Samsung Odyssey Neo G9/G95NA S49AG95 Monitor Review

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 is a large monitor with an aggressive curve. It looks a lot like the Samsung Odyssey G9 with black borders on the front and a white panel in the back. The stand is also black but has a white panel cover for cable management. It's mainly plastic with a bit of chrome trim around.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has great build quality. It's mainly made of plastic, but the stand is sturdy metal and supports the screen well considering its large size. The plastic on the back feels decent, but the cover for the inputs is flimsy. The height adjustment on the stand isn't the best as it doesn't stay in place when you set it to its lowest. Overall, besides these minors issues, it's a solid monitor, and there's nothing cheap about it.

Due to the super ultrawide format, the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has just okay ergonomics. You can adjust the height, tilt it, or swivel it a bit, but you obviously can't rotate it into portrait mode.

The back of the monitor is exactly like the Samsung Odyssey G9. It's mainly white with a bit of texture and black trim throughout. There's a ring that lights up in blue where the stand attaches to the screen. Cable management is done through the stand and there are covers on the stand and back panel to keep the setup clean.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9's stand is wide-set and takes up a lot of space, but the feet are spread apart, so you can still place stuff in front. The stand holds it well considering the size of the screen, but you may still notice some wobble, which is normal.

There's a joystick and three buttons to control the on-screen display underneath the right side of the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9.

• HDMI cable
• DisplayPort cable
• USB-B to USB-A cable
• Power cable
• VESA adapter
• User guides
• Not shown: Cable management covers for back panel and stand

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has a great contrast ratio. The native contrast is very good, which is typical of VA panels, and the local dimming feature does an incredible job of improving the contrast. It displays deep blacks when viewed in the dark, and it's the best contrast with local dimming that we've seen on an LED-backlit monitor. However, if you want a 240Hz ultrawide monitor with a near-infinite contrast, consider the LG 45GR95QE-B.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has a good full-array local dimming feature. It's the first monitor we've tested with Mini LED backlighting, and it has 2048 zones. It does a fantastic job at improving the contrast to display really deep blacks, and even though it crushes some details in dark scenes, it's really not that bad. There's minimal blooming around bright objects if you're looking at it from directly in front, but it's more noticeable from the side due to the narrow viewing angles, which you can see in the video above. However, we don't recommend using the local dimming feature for productivity if you're using a browser in dark mode because the zones light up for small UI elements, which could get distracting.

We recommend setting Local Dimming to 'High' for gaming or for watching movies because that's where it performs best. Fast-moving objects transition between the zones well, but the local dimming struggles to keep up with very fast objects. There's minimal blooming around subtitles that you shouldn't notice with real content. Uniformity is very good and it even displays black bars well if you're watching content that isn't 32:9.

We tested the local dimming with Adaptive Sync and Low Input Lag enabled and there isn't much of a difference when using either of those modes.

Overall, the local dimming is better than any other monitor we've tested as it helps to improve the contrast and make highlights pop. It looks really good when viewing from the center, but there's more blooming when looking at it from the side. It's on par with some local dimming features on TVs, but don't compare the score with TVs. Instead, we took real content local dimming videos like we do with TVs so you can see how it looks:

• Real content
• Real content, side view

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has fantastic SDR peak brightness thanks to the Mini LED backlighting. It easily gets bright enough to fight glare in most rooms. Brightness varies between different scenes, particularly with larger areas of bright colors due to the aggressive Automatic Brightness Limiter. Samsung advertises a typical brightness of 420 cd/m², which we achieved by disabling local dimming in the 'sRGB' mode, so the brightness depends on which settings or modes you're using.

We tested it after calibration in the 'Custom' Picture Mode with Brightness at '100' and Local Dimming on 'High'.

Note: Our results may be brighter than other reviewers because we purchased a retail unit with firmware 1006.1. Other reviewers may be using pre-release firmware.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has excellent HDR peak brightness. It's bright enough for small highlights to stand out, and it's one of the few monitors that delivers a true cinematic HDR experience. Unfortunately, it doesn't track the EOTF properly, though, as dark scenes are crushed a bit, and bright scenes are over-brightened. There's also a sharp cutoff at the monitor's peak brightness, causing bright scenes to lose fine details and appear washed out.

These measurements are with firmware 1011 in the HDR Dynamic mode with Brightness at '100' and Local Dimming on 'High'. The HDR Standard mode isn't quite as bright, with a Real Scene brightness of 741 cd/m². Despite some advertising that implies "HDR2000" certification, no such certification exists, and this monitor has not been certified under the VESA DisplayHDR 1.1 certification program.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has narrow horizontal viewing angles, which is expected from a VA panel. The image looks washed out if you view off-center. The edges of the screen may look inaccurate if you sit too close, but the curve is supposed to help with this. However, our testing doesn't take the curvature into account.

Once again, the vertical viewing angles are narrow on the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9. The image looks inaccurate if you mount it above eye level.

The Samsung Neo G9 has decent gray uniformity. Despite the large size, the entire screen looks uniform. There's very little vignetting, but the center of the screen has a bit of noticeable dirty screen effect.

There are reports of the backlight grid being visible on some units. It's not very noticeable on ours, but you can still see it if you look closely. Let us know if you see it on yours.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has poor black uniformity with local dimming disabled because there's a ton of backlight bleed and some blooming around the center cross, which explains why the overall uniformity score is low. However, the local dimming significantly improves the uniformity as the entire screen looks black and the uniformity is nearly perfect, and it's even better than the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 S32BG85, which also uses Mini LED backlighting.

The Samsung Neo G9 has okay out-of-the-box accuracy. White balance is off, particularly with pure white, and most colors are a bit inaccurate. The color temperature is slightly warmer than the target, but this isn't really noticeable. The sRGB mode is largely ineffective, as gamma is closer to 2.3 than the sRGB curve, causing most scenes to appear darker than they should, and colors are a bit oversaturated. Like most monitors, this mode also locks down some of the picture settings, but it's more accurate than the other picture modes.

The Samsung Neo G9 has fantastic accuracy after calibration. Any remaining inaccuracies with colors and the white balance are nearly impossible to spot. The color temperature is nearly spot-on with the 6500K target and gamma is improved, but some scenes are slightly over-brightened.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has an incredible SDR color gamut. It has perfect coverage of the commonly-used sRGB color space and good coverage of the Adobe RGB color space used in photo editing, which is an improvement over the Samsung Odyssey G9.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has outstanding color volume in SDR. Thanks to its high brightness, great contrast, and incredible color gamut, it displays colors at a wide range of shades and luminance levels.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9's HDR color gamut is great. It has fantastic coverage of the DCI-P3 color space used in most HDR content, but it has more limited coverage of Rec. 2020. We tested it using the HDR Dynamic mode with firmware 1011, and we also measured the color gamut with HDR Standard, which performs similarly:

• DCI-P3 Coverage: 90.6%
• Tone-Mapped DCI-P3 Coverage: 90.2%
• Rec. 2020 Gamut: 67.9%

The Samsung Neo G9 has great HDR color volume. It does a good job of displaying colors at a wide range of luminance levels. Once again we measured it with the HDR Dynamic mode with firmware 1011, but also with HDR Standard:

• DCI-P3 Normalized Volume: 85.9%
• Rec. 2020 Normalized Volume: 67.7%

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has good reflection handling. Combined with the fantastic peak brightness, visibility shouldn't be an issue in most rooms. Light reflects from the center of the screen due to the curvature.

The Samsung Neo G9 has good text clarity thanks to the high resolution. Enabling Windows ClearType (top photo) helps improve the appearance of diagonal lines as seen on R, N, G, and S.

The Samsung Neo G9 has exceptional gradient handling. You shouldn't notice any banding.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has an incredibly fast refresh rate over DisplayPort. Even with an HDMI 2.1 source, the maximum refresh rate is limited over HDMI. When connected to an HDMI 2.0 source, like an RTX 20-Series card, the maximum refresh rate is 60Hz.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 natively supports FreeSync, and it's also certified by NVIDIA to work with their G-SYNC Compatible feature. It has an extremely wide refresh rate range, including low framerate compensation (LFC), ensuring a consistent gaming experience with very little flicker in most situations.

Like the Samsung Odyssey G9, the Neo G9 has flickering issues with lower-frame rate or dim content that could get distracting. The flicker is noticeable, with some scenes more than others. Samsung added a VRR Control setting to help reduce this issue by doubling the frames with lower-frame rate content, which helps improve it but also causes some stuttering.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has a great overall response time. It has the quickest rise/fall response time out of all 240Hz monitors we've tested, even faster than the Samsung Odyssey G9, but its total response time is one of the slowest. There's significant overshoot in all transitions, resulting in a bit of noticeable inverse ghosting. Enabling Adaptive Sync locks you out of any overdrive settings, but it performs similarly to the 'Faster' setting. If you prefer gaming without the variable refresh rate feature, the 'Standard' mode performs the best. Higher settings have slightly faster rise-fall times, but there's also significantly more overshoot and inverse ghosting. There's no noticeable black smearing, which is rare for a VA panel.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has an excellent response time at 120Hz. There's very little difference between gaming at 120Hz or at the max refresh rate. Enabling Adaptive Sync still locks you out of the overdrive settings, but performs very similarly to the 'Standard' setting at 120Hz. If you prefer gaming without using the variable refresh rate feature, the 'Standard' setting still delivers the best results overall, but there's less difference between 'Faster' and 'Standard' when gaming at 120Hz.

The response time at 60Hz is excellent. The Samsung Neo G9 shows the same behavior at 60Hz as at 240Hz, and with 'Adaptive Sync' enabled, the response times are similar to the 'Standard' setting when gaming at 60Hz.

The Samsung Neo G9 has a backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion. The feature only works between 120Hz and 240Hz because even if you set it to 60Hz it still flickers at 120Hz. This causes image duplication as you can see in this photo. At 120Hz, there's no image duplication, as shown in this photo.

Update 10/25/2021: Unfortunately, the Neo G9 has the same scanline issue as the Samsung Odyssey G7 C32G75T. We're able to consistently trigger the issue with this test. We took a few uniformity photos to show you what the issue looks like:

• Scanlines
• No scanlines

The only way we've found to fix this issue is to reduce the sharpness, but this introduces other issues with picture quality, so it's not a perfect fix. It's not noticeable in most content, but we've seen some reports of people seeing this issue with regular content, including when watching streams on Twitch.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has a flicker-free backlight, which helps with eye strain. Unlike the Samsung Odyssey G9, it stays flicker-free with the backlight set at '0'. However, we noticed some flickering issues like the Odyssey G9 in VRR with lower-frame rate content (see Refresh Rate).

The Samsung Neo G9 has incredibly low input lag for a responsive gaming experience. There are a few quirks though, depending on the settings used. It's important to make sure that the Refresh Rate setting on the monitor matches the refresh rate setting on your PC, otherwise the input lag increases drastically. Enabling VRR Control also causes a significant increase in input lag.

The Samsung Neo G9 has a large screen with a high resolution that's the equivalent of placing two 27-inch, 1440p monitors side-by-side. It's fantastic for multitasking and gives you a more immersive gaming experience. If you want something even bigger, the Samsung Odyssey Ark S55BG970 has a 55-inch screen that's the equivalent of placing two Neo G9s on top of each other.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 is compatible with most of the PS5's features. You have to change the aspect ratio manually, otherwise the monitor will stretch the image sent by the PS5, since consoles don't support ultrawide aspect ratios. Unfortunately, even though it's possible to enable VRR, it doesn't work properly, and the screen turns black if you try to start a game with VRR enabled. Of course, unless you're using the picture-by-picture mode, this monitor isn't ideal for console gaming, as there are large bars on either side of the content.

This monitor is fully compatible with all features supported by the Xbox Series X, with the exception of 1440p @ 120Hz gaming, which isn't supported if VRR is enabled. You have to change the aspect ratio manually, otherwise the monitor will stretch the image sent by the Xbox, since consoles don't support ultrawide aspect ratios, but other than that there are no issues. Strangely, this setting can't be adjusted if VRR is enabled, but you can disable VRR, change the setting, and then re-enable VRR, and everything works fine. Of course, unless you're using the picture-by-picture mode, this monitor isn't ideal for console gaming, as there are large bars on either side of the content.

For the most part, there are no serious issues using this monitor with recent Mac devices. The max refresh rate with a recent M1 MacBook Pro is 120Hz, as long as the refresh rate setting on the monitor is set to 120Hz. If you set the Refresh Rate setting on the monitor to 60Hz or 240Hz, you'll be locked at 60Hz. VRR doesn't work properly when you're not gaming. HDR works fine as well, but the color temperature appears to be a bit off.

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 has a few extra features, including:

• Infinity Core Lighting: Syncs the bias lighting with on-screen content
• Crosshair: Adds a virtual crosshair for FPS games
• Black Stabilizer: Increases the gamma so you can see opponents in the shadows in dark games.
• Dynamic Contrast: Adjusts the contrast depending on the content. We didn't test it.
• Auto Control +: Detects when a source is powered on and switches to that input.

The Samsung Neo G9 also supports HDR10, and most of the issues we experienced with HDR have been fixed with the latest firmware.

It doesn't have a KVM switch, but if you want a monitor that does, then check out the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9/G95NC S57CG95.