Samsung Odyssey G5 S27AG50 Monitor Review

This monitor has a gaming-oriented design with a flat screen. It's made mainly out of plastic with an etched design on the back, and it should look nice in any gaming setup. It also has a Kensington lock to secure the monitor to a solid object.

The Samsung Odyssey G50A has decent build quality. It's made mainly of plastic that feels sturdy, but there's nothing premium about it, and there's a bit of flex throughout. The stand supports the screen fairly well, but there's some wobble when you adjust it to its maximum height.

This monitor has fantastic ergonomics, and you can easily place it in an ideal position. The back of the stand has a rubber hook that you can use for cable management.

The V-shaped stand has a wide footprint on your desk, but there's enough space to put your keyboard or mouse in between the legs.

The Samsung LS27AG500PNXZA has a joystick underneath the center branding and three buttons to the left to control the on-screen menu.

• DisplayPort cable and covers
• Power cable
• Power supply
• User guides

The Samsung Odyssey G50A has a low contrast ratio that makes blacks look gray, and the monitor doesn't have a local dimming feature to further improve it. If you do care about the contrast, the Samsung Odyssey G5/G51C S27CG51 is a similar monitor that has a higher contrast ratio for deeper blacks.

This monitor doesn't have a local dimming feature. We still film these videos on the monitor so you can compare the backlight performance with a monitor that has local dimming.

The SDR brightness is great. It's bright enough to fight glare in a well-lit room, and it maintains that brightness consistently across different content. These results are from after calibration in the 'Custom' Picture Mode with the Brightness at its max.

The HDR brightness is decent. It gets brighter than in SDR, but small highlights don't pop against the rest of the image. The PQ EOTF tracking is decent, but mid-tones are overbrightened until there's a sharp cut-off at the peak brightness, so at least it lets highlights get the brightest they could without any tone mapping. These results are in the 'HDR Dynamic' Picture Mode with the Brightness at its max.

The horizontal viewing angle is decent. While it starts to wash out at very wide angles, it's still fine if you want to share your screen with someone sitting next to you.

The vertical viewing angle is okay. Unless you're standing directly above the screen and looking down on it, you won't have any issues.

The gray uniformity is good. There's minimal dirty screen effect in the center, but the edges are noticeably darker.

This monitor has mediocre black uniformity. There's clouding throughout and some backlight bleed, particularly in the bottom left corner. The screen also looks blue due to the low contrast ratio.

The accuracy before calibration is decent. The sRGB mode locks the colors to the sRGB colors space, so they don't look oversaturated. However, some colors are still off, and the white balance is terrible. The color temperature is also much colder than the 6500K target, giving the image a blue tint. Gamma doesn't follow the target sRGB curve well either, as most scenes are too bright. The sRGB mode also locks some picture settings, so if you want more customizability, you'll need to use another picture mode that has oversaturated colors.

The accuracy after calibration is incredible. You won't notice any inaccuracies, and calibrating it fixes issues with gamma and the white balance.

The Samsung Odyssey G50A has an amazing SDR color gamut. It has full coverage of the commonly-used sRGB color space, but the Adobe RGB coverage is too limiting for photo editors.

The HDR color gamut is only okay as it can't display a wide range of accurate colors in the DCI-P3 or Rec. 2020 color spaces.

The HDR color volume is okay. Without a wide color gamut, it doesn't display a wide range of colors at different luminance levels.

The text clarity is good. Enabling Windows ClearType (top photo) helps with the appearance of diagonal lines.

The reflection handling is good. Combined with its high peak brightness, visibility isn't an issue unless you have it opposite a really bright window.

The Samsung Odyssey G50A has exceptional gradient handling. There's minimal banding with shades of similar color.

Due to bandwidth limitations, you can only reach the max refresh rate with 8-bit signals over DisplayPort.

The Samsung Odyssey S27AG50 has very good motion handling across its refresh rate range. It's extremely consistent at any refresh rate, which is great, but you can't use any of the Response Time overdrive settings with VRR enabled.

The refresh rate compliance is good. While its response time isn't fast enough to make full color transitions before the monitor draws the next frame at high frame rates, it's better than other LED-backlit monitors, and it improves at 60Hz.

The CAD at the max refresh rate of 165Hz is very good. Motion looks sharp without much blur, but you can only use the Response Time overdrive settings if you disable Adaptive Sync in the OSD. In that case, the 'Faster' overdrive setting provides the best motion, but it has some inverse ghosting, so 'Standard' is better if that bothers you.

The CAD at 120Hz is good. Motion is sharp, and unlike at the max refresh rate, the recommended overdrive setting of 'Standard' doesn't have any noticeable inverse ghosting. These results are with the Refresh Rate in the OSD set to 120Hz, as setting it to 165Hz causes the screen to still refresh at 165Hz.

The CAD at 60Hz is good. Motion is sharp, and there's no noticeable inverse ghosting. These results are with the Refresh Rate in the OSD set to 60Hz, as setting it to anything higher causes the screen to refresh at that rate.

There's an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI). It only works when you enable the 'Extreme (MBR)' Response Time setting, and you can't use it at the same time as VRR. It works within a narrow range, and although you can enable it as low as 60Hz, it only flickers at 120Hz and causes image duplication.

The Samsung Odyssey S27AG50 has some VRR flicker with changing frame rates in dark scenes that are hard to see in the video, but it's still visible in person. That said, it isn't overly distracting either, and it doesn't happen if you have a consistent frame rate.

This monitor has a completely flicker-free backlight, which helps reduce eye strain if you're sensitive to it.

The Samsung G50 has incredibly low input lag for a responsive gaming experience. However, you have to make sure the PC and the monitor's refresh rates are the same for the lowest input lag. With the monitor set to 165Hz, and our test PC at 60 fps, the input lag was 22.9 ms, but setting the monitor to 60Hz brings it down to 8.9 ms. You can also enable VRR to achieve this low input lag.

This monitor works as expected with the PS5 as it lacks HDMI Forum VRR and HDMI 2.1 bandwidth. That said, you need to disable Adaptive Sync in the monitor's OSD if you want to get a downscaled 4k signal.

This monitor can't take full advantage with the Xbox Series X|S as it's limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth. You need to disable Adaptive Sync to get a downscaled 4k signal, which is disappointing because the Xbox Series X|S only supports HDR in 4k. This means that you can't get VRR and HDR at the same time.

This monitor works well for the most part with macOS. VRR works well in-game but flickers a bit when you're not in a game. HDR technically works, but it doesn't look good, so you're better off leaving it disabled. On the other hand, there are no sleep mode issues, and windows return to their original position when you wake up your computer.

There aren't too many extra features, but it still has:

• Black Stabilizer: Adjusts the gamma so you can see opponents easier in dark games
• Crosshair: Adds a virtual crosshair on the screen that your system won't detect.
• Frame Rate Counter: Displays the current frame rate of your PC.
• Ultrawide Game View Mode: This changes the aspect ratio to 21:9 to simulate an ultrawide screen. It changes the resolution to 2560x1080, and you can't use VRR with it, but you still get the full refresh rate range.