Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 S32BG85 Monitor Review

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has a gamer-oriented design that's similar to the Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 S32BG75, but the main difference is that the back is white instead of black. The white plastic on the back is glossy and the black bezels are matte. The aggressive 1000R curve helps bring the edges within your field of vision, but some people might not like it. If you prefer a flat screen with a better viewing angle, check out the LG 32GQ950-B instead. There's also a ring of lighting on the back.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has good build quality, but it isn't as good as what you would expect from a premium monitor. It's well-made with good-quality plastic and there aren't any issues with how it's put together. However, there's a considerable amount of wobble, especially when you try using the controls. With the screen at its highest setting, there's all kinds of wobble when you try to change any setting, and it's worse than the Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 S32BG75, but it isn't as bad at a lower height.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has great ergonomics. You can adjust it how you like, but as the swivel range is narrow it isn't ideal if you need to share your screen with someone else. The stand has a clip for cable management to route your cables to the inputs.

The wide-set feet take up a good amount of space, so you need a deep desk to place it on, but there's space between the feet to put a keyboard and mouse. Sadly, the screen wobbles easily on the stand, especially at its max height.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8's directional pad is different from the joystick found on past Samsung monitors, and it doesn't feel good. The buttons are mushy, difficult to use, and if you press them too hard the screen wobbles.

• Power supply and cable
• DisplayPort cable
• USB-B to USB-A cable
• VESA-mount adapter
• User guides

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has an excellent contrast ratio. Combined with its Mini LED local dimming feature, it displays deep blacks next to bright highlights, resulting in fantastic dark room performance.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has decent local dimming, and it's very similar to the Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 S32BG75. It features Mini LED backlighting with a 46x26 array for 1,196 zones. The Mini LED backlighting provides better control over the local dimming zones compared to traditional edge-lit monitors. Setting Local Dimming to 'High' deepens blacks, but there's black crush that causes a loss of fine details in dark scenes. It also makes small highlights pop against a dark background, as long as they're big enough to turn on a dimming zone, otherwise, they look crushed. Setting it to 'Low' results in less black crush because it raises the black levels more, but highlights aren't as bright, so there's a trade-off when deciding which setting you prefer the most.

The uniformity with Local Dimming on 'High' is great as there's minimal blooming around bright objects. There's a bit of blooming with subtitles and with the mouse on a dark background, but it isn't an issue with most content or games. Unfortunately, the blooming is worse when viewing from an angle and you don't need to be far off-center for you to notice it, so you need to sit in front of the monitor for the best performance. Highlights also transition between zones well and the algorithm keeps up with fast-moving objects.

Overall it's a good implementation of local dimming, but the off-angle issues take away from its overall performance. It doesn't look any different with VRR enabled or not, but there's flicker in dark scenes with VRR enabled and a low frame rate (see Variable Refresh Rate section for more). We also filmed our TV real content videos for reference from straight on and from the side. These videos along with the video above were done with the Local Dimming on 'High'.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has impressive peak brightness in SDR. It's enough to fight glare in a well-lit room, but it has an aggressive Automatic Brightness Limiter with Local Dimming set to 'High'. This means that there's a variation of brightness with different content, like when you minimize and maximize windows on the desktop, and there's also some blooming around small bright objects on a dark background, like the mouse cursor. Setting the local dimming to 'Low' results in a higher real scene brightness of 401 cd/m², but highlights aren't as bright. Setting it to 'Auto' has the same real scene brightness as 'High'.

The measurements are from after calibration in the 'Custom' Picture Mode with the Brightness at its max and the Local Dimming on 'High'.

If you find the aggressive ABL too distracting to use on the desktop, it's better to disable the local dimming as there isn't any variation in brightness and it's still bright enough to fight glare:

• Real Scene: 380 cd/m²
• Peak 2% Window: 341 cd/m²
• Peak 10% Window: 342 cd/m²
• Peak 25% Window: 342 cd/m²
• Peak 50% Window: 343 cd/m²
• Peak 100% Window: 342 cd/m²
• Sustained 2% Window: 341 cd/m²
• Sustained 10% Window: 341 cd/m²
• Sustained 25% Window: 342 cd/m²
• Sustained 50% Window: 342 cd/m²
• Sustained 100% Window: 341 cd/m²

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has decent HDR peak brightness. It's very similar to the Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 S32BG75, and with most real content, it's not as bright in HDR as the Sony INZONE M9. It's brightest with small highlights as they pop against a dark background, but it gets dimmer with larger areas due to its ABL. Samsung advertises Quantum HDR 2000, but this isn't a real VESA certification, and it doesn't hit 2000 nits. Unfortunately, the EOTF doesn't follow the target PQ curve well as it crushes blacks and over-brightens brighter details. There's also a sharp cut-off at the peak brightness, causing a loss of fine details in bright scenes.

The real scene brightness is low considering it gets bright with small highlights, so that means content with bright objects all over the screen doesn't get the brightest. Setting Local Dimming to 'Low' actually makes real scenes brighter because it raises the overall black level, but small highlights don't pop as much.

These results are in the 'Custom' Picture Mode with the Brightness at its max and Local Dimming set to 'High'. The EOTF is also similar with Local Dimming set to 'Auto', as you can see here. The EOTF on 'Low' follows a similar pattern, but it isn't as aggressive with crushing blacks. With local dimming disabled the EOTF is terrible and all scenes are too dark.

Overall, native HDR content looks great, but HDR looks washed out on desktop if you leave Windows HDR enabled.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has a narrow horizontal viewing angle. The curvature helps bring the edges of the screen more within your field of vision if you sit at the center, but the image looks inaccurate as you move off to the sides. You also notice more blooming from the sides.

The vertical viewing angle on the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 is disappointing. The image looks washed out if you need to share your screen with someone standing above you.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has good gray uniformity. There's a bit of vignetting towards the edges and dirty screen effect in the center which could get distracting with large areas of uniform color, like when browsing the web.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has good black uniformity. The screen looks blue without the local dimming feature enabled as there's backlight bleed, but the Mini LED local dimming feature helps further deepen any blacks and there's minimal blooming around bright objects.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has excellent out-of-the-box accuracy in SDR. The sRGB mode limits primaries to the sRGB color space well, so they don't look over-saturated, and the white balance is much better than on the Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 S32BG75. The sRGB mode locks you out of a few settings like Contrast, Color, Black Level, and Screen Adjust, but you can still adjust the brightness to your liking. Other picture modes that have these settings unlocked are less accurate.

The color temperature is slightly on the warm side, but it's still close to the 6500K target. Unfortunately, gamma doesn't follow the sRGB target at all as dark scenes are too dark and other scenes are over-brightened.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has incredible accuracy after calibration to the D65 white point. Any remaining inaccuracies aren't visible to the naked eye, and while gamma is better, it still isn't perfect.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has a fantastic SDR color gamut. It has near-perfect coverage of the sRGB color space used in most web content, and it has good Adobe RGB coverage, but it under-saturates greens and over-saturates reds.

The SDR color volume is remarkable. The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 doesn't have any issues displaying bright and dark colors.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has a great HDR color gamut, and it essentially performs the same as the Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 S32BG75. It has great coverage of the DCI-P3 color space used in most content, but it has more limited coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space. Tone mapping is good in DCI-P3, preserving fine details, but it's worse in Rec. 2020, meaning some colors are inaccurate. Overall, native HDR content looks great, but HDR looks washed out in the desktop if you leave Windows HDR enabled.

Unlike past Samsung monitors, there aren't dedicated HDR picture modes like 'HDR Dynamic' or 'HDR Game', and instead the HDR picture modes are the same as in SDR, but they perform differently. You can also change picture settings like Contrast, Sharpness, and Color.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has a great HDR color volume. It displays dark colors well and bright colors as bright as pure white, but it's limited by its incomplete color gamut in both spaces.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has remarkable reflection handling. It uses a slightly different screen coating that the Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 S32BG75, which helps it reduce the amount of direct reflections. Even reflections from strong light sources aren't distracting and combined with the high peak brightness, you won't have issues using this in a bright room.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 S32BG85 has fantastic text clarity. The high 4k resolution makes images look sharp, and even though Windows ClearType (top photo) helps improve the text clarity, you likely won't need it. Although it shares the same 32-inch, 4k screen as the Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 S32BG75, text clarity is slightly worse on this because it has a different screen coating that introduces more haziness, but it's only noticeable if you place both monitors side-by-side and you really look for it.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has fantastic gradient handling. You won't notice any banding with different shades of the same color.

The monitor supports a 4k signal up to 240Hz as long as your graphics card supports Display Stream Compression (DSC) to compress the extra bandwidth. However, there are a few issues with the monitor at 240Hz. Firstly, there are scanlines that are most noticeable with solid colors, especially blue, but you can also see them throughout the desktop, like on icons. This scanline issue is only a problem with 240Hz, and not lower signals.

There are also pixel inversion issues with certain test patterns, as you can see in this video. There's a chance you see this in some games that have a similar pattern, but not every game or content has this problem.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has native FreeSync support, and even though NVIDIA doesn't certify it, G-SYNC compatibility still works on it. Both FreeSync and G-SYNC compatibility work over a DisplayPort connection, but only FreeSync works over HDMI as G-SYNC didn't work with an RTX 3070 PC, and the refresh rate was capped at 120Hz on that PC. The monitor supports Low Framerate Compensation for the VRR to continue working at low frame rates.

Like other Samsung monitors, there are flicker issues with VRR enabled when the frame rate of your game drops, particularly in dark scenes with the Local Dimming on 'High'. It's hard to see with most content, but it's noticeable and distracting when it appears. Samsung added a VRR Control setting to effectively eliminate the flicker with low-frame-rate content, but it also increases the input lag.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has an excellent response time at its max refresh rate of 240Hz. There's minimal blur trail behind fast-moving objects, but there's significant overshoot with dark transitions that leads to inverse ghosting. Enabling VRR locks you out of any overdrive setting, and the response time is quick with it, and if you don't use VRR the best overdrive setting is 'Standard' because it performs similarly. 'Faster' and 'Extreme' have too much overshoot.

Like with the Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 S32BG75, there are reports that enabling local dimming worsens the response times. While the local dimming may cause some extra blur trail with fast-moving objects, the overall motion handling looks the same with local dimming on and off. Below you can see motion photos with the local dimming at different refresh rates:

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has an excellent response time at 120Hz. Like with the max refresh rate, enabling VRR produces the best result, but the motion performs differently when sent a fixed frame rate signal with VRR enabled than when sent a lower frame rate signal that forces VRR to work. With a fixed-rate signal, the response time is similar to the 'Standard' overdrive setting without any overshoot, but as soon as the monitor needs to lower the refresh rate, there's more overshoot. It performs closer to 'Faster', but with a quicker response time. This phenomenon doesn't occur at 240Hz, and despite this at 120Hz, it isn't a noticeable difference while gaming and motion looks smooth regardless.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has an equally quick response time at 60Hz as the higher refresh rates. Once again, enabling VRR results in the best response time, and like at 120Hz, the response time is different when sent a fixed rate and when VRR is actively working. However, the difference between them isn't very noticeable.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion, but sadly it isn't that useful. The timing is quite off because the pulse phase isn't matched up to the refresh rate, so the timing is constantly shifting. With the refresh rate at its max of 240Hz, it takes 1.5 seconds for the timing to match up with the refresh rate, but it takes 2.5 seconds at 120Hz, and 10 seconds at 60Hz, meaning the timing is very off with lower refresh rates. This creates noticeable image duplications when it's off. You can see examples below of what it looks like at its best and its worst with 240Hz, 120Hz, and 60Hz signals.

However, there are issues when trying to get the BFI to work at 60Hz. If you set the refresh rate of the monitor to 60Hz from your PC and then enable the BFI, it actually flickers at 120Hz, creating noticeable image duplication and you can see what it looks like at its best and at its worst. However, if you first have the monitor at a higher refresh rate and then enable BFI and set the refresh rate to 60Hz, it properly flickers at 60Hz. Essentially, you need to change it to 60Hz once the BFI feature is enabled.

The BFI features also lock the brightness setting, but if you set the brightness before enabling the BFI, it stays on that brightness. You can't use the local dimming or VRR features with the BFI either.

The photo and graph above is at 240Hz. You can see the graphs at 120Hz and at 60Hz.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has a flicker-free backlight, which helps reduce eye strain, as long as you have the local dimming enabled. This performs differently from the Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 S32BG75, which flickers at low brightness levels. As mentioned in the Variable Refresh Rate section, there's a flicker when you enable VRR and local dimming in dark scenes, but it isn't a measurable flicker. You can see the flicker graph with local dimming here, which has a 1000Hz+ flicker that isn't noticeable, so something else is causing the flicker in dark scenes.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has low input lag for a responsive feel when gaming. Unlike past Samsung monitors, the input lag doesn't increase when the frame rate of your source drops below the set refresh rate of the monitor, and the local dimming doesn't significantly impact the input lag either. Unfortunately, the VRR Control setting increases the input lag. Below are input lag measurements with the VRR on and off using different settings:

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 works perfectly with the PS5 thanks to its HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, allowing you to play 4k games up to 120 fps. For VRR to work, you need to set the monitor's refresh rate to 120Hz, otherwise, it doesn't work. The 'PC' or 'AV' modes both perform the same, and neither have an impact on text clarity. The 'AV' modes lock you out of the regular Picture Modes available, including sRGB, while you can still use those modes in the 'PC' mode.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 works well with the Xbox Series X, but there's an aggressive flicker with 1440p @ 60Hz signals. Otherwise, it works fine.

Both of the HDMI ports on the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 support HDMI 2.1 bandwidth.

You need to connect the USB-B to USB-A cable to your computer for the USB ports to work, meaning you can connect your peripherals like a mouse and keyboard.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 works well with recent MacBooks. Because the refresh rate doesn't drop below 68Hz, there isn't any flicker at low frame rates that you would get with the Samsung Odyssey Neo G7 S32BG75. VRR works in games and on the desktop, and while HDR looks a bit washed out on the desktop, it looks good for games and videos. Windows return to their original position after waking up from sleep, but not when you close the lid to your laptop.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 has a few extra features to improve your gaming experience, like:

• Black Equalizer: Adjusts the gamma so that you can see opponents better in dark areas of games.
• Contrast Enhancer: Optimizes the contrast according to the content.
• Dynamic Brightness: Brightens the screen on a scene-by-scene basis. Automatically enabled with Local Dimming on.
• Eco Light Sensor: Changes the brightness of the screen according to the ambient environment.
• Eye Care: Removes blue light to help with eye strain in the Eye Saver Mode. Includes the Adaptive Picture mode to change the brightness according to your environment, and Min. Brightness lets you set the minimum brightness.
• Infinity Core Lighting: Controls the lighting on the stand, and can sync with the on-screen colors.
• Local Dimming: Mini LED local dimming feature with 1,196 zones to further improve the contrast and picture quality in dark scenes.
• Low Input Lag: Provides the lowest input lag possible.
• Screen Size: You can change the aspect ratio according to your content.
• Ultrawide Game View: Displays an ultrawide 21:9 image, with black bars at the top and bottom.
• Virtual Aim Point: Displays a crosshair that your system won't detect.
• VRR control: Helps eliminate flicker with low-frame-rate signals.