Samsung Smart Monitor M8 S32BM80 Monitor Review

The Samsung M8 looks a lot like the Apple Studio Display with a stylish design. It's rather simplistic and will look nice in any setup. It's available in four different color variants, but only the stand and front bezels change color as the back remains white. It has speakers on the back, a sensor for the remote on the lower right side of the screen, and a detachable webcam on top.

The Samsung M8 has decent build quality, but it's not something you would expect from a premium monitor. The screen bends slightly when you try to tilt it, the plastic doesn't attach evenly to the screen, and the stand makes a creaking sound when you try to adjust it. Overall, it looks nicer than it feels.

The Samsung M8 Monitor has mediocre ergonomics. It's hard to put the screen in an ideal position, and you need to rotate the entire stand if you want to share the screen with someone next to you. Sadly, you can't remove the stand to use a mounting arm either. There's a cutout in the stand for cable management.

The stand is basic and has a flat base so you can still put stuff on top of it, and it doesn't take up a lot of space on the desk.

There's only a single joystick on the back of the Samsung M8, which is hard to reach, but it comes with a remote to control the monitor's settings and navigate through the smart interface. It's a bit different from the remote that comes with Samsung TVs as it doesn't have a Multi-View button, but it still has shortcut buttons to popular streaming services. There's a mic that allows you to search for content, and it supports both Alexa and Bixby voice assistants, but not Google Assistant like with Samsung TVs. Also, the remote only comes in white, even if you get the pink, green, or blue variants.

• USB-C cable
• Micro-HDMI to HDMI cable
• Webcam and attachment
• Remote
• Power cable and brick
• User guides and manuals

The Samsung M8 has an excellent native contrast ratio. It displays deep blacks, but it doesn't have a local dimming feature to further improve the contrast.

The Samsung M8 Monitor doesn't have a local dimming feature. We still film these videos on the monitor so that you can compare the backlight performance with a monitor that has local dimming.

The Samsung M8 has great SDR peak brightness. It gets bright enough to fight glare in well-lit rooms, and the brightness is very consistent across different scenes. Sadly, the minimum brightness is a bit high, which can be annoying if you're using the monitor in a dark room and sensitive to bright lights.

These results are from after calibration in the 'Custom' Game Picture Mode with the input label set to 'PC' and the Brightness at its max.

Unlike many monitors, the Samsung M8 supports HDR10+, but with just okay HDR peak brightness. It's not bright enough to deliver a satisfying HDR experience as most small highlights don't pop. It displays most scenes at their correct brightness, but there's a sharp roll-off at the peak brightness, causing a loss of fine details with bright objects.

These results are from the 'Game HDR' Picture Mode with the input labelled as 'PC'. Even if you use other Picture Modes and label the input as 'Blu-ray', the peak brightness doesn't change much, and you don't get the same low input lag and clear text as you do in 'Game HDR' with the input labeled as 'PC'. You can reach 390 nits in 'Game HDR' with the input labeled as 'Blu-ray', but text isn't as clear with that setting because it doesn't display chroma 4:4:4, so it's best to keep it as 'PC' for the best monitor experience.

The Samsung M8 Monitor has a narrow horizontal viewing angle, meaning the image looks washed out from the sides. It isn't ideal if you want to watch something with someone sitting next to you.

The Samsung M8's vertical viewing angle is poor, but this isn't much of a problem unless you're standing up and looking down at the screen.

The Samsung M8 has good gray uniformity. The edges of the screen are a bit darker than the rest, which is noticeable with web pages and documents open in full-screen mode. There's a bit of dirty screen effect in the center too, but it's minor.

The Samsung M8 Monitor has good black uniformity. The screen looks black, and blooming is minimal around the center cross, but it doesn't have a local dimming feature to improve it.

The Samsung M8 has mediocre out-of-the-box accuracy. Unlike other monitors, it doesn't have an sRGB mode, but you can instead adjust the Color Space Settings to 'Auto' to limit the colors to the sRGB color space in the 'Custom' Picture Mode. The 'Standard' Picture Mode performs similarly to 'Custom', while the 'FPS', 'RTS', and 'RPG' modes all have over-saturated colors. The color temperature is also close to the 6500K target with the Color Tone set to 'Standard', but setting it to 'Warm' or 'Cool' makes the image too warm and too cold. Sadly, most colors and the white balance are very off, and the gamma doesn't follow the target sRGB curve at all, as dark scenes are too dark while other scenes are too bright. The Contrast, Sharpness, Color, and Tint were at their default settings during testing.

The accuracy on the Samsung M8 after calibration is excellent, but it doesn't fix all issues. The monitor still doesn't cover all of the sRGB color space, so some primary colors aren't as saturated as they should be, but the overall color accuracy and white balance are better than before calibration. You can see the 2-point white balance settings here.

The Samsung M8 Monitor has an excellent SDR color gamut. It has fantastic coverage of the sRGB color gamut used in most web content, but it doesn't fill up the space entirely. It also has great coverage of the Adobe RGB color space used in photo editing, but greens and reds are inaccurate.

The Samsung M8 has an incredible SDR color volume. It displays colors as bright as pure white. It displays dark colors well too, but they're not as dark as pure black.

The Samsung M8 Monitor has a very good HDR color gamut. It has excellent DCI-P3 coverage, which is important as most HDR content uses that color space, but the tone mapping with pure white is off. Also, it's not future-proof because it has limited Rec. 2020 coverage and more content will start to use that color space.

The Samsung M8's HDR color volume is great. It displays dark and bright colors well, but it's limited by the incomplete color gamut.

The Samsung M8 has decent reflection handling. There aren't any mirror-like reflections thanks to the matte finish, but it still struggles with strong light sources, like if you were to place it opposite a bright window.

The text clarity on the Samsung M8 Monitor is incredible thanks to its 4k resolution. Enabling Windows ClearType (top photo) makes letters appear bolder, but it's not necessary. You need to make sure you set the input label to PC for it to display proper chroma 4:4:4 for the clearest text possible. The larger Samsung Smart Monitor M7 S43BM70 has much lower pixel density, resulting in significantly worse text clarity.

The Samsung M8 has fantastic gradient handling. There's a bit of banding with darker shades, but otherwise, you won't see much banding. You can only achieve a 10-bit signal over HDMI with a 30Hz refresh rate, and you can't get 10-bit via the USB-C input.

The Samsung M8 Monitor has a basic 60Hz refresh rate. You can only get 10-bit color depth via the Micro-HDMI input. The USB-C port has an 8-bit color depth limit, even if you lower the resolution and refresh rate.

The Samsung M8 doesn't support variable refresh rate technologies.

The Samsung M8's response time at the max refresh rate isn't bad, but motion still looks blurry with fast-moving objects. You can adjust the Response Time setting. Even though the three settings are all similar, leaving it on 'Standard' results in the least amount of overshoot.

The Samsung M8 Monitor doesn't support 120Hz signals.

As the Samsung M8 has a max refresh rate of 60Hz, these results are the same as at the max refresh rate.

The Samsung M8 Monitor doesn't have a backlight strobing feature to reduce persistence blur.

The backlight is completely flicker-free at all brightness levels, which helps reduce eye strain.

The Samsung M8 Monitor has low enough input lag for a responsive desktop experience as long as you're in 'Game Mode' or have the input labeled as 'PC'. You get the same low input lag if you're in 'Game Mode' with the input labeled as Blu-ray, or if you're outside of 'Game Mode' with the input labeled as 'PC'. However, the input lag increases once you're out of 'Game Mode' with the input labeled as something else, causing noticeable delay. For the best monitor experience, leave it in 'Game Mode' with the input as 'PC' for low input lag and clear text.

The 32 inch screen still maintains a high pixel density thanks to the 4k resolution. The larger Samsung Smart Monitor M7 S43BM70 has the same native resolution, resulting in a much lower pixel density.

The Samsung M8 works well with the PS5 for games up to 60 fps. It automatically switches into 'Game Mode' when you start playing a game.

The Samsung M8 Monitor works as expected with the Xbox Series X for games under 60 fps. Like with the PS5, it has an Auto Low Latency Mode that automatically switches the monitor into Game Mode for low input lag.

The Samsung M8 comes with a Micro-HDMI to HDMI cable, so you don't have to worry about getting an adapter if your device uses HDMI.

One of the USB-C inputs supports DisplayPort Alt Mode, which allows you to display an image from a compatible device and charge at the same time. The other USB-C input is for data transfers only. There's a USB-C Preference setting with 'High Resolution' and 'High Data Speed' options, which allows you to choose the USB bandwidth for a higher resolution or faster data transfer.

The Samsung M8 works with recent MacBooks, but it doesn't support HDR. Other than that, everything works, and windows return to their correct positions when waking up from sleep.

The Samsung M8 is a smart monitor with a lot more features than most monitors. It comes with the Tizen smart platform like on Samsung TVs, which is user-friendly and has a ton of apps available to download. This means that you don't even need to connect a PC to stream your favorite content and you can treat the monitor as a small TV, but without a tuner. You can even connect your mouse and keyboard directly to the monitor and use the built-in web browser or Microsoft 365 apps. You can choose between the Alexa and Bixby voice assistant features, and you can use them to control Samsung products in your household. You can learn more about all of Samsung's extra features in the Samsung QN90B QLED TV review.

It has an option for Picture-by-Picture called Multi-View but it's not for two external sources as you can only display content from your PC along with the webcam's image or a smart app. It's not that convenient either because if you want to change anything on the native apps you need to open them in full-screen mode then go back to Multi-View, so it's not a real Picture-by-Picture mode.

It has a detachable webcam that connects to the back of the monitor with the proprietary connection. The video quality isn't bad, but the microphone sounds terrible. You can see an example here. The webcam has a few extra features too, like auto-zoom that centers you in the frame when you move around, but that only works with certain apps, and there's a privacy cover.

The speakers aren't anything special, which is what you expect for built-in monitor speakers. They're not nearly as good as the speakers on the Apple Studio Display; they don't produce any bass, and they don't get loud, though they're fine for listening to dialogue. You can see the results below:

• Frequency Response Plot
• Dynamic Range Compression Plot
• Max Volume: 77 dB SPL
• Standard Error @ Normal Vol. (65 dB): 3.5 dB
• Slope @ Normal Vol. (65 dB):
0.2
• Bass Extension (Low-Frequency Ext.): 217 Hz
• Treble Extension (High-Frequency Extension): 11 kHz
• Dynamic Range Compression @Max Vol.: 1.5 dB
• Final Score: 8.4

The Samsung M8 has many more settings than most monitors as it's similar to Samsung TVs. You can learn more about the settings on Samsungs with the Samsung QN90B QLED settings page.