Samsung Odyssey G9 C49G95T  Monitor Review

The Samsung Odyssey G9 is a super ultrawide monitor with a very aggressive curve. It has relatively thin borders, a wide V-shaped stand, and some RGB lighting on the back.

The build quality is great. The body is made out of decent-quality plastic, and the stand is metal but covered with a plastic shell. This plastic shell and the headphone hook both feel flimsy, but this isn't an issue unless you're constantly playing around with them. There aren't any obvious issues with how it's put together, but it wobbles a lot, which is somewhat expected of a center-mounted super ultrawide monitor.

The ergonomics are alright. Despite its curved screen an super ultrawide display, you can still adjust it in a few different ranges, which is useful, but the tilt and swivel ranges are limited.

The back of the monitor has a gamer-oriented design with white plastic. There's some RGB lighting where the stand connects to the screen, and there's a small plastic hook near the top of the stand to hold your headphones. The stand's white plastic cover is removable, allowing you to hide the cables and route them to the bottom for cable management.

The stand's feet are very wide but thin, so there's still a good amount of usable desk space in front. It doesn't support the monitor all that well as there's a lot of wobble, but that's mostly due to its super ultrawide format.

There's a single joystick located underneath the display. It allows you to turn the monitor On/Off and navigate the on-screen menu.

• User guide
• Power cord
• USB-A to USB-B upstream cable
• DisplayPort cable
• VESA mount adapter
• VESA screws

The Samsung G9 has a VA panel, but its contrast ratio is only decent, so some blacks look gray in dark scenes. The local dimming doesn't seem to do much in SDR, as the contrast remains almost unchanged. Even when you enable it in HDR it causes large dimming zones to turn on, actually reducing the overall contrast with the checkerboard pattern, but blacks are deeper when the dimming zones are off.

Unfortunately, the local dimming is terrible. It has edge-lit local dimming and doesn't feature Mini LED backlighting like the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9/G95NA S49AG95. You can enable it in SDR, but it doesn't seem to do anything, and it only works properly in HDR. There are only 10 vertical lighting zones, so the entire column lights up if there's a small object anywhere on the screen. When lit, the black level rises significantly and there's distracting blooming, as there's a big difference between the zones that are lit and those that aren't. Zone transition seems to be faster in the middle than at the edges of the screen, so while the center zones react quickly to objects going in and out, the zones at the edges of the screen are almost always on. Overall, it looks better without local dimming in regular HDR content.

This monitor has great SDR peak brightness. It's very consistent across different content and is bright enough to overcome glare in bright lighting conditions.

These results are from after calibration in the 'Custom' Picture Mode, with Brightness set to max and Local Dimming set to 'Auto'. There's an 'High Brightness' Picture Mode that lets the screen reach 639 cd/m² in the 10% window with Local Dimming and Dynamic Brightness enabled, but the image is less accurate.

The HDR peak brightness is great. It varies a lot depending on the scene, but overall, it's bright enough to deliver an impressive HDR experience. It just gets bright enough to meet its VESA HDR1000 certification.

These results are with the Backlight set to max and Local Dimming set to 'Auto'. Dynamic Brightness is enabled automatically when you turn on local dimming.

This monitor has a sub-par horizontal viewing angle. Images look washed out from the sides, which isn't ideal for sharing content or playing co-op games. Due to its wide format, the edges of the screen can look inaccurate if you sit too close; however, the screen's curvature helps mitigate this issue.

The vertical viewing angle is sub-par. This causes the image to look inaccurate if you're standing up and looking down at it.

The gray uniformity is good. The edges appear slightly brighter than the center, and there's a bit of dirty screen effect in the center. However, it's minimal and not noticeable with most content.

The black uniformity is bad. Without local dimming, there's visible backlight bleed throughout. Additionally, due to the screen's curvature, the photo is cropped and doesn't show the corners where the backlight bleed is far worse. With local dimming enabled, the test cross causes an entire vertical lighting zone to light up, which is quite distracting.

The color accuracy before calibration is mediocre. Even though it has an sRGB mode to lock the colors to the sRGB color space, some colors are still oversaturated. Also, the white balance is bad, especially with brighter whites and darker grays, and gamma doesn't follow the target curve at all, making most images appear too dark. The sRGB locks a few picture settings, including the Contrast, Color, and Black Level, but other modes have worse accuracy.

After calibration to the 6500K white point, the monitor has incredible color accuracy. The remaining inaccuracies shouldn't be visible to the naked eye, and the color temperature is almost right on the 6500K target. Gamma is significantly improved, but both dark and bright scenes are now slightly over-brightened. We encountered a bug during testing, causing our calibration settings to reset and return to the default values when changing the picture mode or other settings.

This monitor has an incredible SDR color gamut. It covers nearly the entire sRGB color space used in most content, and it has decent coverage of the Adobe RGB color space used in photo editing.

The SDR color volume is fantastic. It displays bright colors well but has trouble displaying dark colors as its contrast ratio is only decent.

The Samsung G9 has a decent HDR color gamut. It has great coverage of the commonly-used DCI-P3 color space, but its Rec. 2020 coverage is much more limited.

The HDR color volume is decent. It displays most colors fairly well, but has problems with really bright and dark colors.

The Samsung G9 has good reflection handling. Combined with the screen's high brightness, you won't have any visibility issues in bright lighting conditions.

The text clarity is good. Window ClearType helps make the letters look more clear (top photo), especially diagonal lines. The photo of the pixels looks blurry due to the screen's anti-reflective coating.

The gradient handling is superb. There's only a little bit of banding in the greens and grays, but it isn't noticeable in regular content.

You can reach this monitor's max refresh rate with a DisplayPort connection, as there are bandwidth limitations when using HDMI. Your graphics card needs to support compression if you want to send a 240Hz signal over DisplayPort.

The monitor's variable refresh rate support only works over a DisplayPort connection and not at all over HDMI. There are also some minor issues of flickering with low frame rates in dark scenes with VRR enabled, which is typical of Samsung monitors like the Samsung Odyssey G7 C32G75T. Samsung has added a VRR Control setting to reduce the flicker through a firmware update. However, this also increases the input lag.

The Samsung Odyssey G9 has a good response time when running at its max refresh rate, resulting in only a short blur trail behind fast-moving objects. Enabling VRR locks you out of any of the overdrive settings, resulting in a ton of overshoot though. If you disable VRR, either 'Standard' or 'Faster' are good options as they have less overshoot.

The response time at 120Hz is great and there's actually less overshoot than at its max refresh rate. If you disable VRR and want to send a fix refresh rate, you need to also change the Refresh Rate in the on-screen display to 120Hz. In that case, the 'Standard' overdrive setting performs best because it has a quicker response time and less overshoot than 'Faster' and 'Fastest'.

The response time at 60Hz is decent, but there's more motion blur than with faster frame rates. If you disable VRR and set the OSD to 60Hz, the monitor seems to still work at 120Hz, so the 'Standard', 'Faster', and 'Fastest' results are all nearly the same as at 120Hz. Only if you send a 60Hz signal with VRR enabled does the screen refresh at a true 60Hz cycle.

The Samsung Odyssey G9 doesn't have an optional backlight strobing feature.

The Samsung G9 uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim the backlight. It's flicker-free with the backlight set to anything above '0', and it flickers at over 2000Hz with the backlight at '0', which isn't noticeable.

Like other Samsung monitors, there are scanline issues that only affect certain content, and it isn't something you'll see during most usage. However, you can see an example of it here and it what it should normally look like here.

The Samsung Odyssey G9 has low input lag for a responsive feel, especially with high-frame-rate signals. However, if you have VRR disabled, you need to make sure the refresh rate in the on-screen display (OSD) matches the frame rate of the source; otherwise, the input lag increases. You can see the results with the different combination of settings, including enabling Adaptive Sync in the OSD below. The only exception is if you set the OSD to 240Hz and send a 60 fps fixed signal, you'll get lower input lag than if you were to set the OSD to 60Hz.

Adaptive Sync - Off

Adaptive Sync - On NVIDIA VRR - Off

Additionally, enabling VRR Control causes the input lag to increase, from 2.8 ms to 10.7 ms with a 240Hz refresh rate.

The Samsung Odyssey G9 has a massive screen that's equivalent to two 27-inch, 16:9 screens placed side-by-side, delivering an immersive gaming experience, and providing plenty of space for multitasking. Note that not all games support a 32:9 aspect ratio, so you might get some black bars on the side, or the image might be stretched out to fill up the whole screen. If you find the 32:9 aspect ratio too big, then check out the Samsung Odyssey G5 C34G55T, which has a 21:9 aspect ratio.

The Samsung Odyssey G9 has limited compatibility with the PS5 as it doesn't support 120Hz games at all, and VRR doesn't work. Also, because the PS5 doesn't support ultrawide gaming, you'll see black bars on the sides.

Once again, the compatibility with the Xbox Series X is limited, but you can at least get a 1080p @ 120Hz signal by enabling the HDMI override. It accepts a 4k signal and downscales it, resulting in a sharper image than a native 1440p signal.

Without HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, this monitor can't take advantage of high-end HDMI 2.1 graphics cards. If you want a super ultrawide gaming monitor that does, then check out the LG 49GR85DC-B.

The Samsung Odyssey G9 works well with macOS, but there are some limitations. It doesn't work with 240Hz signals unless you have your macOS updated to version 13.2, as you can see here, but the VRR works well regardless. The VRR always turns off when you close the lid, and the laptop going to sleep also sometimes disables HDR, so if that happens, you have to go back into the display settings to enable it again.

The Samsung G9 has a few additional features, including:

• Crosshair: Adds a virtual crosshair on the screen for shooter games.
• Black Stabilizer: Makes objects more visible in dark scenes.
• Frame Rate Counter: Adds an overlay displaying current frame rate.
• RGB Lighting: RGB lighting on the back of the monitor. You can set it to 52 different colors.
• Picture-in-Picture and Picture-by-Picture: Lets you display images from two input sources simultaneously.