Samsung - Odyssey Neo G7 43" Mini 4K UHD 1ms AMD FreeSync Premium Pro Smart Gaming Monitor with HDR600 - Black

This monitor is actually craaazy value for the price. I am someone who has a $2,000+ OLED tv so I’m not clueless on what a nice display look like. This monitor is super bright, amazing colors, deep blacks/contrast, crisp 4K, 144hz…. and it’s HUGE to top it all off. This is seriously the best deal for a monitor I’ve ever seen. I cant believe there are 28 inch monitors more expensive than this. Buy it. You won’t be disappointed.

I’ve spent a lot of time worrying that my choice to buy this was foolish… or at least I did based on reviews completed by people who have no clue what they were doing. I say that because this monitor rocks. 1: Its menu is not slow. 2: it runs fine ar 144hz via displayport… IF you use a rates cable. If it flickers and drops your cable is not fast enough for 10 bit, 4k at 144hz. I suspect many people whining about that exact issue simply reused old DP cables rather than one that came with the device or a new one rated for 8k. The mini led backlights are superb and there is minimal blooming (see pics) assuming you soent five minutes A: calibrating HDR and B: calibrating your brightness/contrast. The set doesnt smear in real world use unless you are scrolling solid black on a solid white background. Avoid setting the response to fastest, just use faster. The device WILL remmeber the last input you used and gives your pc a minute to boot before dropping to the main menu. You can also rearrange the main menu so PC input is the first choice. Now, nitpicks… yes you should use a remote to turn this on and off. You can use the included one, the smart things app on your phone ir buy a smart remote clone for ten bucks. I always manually turn my home monitors on/off so I didnt see a problem here. Thats personal preference though. Colors… it did take some slight calibration out of the box to maximize black levels and colors. It was pretty saturated by default. I did 90% of the calibration using geforce image settings and the rest in the game mode menu as that was the only way to drop blacks far enough without crush. Currently I have no black crush. It does do 600 in HDR settings with ease. Finally, I was worried it would be far to large. To my relief, at my normal distance of about 3.5 - 4ft, its perfect. Any closer would be rough on my eyes. though. So, if you’re on the fence, give this a try. Just make sure you use good cables because the 2k monitor you had did NOT come with a high spec DP cable. FYI, I am pushing this with a 4090 for anyone wondering, and this plays well with vrr.

TLDR; IF this monitor would work like a PC monitor when connected via Display Port, it would be awesome. But sadly in most cases, it fails to meet the advertised claims in installations and acts like a TV instead. This particular model states 4K @ 100Hz - 144Hz via DP. And this is great since I didn't need to opt for the more expensive model with the HDMI 2.1 port. And when you first connect it, it works as expected. However, the G7 fails to recognize the connection to the PC once you either lock your computer or the power management attempts to put the displays to sleep. Multiple attempts to reset the monitor via the OSD's connection selector as well as power cycling the monitor DO NOT resolve the issue. The screen times out and goes into standby. Pulling the DP does reset the connection but this is not a solution. Power cycling the computer will also bring it back to life, but if you're in the middle of editing or any other task, this is also no solution. I've got an open ticket with Samsung Business support on the issue but during the call, the rep indicated via conversations with an engineer in her office that the port is passive. So this tells me that the G7 is not properly reporting EDID so the GPU knows what it is talking to on the display side. My system: i7 9900K, RTX 2080 Monitors: Samsung 43" Odyssey Neo G7 (DP), LG 32" 4K (DP), EVE 27" Spectrum (DP) Odyssey Firmware: 1520.9 The included DP cable results in a Generic Display @ 60Hz. Nvidia Control panel was unable to identify the monitor at all. I've used a VESA certified DP1.4 cable from KabelDirekt, not super expensive but they are listed on VESA's cert page. And the system recognizes the monitor correctly and allows for advertised refresh rates 100Hz, 120Hz and 144Hz to be set without issue. Again, this results in the monitor becoming unresponsive once the system is either locked or the displays are allowed to sleep. I also tried with VESA certified HDMI. The monitor works as expected during sleep and lock scenarios but was unable to meet the advertised refresh rate due to this model missing the high end HDMI port. I also spoke to an engineer over at EVGA and he ran through some troubleshooting steps and pointed out that the NVIDIA control panel was even set to aggressively detect TV's and even with that, this display fails to function on the port it's advertised for. His final thought was that Samsung is not providing the correct protocol on the Display Port for sleep scenarios and this causes the display to stop listening on that input. If you want to follow the ticket; you can look up 'g7 monitor not detecting displayport' online. I really want to like this monitor but honestly, if they do not do anything to resolve this issue, I feel like I've been a victim of false advertising since I cannot use this as it was sold to me; a 4K display running 144Hz.