 years ago, and they still work great, BTW) and spent $2000 each, so paying $1900 for this monitor was a great deal.

This monitor is amazing! It replaced my dual screen setup, and while in terms of screen space I have neither gained, nor lost, it does have flexibility to split my screen into 3 or 4, which is very handy. Though I believe it is marketed as a gaming monitor, I use this monitor almost entirely for productivity, and a little bit of media.The curvature is great for me, no eye strain and I do not have to swivel my neck around which is great as I have some neck issues. Text, and I work with text all day long plus some, is very clear.The instructions for assembly were clear, and while I could do most myself, I did need to get someone to help me actually lift it out of box and onto my desk. It is heavy! I have a sit-stand add-on on my desk and this monitor is too heavy for the sit-stand to “lift” (maybe I can adjust with settings though I suspect I exceed the weight limit). A sit-stand desk may be better in that case. Also be prepared to have a lot of room to set up and breakdown materials, as this is a big monitor in a big box with a lot of protective wrapping.I am so pleased I went with this size. It was expensive ($2,199 at time I purchased, though $1,998 at the time I am writing this review) however I have zero regrets. It was well worth it as it has really boosted my productivity, and even made my day job more pleasurable.I’d recommend this even for the non-gamers amongst us who are more interested in productivity uses. If you work in a relatively boring office environment though, be prepared for people to ask when your space suit is coming back from the dry cleaners. The rear of the monitor definitely has a futuristic look.

The hardware is impressive, the screen is incredible but connectivity is a massive pain.The power button only works when it wants to, I’m forced to consistently plug the power cable in and out to turn on the screen. I tried different HDMI cables and different HDMI ports… still nothing, for the amount of money you pay, this should’ve came with built in speakers and some sort of remote cause the buttons do no work.

Wow! This monitor is impressive in size and capability and is a productivity (and gaming) powerhouse! But it has several quirks, and getting it running the way I wanted was far from straightforward. Let me tell you about my frustrating but wonderful experience using the 57″ Odyssey Neo G9.Pros:• Incredible amount of screen real estate• Flexible PBP options allow you to use it as two or three displays• Extremely bright image• High refresh rates• Nice lighting features• Good value compared to buying two comparable 32″ 4K displays• KVM feature helps when connecting to two computersCons:• Extremely frustrating to get set up on macOS, especially with resolution scaling• Unreliable at connecting to my MacBook Pro when I wake it• Local dimming is less impressive than I hoped• Very picky about what cables work with it• Lacking USB-C connectivity to a computer• Only a single DisplayPort connection when three would be useful• Only two USB ports (and USB-A at that)I’m a huge fan of expansive multi-monitor setups, having used triple 27″ 5K displays for years, but I needed something that wasn’t quite so wide (so I could fit big speakers beside my desk). However, I still wanted the sort of screen real estate I’m used to. This monitor appeared to offer an excellent solution, so I took the plunge and ordered it. A massive box arrived at my door the very next day.For context, while this monitor is marketed as a “gaming” monitor, I’m not much of a gamer and rarely play video games these days. I’m a web developer, and I find having multiple displays extremely helpful for doing my work. I’m also a Mac user and only generally use Windows through virtualization (with Parallels). So, I’ll be reviewing this monitor in the context of a display for productivity and work applications on a Mac.I use an M2 Max MacBook Pro, which is relevant for how I use this display, as only the Max variants can connect four external displays, while the M2 Pro can use two external displays.The unboxing experience of this display was something. This is a beast. I’m an average-sized guy and had an okay time attaching the stand and lugging it out of the box and onto my desk, but if you can get someone to help you, you should. For some reason, the instructions strongly imply you should attach cables before you set it up, but I have no idea why; it’s quite easy to access the cables on the back as long as you don’t put it right in a corner or put the thin plastic cover on. About that cover, you will want to leave that off until you are very sure you are happy with how you have this display set up because I had to try nearly every cabling configuration possible with this display before I found a setup that worked well for me.At first, I simply plugged in a DisplayPort cable to my UGreen ThunderBolt 4 dock, and it worked great, giving me the full 7,680×2160 pixels at 120 Hz. (It appears Macs never want to do more than 120 Hz, and I’m fine with that). There were, however, two big problems with this scenario:1. Window management is awkward with a massive 32:9 display. It’s handy to “snap” windows to different monitors, but you lose some of that ability with one giant monitor and have to spend a lot of time dragging windows into comfortable positions. Also, macOS shows its menu in the far top-left corner, which is a little awkward to use; your neck will not appreciate you frequently looking at the far corners of this display.2. Unlike Windows, with its fairly straightforward 1.25x/1.5x scaling, macOS scaling works by essentially downsampling a variety of “virtual” desktop resolutions to the resolution of the native display. Although “4K at 32-inches” (which this display is effectively two of, side by side) is a decent pixel density, it’s an awkward resolution on a Mac. I could choose between running at the native resolution with no scaling, where everything is very tiny at 1x, or everything is very large at 2x. The latter may be great if you have quite poor eyesight, but neither made me happy.To solve the second issue, macOS typically allows you to set the “virtual desktop” resolution of a 4K display to either 5K (5120×2880 or 2560×1440@2x) or 6K (6016×3384 or 3008×1692@2x). The image is then scaled in hardware to the native 4K resolution, which looks surprisingly good, albeit not quite as crisp as a true 5K or 6K display like the Pro Display XDR would.All this said, out of the box, I was not getting these scaled options, and I briefly tried to use a utility called BetterDisplay to add the desired resolutions, but it would not cooperate. I am not sure why, but it’s possible that creating a resolution this large is problematic because the display hardware simply can’t drive it.I ultimately realized that, even with the appropriate scaling, I probably wouldn’t enjoy using this display as one extremely wide screen, so I decided that I’d try some of the “Picture by Picture” modes.Picture by Picture or PBP is a very cool feature of this monitor that allows you to configure the monitor as two or three separate displays and allocate the sections in different ways. For instance, you can run this display as two 4K displays, a 4K display in the center with a half-width display on each side, or three equal 2,560×2,160 screens. PBP is a wonderful feature that offers a great deal of flexibility, but this also comes with the significant caveat that you’ll need to physically plug your computer(s) into all these “logical monitors” with separate ports. If you elect to use a three-screen mode, you’ll need a computer capable of triple-display output.I chose to use the 4K in the middle, half-width monitors at the sides layout, which is perfect for getting a “normal” sized, 16:9 display in the middle that works well to watch video while having side screens that are great for email, documentation, documents, etc. This is an excellent productivity setup that gives you a lot of screen real estate with no bezels in between its logical “displays.”Unfortunately, the path to getting everything working well was not easy. First, I wanted to run the displays as 6K (and half 6K for the sides), so that the UI was at the appropriate size. This was straightforward for the center display, but the side displays, at 1,920×2,160, were not offering me the appropriate options for this. I ended up messing around with various utilities to try to see if I could manually add the virtual resolution I wanted, and I had an extremely difficult time doing this. I was able to get one side to work with SwitchResX, but not the other. Eventually, I determined that one of my cables or connections was messing something up, and I bought a new USB-C to HDMI adapter to connect this display.Finally, once I thought I had everything set up the way I wanted, I couldn’t reliably connect to all my displays. I’ll note that in addition to using the Neo G9 as three displays, I have another 4K display on top that I was connecting, so I’m really pushing the limits of what my poor MacBook Pro can do! But what I was finding is that three out of four of my displays would connect when my computer woke up, and I’d have to fight with the connections to get them all to connect. What seems to work most reliably is to unplug the HDMI to USB-C adapter from the left Thunderbolt port on my laptop and plug it in again. Usually, that would make everything connect (with, at best, two of three of the displays at 120Hz, which could be a limitation of my Mac). It’s super annoying that I have to do this almost every time I sit down at my computer if the displays have been off.I believe this might be a problem with this display, as I have heard other people report an issue with this display that makes it unreliable at establishing a connection. Let us hope and pray a firmware update can improve this!If you’re planning to get fancy with how you set up this display, you’ll want to make sure you have high-quality HDMI and DisplayPort cables or adapters that support the highest capabilities, as this monitor is picky about what capabilities it will allow with some cables or adapters. You do get one quality HDMI cable and one DisplayPort cable in the box, but you may want more, and you may need different cables if you need to connect to USB-C ports. At any rate, with the saga of my connection and configuration to this display behind us, I’ll get to some of the other noteworthy properties of this monitor.First, I feel that, for a display of this size and capability, it’s a shame that the connectivity options are so limited. A display like this should probably offer Thunderbolt or USB-C as an option, which would allow connecting the internal USB ports, of which you get a piddly two. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a monitor with a USB hub that only offers two ports, so that’s lame. One neat feature these ports do afford, though, is for you to use the display like a KVM. You can plug your keyboard and mouse into those ports, and they will automatically switch between computers as you switch the display. This is nice if you have separate work and gaming PCs, for example.Additionally, you get three HDMI ports but only one DisplayPort, which is capable of DP 2.1 (although it’s set to 1.4 by default, so you’ll have to manually enable that in the OSD menu if your computer is capable of DP 2.1). DisplayPort is generally the superior connection type for computers, so why Samsung would hamstring this display by only including one DP connection is a mystery to me. You can always convert DP to HDMI with an active cable, and I have one—but holy smokes, that adapter gets hot. Also, I’ve not found HDMI to be as reliable as DisplayPort with Thunderbolt 3/4 Macs.This is all something that can be worked around, except that I noticed one very annoying thing—I was having better luck connecting using 1x DP and 2x HDMI connections than using 3x HDMI connections. However, the DisplayPort signal and HDMI signals look quite different. The colors through DisplayPort were significantly bluer, and the HDMI had much warmer colors. Not to mention that you don’t get any ability to adjust colors through the OSD menu if you’re using PBP mode, for some reason. All this to say, if you do color-sensitive work, you will want to be cognizant of this and will likely want to try connecting all displays with HDMI and calibrating them accordingly. I haven’t yet found a reliable way to get the DP and HDMI inputs color-matched.On a more positive note, the brightness of this display is next-level, with retina-searing capabilities. Samsung claims it does 1,000 nit peak HDR brightness, and I believe it. On their product page, it also lists this as a 420 cd/m2 (I guess if you’re not using the HDR capabilities), but at least with my configuration, it appears capable of much more than 420 nits just in the regular desktop UI. On my Mac, I use the excellent Lunar app to control the brightness with my Mac’s keyboard. There are a couple of quirks to doing this, however: First, while most monitors go from 0-100, this goes from 0-50, so the last half of the adjustments do nothing, and the step between the first half of the scale is big. Also, Lunar tries to adjust all three of the displays at the same time, which leads to some glitchy behavior. Fortunately, these issues are solvable by limiting the max brightness to 50, locking all but one display’s brightness, and changing the adjustment increment to a lower number than the default of 6%. With that, I can easily tweak the brightness using my keyboard based on what I’m looking at or the room brightness, which is very nice.When it comes to contrast, this mini-LED backlit monitor offers 2,392 dimming zones, which sounds impressive, but it’s not quite enough for a display of this size. While the monitor is capable of impressive-looking contrast on completely black screens, you’ll also notice considerable blooming on dark screens with small bright regions. Also, the local dimming doesn’t seem to kick in significantly until the brightness gets quite low. Unfortunately, this isn’t the best local-dimming implementation I’ve seen, and it doesn’t hold a candle to the excellent performance of the mini-LED MacBook Pro displays.A feature of this monitor I’m not fond of is that it has a pretty strong antiglare film. This treatment is probably important on a curved display, as it’ll reflect any light sources behind you, but in an environment where you can control your lighting and ensure there is no light behind you, an AG coating adds a “sparkle” to the display, reduces contrast, desaturates color, and generally makes the display worse. I wish Samsung would offer more of their displays with a glossy option.I find the vertical off-axis viewing angles fairly narrow, especially with shades of gray, so it’s very important to get this display angled towards you and at the correct height, or grays and colors will look washed out. It’s too bad the viewing angles of this monitor aren’t the most impressive, but they are sufficient if you can get the display set up and ensure you sit in the sweet spot.About that sweet spot, you can’t forget that one of the defining characteristics of this display is the fairly aggressive 1000R curve. I’ve seen a lot of debate about the merits and drawbacks of curved screens. Remember the curved TV fad? That was dumb because TV viewers rarely sit in the sweet spot. But for a monitor like this, you definitely will appreciate the curve as long as you’re sitting in the right place.1000R means that this monitor is a segment of a circle with a radius of 1000mm, which means you will want to sit with your eyes about 1M from the display, which I think is a reasonable and comfortable distance. Without this curve, the edges of the screen would be at quite an awkward angle and lead to very washed-out or suboptimal viewing. Even with a curve this aggressive, my eyes being a little weak, I like to sit a bit closer than 1M from the display, so I’d almost like a slightly tighter curve, like 900R, but overall, I give a thumbs up on the curve. It significantly increases the ergonomics of a display at a typical viewing distance, but you may not appreciate the curve if you use this display for meetings or sit really far from your screen.Finally, there’s one neat feature I’d like to point out, and that’s the “Infinity Core Lighting”, which is, I guess, the sort of thing you must add to a product to sell it to gamers these days. Basically, it’s a big colored light around the point the monitor stand connects, with two thin accent strips at the front. Even though I despise the “RGB everywhere all the time” aesthetic, the implementation here is thoughtful, and you can configure this light to work in a variety of ways with many color options. I enjoy setting it to a static light that gives a nice ambient glow around the back of the monitor, making it a bit easier to plug in cables there.In conclusion, while it’s unfortunate that this display offers too little connectivity and a strong AG coating I don’t like, this is a really cool monitor. I mainly wish Samsung would fix the reliability issues with this monitor connecting to computers—it is insane that literally every time I sit down at my desk, I have to get up again and unplug/replug a cable to get my monitors to connect correctly! But when everything is set up the way I want it, I really enjoy this monitor, with its bright, expansive display, good pixel density, and very useful PBP capabilities. It’s an excellent productivity monitor, although it was (and remains) tricky to get it working as I wanted. I think that, for the money, it offers incredible capabilities and is a unique display that works really well for my particular needs as a multi-monitor enthusiast.