The Samsung Odyssey G6 is an excellent, top-flight gaming monitor with Smart TV functionality that feels caught in an identity crisis. A superlative gaming monitor pulled from the ranks of Samsung’s excellent Odyssey range, its other half, its Smart TV functionality, is a bit of an anchor around its neck. The Odyssey G6’s Smart TV functionality is like meeting someone with a winning personality, who is in possession of a single really annoying trait.
Setup
A moment to be completely candid: I absolutely hated the set-up process for the Samsung G6 gaming monitor. Where what I would consider to be a normal monitor requires little more setup than taking it out of the box and plugging it in, the G6 is content to waste 15 minutes of your time for absolutely no reason at all.
Well, there is a reason. It would very much like to install an app on your phone that gobbles up all sweet, valuable personal data so it can serve you ads on the very monitor you’re trying to set up.
Upon power up, the G6 presents you with a bright blue screen that has a QR code on it. You scan this QR code with your phone, which asks you to install the Samsung Smart Things app onto said phone. Naming any part of this process Smart Things seems like a contradiction in terms, but ok, I’ll go with it. What follows is minutes on end of pure UX gore. The questions keep coming. Would you like to set up an account? Would you like to connect a set-top box? Bluetooth? Your wifi? Please agree to three different screens of privacy declarations (and no, you can’t opt out of the marketing emails). Can we have your exact location? Can we send you push notifications? You said no to a few of these questions, so we’re going to ask you again.
When the G6 finally acquiesced to letting me use it, it did not deposit me onto my desktop, as one might hope. No, it took me to a Smart TV interface that deliberately obscures where the HDMI channels are. I had to fumble about with the included remote to get back to my computer. And then, because it hadn’t imposed itself enough on me, it routed all of the sound on my PC through its speakers.
To say it made a bad first impression truly undersells how frustrated it made me. Thankfully, relations improved significantly after that.
Smarty pants
As I’ve said, the Samsung Odyssey G6 is a fantastic gaming monitor in and of itself. It comes in a 27-inch and 32-inch sizes. Its curved screen and desktop-hogging assembly resemble the equally excellent Odyssey Neo G8 and silly-huge Odyssey Ark 55″. It’s a QLED screen capable of displaying up to 4K resolution at a maximum refresh rate of 240Hz with a 1 ms response time and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro functionality. DisplayHDR 600 opens the screen’s HDR colour capabilities to an insanely wide gamut. To 1000R curvature of the monitor feels like it envelops your field of vision, dropping that grip on reality down to a good 5-6%, a solid indicator of a good monitor. It builds Samsung’s Game Bar into the feature set, letting you quickly adjust the monitor’s settings to your liking (and minimise any unwanted post-processing). The stand swivels and tilts to allow you a large range of movement and customisation, in case you’re fitting it into a larger monitor array. If you’re craving an ultrawide without spending the extra on an ultrawide, simply tell the Odyssey G6 that you’d like it to display in ultrawide mode and it will shift the image to a 21:9 aspect ratio, mimicking its wider cousins. There’s even a light on the back that, when set up, changes colour to match what’s on the screen, creating a kind of shifting ambient backlight. It’s … fine. I can probably live without that feature, if I’m honest.
The results in-game are as fantastic as the spec sheet suggests. The panel is bright and crisp, able to handle fast-motion gameplay without ghosting or artifacts. It’s as lovely to look at when playing a fast-paced shooter as it is when playing a racing game, or low-fi indie. It’s that wonderful grade of high-end monitor that helps all your games look and perform their best. It also looks extremely cool on the desk, despite its oversized footprint.
The G6’s built-in suite of image customisation options is similarly beyond reproach, featuring hundreds of levers that allow you to tweak the display to your liking. There are plenty of presets for those that don’t want to mess around and just want instant performance, and tweakers are free to get lost in the menus, nudging the various colour, brightness and contrast bars in different directions until the picture is perfect.
With the exception of the aforementioned setup, everything else about using the monitor is a breeze and a delight to use.
Final thoughts
While friend of the site Alice Clarke found the Odyssey Ark 55″ to be a bit silly for her tastes, I feel the G6 Odyssey gives it a certain clarity. The Odyssey Ark knows what it is, at heart — a TV. A TV for insane people, certainly, but a TV nevertheless. The Neo G8 knows that it is a gaming monitor, and that its job is to be a fantastic one, a goal it handily achieves. The G6 Odyssey feels caught somewhere between the two, neither a fish nor a fowl.
I’m having real trouble imagining the person that the Samsung Odyssey G6 gaming monitor is for. People who are looking for a small smart TV aren’t likely to want to pay $AU1,100 for it, no matter how flash it is. They’re also probably not looking for something curved. Gamers will be interested in the ability to tweak its settings to taste, but the Smart TV component will (for most) probably go unused. For all but the most dedicated variety streamer that hops frequently between their PC and console for game streaming, who else will make the most of its full feature set? PC players won’t need it because their PC already does everything the Smart TV functionality exists to do. Console players are in a similar boat, and they can enjoy the content the Smart TV functionality provides from the comfort of their couch on a much bigger screen than this.
If you’re on the hunt for an all-in-one monitor, the Samsung Odyssey G6 is easy to recommend. For everyone else, and I suspect that’s probably most of you reading this review, I have to imagine it’s going to be a harder sell. Viewed as the gaming monitor it sets out to be, it is an excellent, confident panel with a handful of very annoying personality traits that keep slipping through.
Review conducted on a loaned retail unit provided by the manufacturer. You can find out more about the Odyssey G6 on the Samsung Australia website.
Leave a Reply