Samsung Odyssey G80SD

Originally published 14 August 2024, last updated 24 August 2024 (addition of ambient lighting black depth measurements)

Introduction

The Samsung Odyssey G80SD offers a familiar 32″ screen size, 3840 x 2160 “4K” resolution and 240Hz refresh rate as we’ve seen on many competing QD-OLED models already released in this sector (e.g. from Asus, MSI, Dell and Gigabyte). Unique to Samsung’s model is the inclusion of a range of added Smart TV features, including integrated streaming applications, gaming hubs and other things you’d normally find in the TV space. Some decent 2x 10W integrated speakers are also offered and help position this screen as a potential all-in-one multimedia and gaming display solution. What really makes this screen unique though in this sector is its screen coating.

QD-OLED monitors have been around now for a couple of years now since early 2022, and in the last few months we’ve seen many 32″ QD-OLED monitors released to market with a 3840 x 2160 “4K” resolution and a 240Hz refresh rate. One thing that all of these QD-OLED monitors have had in common, from the early 34″ ultrawide models, to the super-ultrawide 49″ models, and more recently to their 27″ 360Hz and 32″ 240Hz models – is their screen coating. They’ve all had a standard coating from the panel manufacturer Samsung Display, which we like to refer to as “semi-glossy”. It’s glossier and clearer in appearance than a typical matte anti-glare monitor coating, but has an anti-reflective film applied to it which helps reduce reflections and glare somewhat. It’s a popular coating choice in the OLED market and provides a sharp, clear and clean looking image.

That trend of only semi-glossy QD-OLED panels is now coming to an end, as Samsung Electronics (the monitor manufacturer as opposed to the panel manufacturer) are introducing several new QD-OLED monitors with an added matte anti-glare coating finish. There’s models in 27″ and 49″ being released, but we have with us what is arguably the most interesting of the bunch which is their 32″ model, the Odyssey G80SD. At first glance it might seem like a strange choice to add a matte anti-glare coating to these panels, although Samsung have also done this in the TV space too. We’ll consider what impact this new anti-glare coating has on image quality, clarity, reflection handling and black depth, including importantly whether it helps reduce a long-standing challenge with raised blacks on this technology.

Let’s see how it performs in our testing, whether the new coating is any good, whether the Smart TV functions are worth having and how it compares to the wide range of competing models already available.

Where to Buy

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Key Specs and Features

• 32″ in size (more precisely 31.5″), flat format
• 3840 x 2160 “4K” resolution
• Samsung Display QD-OLED technology panel
• Added custom matte anti-glare (AG) coating
• 240Hz refresh rate, 0.03ms G2G rated response time
• Adaptive-sync for VRR with NVIDIA ‘G-sync Compatible’ and AMD ‘FreeSync Premium Pro’ certification
• Wide colour gamut covering 99% DCI-P3
• 1x DisplayPort 1.4 (with DSC) and 2x HDMI 2.1 video connections. Plus 2x USB data ports
• Integrated 2x 10W speakers, ARC HDMI passthrough, Bluetooth audio
• Full range of stand ergonomic adjustments with tilt, height, swivel and rotate
• Pulsating heat pipe “dynamic cooling” system
• Smart TV functions and apps including Gaming Hub, powered by NQ8 AI Gen3 processor

Design and Features

The screen has a sleek and stylish design which we liked a lot, and feels more subtle and “professional” than the more gamer-focused designs of many competing models. We think this is the smartest looking 32″ OLED available at the moment. It has a thin silver-coloured metal edge around all sides of the panel which measures ~2mm, and then a thin black panel border. The total edge is ~10mm along the sides, ~8mm along the top and ~20mm along the bottom edge. There is a small protruding “chin” on the bottom edge as you can see from the photos above but it’s fairly subtle.

The stand has a black and silver plastic arm, and a silver metal base. This is a fairly small overall footprint but provides a pretty sturdy support for the panel. The back of the screen is enclosed in a silver metal casing with a matching silver plastic section at the bottom (beneath the central ring and where the connections are located). There is an RGB lighting ring in the centre around where the stand connects with a quick release mechanism. These can be controlled or turned off via the OSD menu. A cable tidy clip is located on the back of the monitor arm too.

The connections are quite easy to access as they are located on the back of the screen, instead of being tucked out of the way. This may end up looking a little more messy though if you can see the back of your screen, as opposed to the cables being tucked away more. There are 1x DisplayPort 1.4 (with DSC) and 2x HDMI 2.1 ports provided for video, along with 2x USB data ports (plus upstream port). There are unfortunately no USB type-C connections on this model, something that is offered on many competing displays.

The OSD menu can be controlled via the joystick toggle shown on the left of the image above, or via the provided remote control in some cases. Loads more on the menu and user experience in a moment.

The stand provides a full range of tilt, height, swivel and rotate adjustments. They are all pretty smooth to operate, but the tilt and height were quite stiff to use. There is a small amount of wobble from the screen as you move it around, or when connecting devices or using the controls.

The screen does support user-updatable firmware via their built-in software. For this review we updated to the latest firmware installed V1003.3 firmware from July 15, 2024.

OSD Menu and User Experience

We had talked about these features at the end of 2023 when we reviewed their G95SC 49″ super-ultrawide OLED monitor. To be honest, we still found the user experience of this new G80SD screen confusing and frustrating. We are trying not to be overly negative about this area, but even as someone who uses and tests hundreds of different monitors, it was really quite painful to use the menus and software on this screen still.

Good news is, they’ve decided to package the screen with a black-coloured remote this time, unlike the odd white remote that came with the G95SC. The problem really comes in controlling the screen and the settings though.

As with the G95SC, one very annoying thing about the remote is that it’s very easy to accidentally press the home button which takes you away from your input and back to the Smart TV menu. It’s then several presses to get back to the input you were using. Same thing with the channel up and down buttons, if you press one of those accidentally it takes you to the streaming channels, and you have to navigate all round the menu to get back to your PC input again.

One fundamental setting in the menu is whether or not you have ‘Game mode’ enabled, it’s disabled by default which means you don’t get the quick access bar along the bottom of the screen (hold play/pause button). Thankfully you can still get in to the main OSD using the gear icon button, although it’s 4 clicks to get to the ‘all settings’ menu. You can also use the joystick toggle on the back of the screen if you want. There are some modes like the ‘graphic’ preset (the factory calibrated mode) which aren’t available when you have ‘game mode’ enabled, then other settings that are only available when you do have it enabled. When you enable game mode, adaptive-sync is turned on in the OSD menu all the time – disabling adaptive sync turns game mode off again. So if you want to use Game mode (and you do, as discussed below), but you don’t want to use VRR you will need to disable that on the graphics card side.

Oddly, it seems that when you disable Game mode, the maximum refresh rate you can select from your graphics card control panel is 120Hz, not the full 240Hz that’s available when Game mode is active! We have no idea why, but this means that surely every PC user is going to need to have Game mode enabled.

Once you’re in the menu there is a good range of settings to play with, but some of them are hidden within several layers of menu. For instance why are things like brightness and colour controls hidden within the ‘expert settings’ section of the picture menu? That means a total of 8 presses/scrolls on the joystick to get just to that one section, or 9 if you’re using the remote via the gear icon, or 15 using the game mode quick launch bar area. It just takes ages to get to the key sections you might actually want to use frequently. There’s also constant reminders when changing settings about how it might change your power consumption which get really annoying. Like, all the time. The menu graphic fills up nearly all the screen too for some reason.

There’s loads of settings, but half of the time they’re unavailable, or make very little sense. The setup and configuration of HDR is so confusing and convoluted, but we’ll talk about that more a bit later.

Another annoyance is that once you want to close the OSD menu, you can’t simply press and hold the back arrow on the remote like you would expect – doing so actually takes you back to the Smart TV home menu! You have to press the back arrow multiple times to get out of each section and close the menu. If you’re outside of Game mode and using the joystick toggle on the back of the screen you have to press and hold the button to exit the menu.

We don’t mean to be overly negative here, but many times during our testing I found myself saying out loud to myself, “this is so stupid”, or “this is so weird”. The whole interface and navigation experience needs to be better thought through and tested. At the moment it’s terribly counter-intuitive and annoying to use. This is still the same unfortunately as back in Dec 2023 when we tested the G95SC model, no changes or improvements have been made which is a huge shame. All these extra features and functions are nice to have, but honestly we just found using the menu and trying to configure the screen painful.

Smart TV apps and Gaming Hub

The menus and navigation are all annoyances in trying to use the screen as a normal desktop PC monitor. Perhaps you will be willing to overlook these if you want a display that includes the comprehensive set of Smart TV capabilities on offer here. These are unique to this G80SD display in the 32″ OLED space, and if you’re looking for an all-in-one display for gaming, multimedia and PC use then it’s an attractive option. This could be ideal for a smaller office or bedroom where you don’t have space for an extra TV. The screen itself provides excellent OLED picture quality too, so it’s really nice to be able to make use of that away from PC applications.

We won’t go in to loads of detail about the Smart TV features as it really starts to get away from the main testing of the monitor but we will mention some of what’s included:

• Gaming Hub provides instant access to your favorite streaming platforms and gaming consoles, without downloads. Responsive gameplay is powered up by Samsung’s advanced NQ8 AI Gen3 processor, which enables AI upscaling to nearly 4K for more immersive experiences, even when streaming games (available in some regions only).
• Smart TV streaming apps are available as you’d expect, like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ etc. When using the Smart TV apps you can also make use of the NQ8 AI Gen3 processor which leverages AI to sharpen and smooth out the motion of objects and text. You can also use their Active Voice Amplifier Pro technology which uses AI to analyze your background noise and enhance voices with advanced audio processing. So now it’s easier to hear dialogue in your favorite content, like movies and live sports

Panel Coating

This is the first time we’ve seen a new coating finish on a QD-OLED monitor, with Samsung Electronics (the display manufacturer) adding a custom matte anti-glare coating on top of the panel’s standard semi-glossy finish that comes from Samsung Display. It’s the monitor manufacturer who are adding this customer finish, just like they have done on some of their QD-OLED TV’s.

Grain level and picture clarity

This new coating showed very low levels of visible grain, and comparing several screens side-by-side we would rate it to look visually similar to a modern IPS LCD’s “light” anti-glare coating. It’s a little less grainy and is cleaner looking than the WOLED technology panels, including the recent 32″ models using those panels like the LG 32GS95UE and Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDP. It’s a minor difference, but the coating finish looks a bit smoother and clearer here visually.

We published an article comparing all the different OLED panel coatings in June, and if we add this matte AG coated QD-OLED monitor in to that ranking system we would have the following:

Image clarity ranking (best to worst)
1	Semi-glossy QD-OLED monitor
	Glossy WOLED TV
	Gorilla glass glossy WOLED monitor
2	Native glossy WOLED monitor
3	Matte AG coated QD-OLED monitor
4	Matte AG coated WOLED monitor

It’s not as clear and clean looking at the image from the glossier panel options as it’s got this added anti-glare layer applied, but the image doesn’t look grainy at all and is marginally cleaner than the AG coated WOLED models.

Reflection handling

We carried out a range of visual tests in a light-controlled environment to see how the new coating handles reflections and glare. Compared with a normal semi-glossy QD-OLED panel the reflection handling was improved, and it showed less reflections than you might see on those panels, especially in more well-lit rooms or where you have a light source like a lamp or window facing the screen. Samsung say that the screen is 54% less glossy than the conventional anti-reflective film applied to QD-OLED panels.

It’s also a little better at handling reflections than the matte coated WOLED panels which was pleasing. It does a really good job of handling reflections and glare and we were impressed with its performance. If we add this panel coating in to our wider comparison, we get the following ranking:

Reflection handling ranking (best to worst)
1	Matte AG coated QD-OLED monitor
2	Matte AG coated WOLED monitor
3	Semi-glossy QD-OLED monitor
4	Gorilla glass glossy WOLED monitor
5	Native glossy WOLED monitor
6	Glossy WOLED TV

Ambient light handling and black depth

One of the key benefits of an OLED panel is the fact it is capable of generating true blacks and a basically infinite contrast ratio. Each pixel can be fully turned off individually, and there’s no need for backlight local dimming here like there is on LCD’s. As a result, the black depth and contrast ratio can surpass all LCD panel technologies including VA panels by a long way. Blacks look inky and deep, and you get local contrast between different areas of an image.

Your ambient lighting will have some impact on perceived contrast ratio as it does with all screens, although this is more noticeable on QD-OLED panels than it is on competing WOLED options. In brighter rooms there is a fairly noticeable issue with raised blacks due to the panel structure and the fact that a polarizer is not used. The ambient lighting can cause inadvertent activation of the Quantum Dot layer, and blacks can start to look more grey. We studied the impact of this in detail in our article here if you want to know more. In darker rooms or where you can more carefully control your light sources, it is not a major problem, but competing WOLED panels do fare better.

Comparing the new matte AG coating against a traditional semi-glossy QD-OLED panel showed there was still an issue with raised blacks. The addition of the matte AG coating doesn’t magically fix this underlying challenge with the panel structure. With a light source in front of the screen, the blacks still turn grey in colour and looks very similar overall to the traditional semi-glossy coating. Visually in person they looked very similar side by side, although the matte AG coating did diffuse the light more across the screen which reduced reflections and glare.

In the same test situation we compared the new matte AG coated QD-OLED panel against a matte WOLED panel and you can see the drastic difference in how they handle external light sources side by side and how black depth is retained much better on the WOLED panel.

Using our objective measurement approach explained in our article here, if we look at the two different QD-OLED panels we can see that the matte AG coating has a small negative impact on perceived black depth as your ambient light increases. The coating definitely helps with reflection handling and glare as we talked about earlier, so that should certainly be considered as well. But the matte AG coating diffuses the light a little more, resulting in a slightly worse black depth. For a very bright room there is an 8% difference in black depth between the two coating approaches, although but in those situations there is far more risk of glare and reflections. Those can be even more distracting than a small loss of black depth in well-lit rooms. For more modestly lit rooms, before the glare and reflections becomes an issue, the two coating approaches are very similar when it comes to black depth retention.

Here’s a graph showing all six of the OLED panel coating options currently available. We compare all of these a lot more in our other article here. One obvious difference here is how much better all the WOLED panels are at handling ambient light sources than the QD-OLED panels. In a dark room there’s no observable differences but when you start introducing external light the differences become increasingly more apparent. The WOLED panels all look blacker and darker than the QD-OLED panel, especially in well-lit rooms.

Black depth retention ranking (best to worst)
1	Glossy WOLED TV
2	Native glossy WOLED monitor
3	Gorilla glass glossy WOLED monitor
4	Matte AG coated WOLED monitor
5	Semi-glossy QD-OLED monitor
6	Matte AG coated QD-OLED monitor

Here’s a summary of the black depth retention for each OLED panel coating. There’s loads more comparisons and detail in our articles linked below.

• Related content: The OLED Black Depth Lie – When Panel Type and Coating Matters
• Related content: Glossy vs Matte – OLED Panel Coatings Compared, Including the Asus ROG Strix XG27AQDMG

Brightness and Contrast

Out of the box the screen operates with a uniform brightness in SDR mode with consistent luminance measured regardless of the content being shown or the size of your windows. You thankfully don’t get any annoying ABL dimming like you do on some screens, although all these modern 32″ models we’ve tested so far all have this same uniform brightness behaviour available. The screen can reach up to ~260 nits maximum which is broadly similar to other competing models we’ve tested so far, although slightly lower by around 20 nits than some. The brightness was consistent in Windows desktop and in test patterns, and the logo brightness adjustment OLED care feature didn’t seem to have any noticeable impact on these measurements either.

We’ve also provided settings here for achieving common 200, 150 and 120 nits luminance, each of which shows this same uniform brightness behaviour. You can reach down to a luminance of 19 nits minimum too which is good and should be perfectly adequate for darker room conditions.

• Useful reading – OLED Dimming Confusion – APL, ABL, ASBL, TPC and GSR Explained

Backlight or Panel Flicker

Flicker
Flicker free verified
PWM / flicker frequency	n/a

Like most OLED screens there is a minor fluctuation of the backlight, and in this case it operates in sync with the refresh rate, whatever you have that set at. Above it’s operating at 240Hz so there’s a small fluctuation every ~4.17ms. You can see on the graph above that the 0V would be an “off” state, so the amplitude of this fluctuation is minor, and does not produce any visible flickering or anything like that in practice. It’s not the same as PWM on an LCD monitor where the backlight is rapidly switched fully off and on when trying to dim the brightness level. Obviously being an OLED panel there is no backlight here anyway, and this minor fluctuation didn’t cause us any problems in real use and would be considered flicker free.

Default Setup

The screen comes out of the box with the ‘Game mode’ disabled, and with the screen in it’s ‘ECO’ preset mode. This same ‘ECO’ mode exists when you have Game mode enabled anyway, and behaves exactly the same. With Game mode off you can only chose from 3 preset modes which are ECO, Graphic and Entertain. The Graphic mode apparently carries the factory calibration, according to the screen’s built-in calibration report, so we will test that in a moment too for completeness, although as we said earlier it seems the screen is restricted to 120Hz when you have Game mode disabled, so that is surely a bit pointless. The ‘Entertain’ mode is much cooler and bluer in appearance.

In the ECO mode gamma was good overall at 2.22 average, although it was too high in the darkest grey shades which leads to compressing of those shades and some loss in shadow detail. Using this SDR black sample test the first box we could just about make out was number 5 which is moderate, and fairly typical for OLED monitors. Bumping the “shadow detail” setting in the OSD menu up a few notches to 3 – 5 helped further and can help bring out more of that detail.

The RGB balance was pretty good, although the red channel was a bit low and this resulted in a slightly too cool colour temp at 6722K white point (3% deviance from our target).

In the top left hand CIE diagram you can see that the screen has a very wide native gamut thanks to the use of Quantum Dot coating, extending far beyond the sRGB reference space and reaching a very large 137.5% relative coverage. There was a lot of over-coverage in red and green shades in particular, leading to a very saturated and vivid image. Because the colour gamut was so wide, the accuracy of sRGB colours was of course pretty poor, with a dE average of 4.1 measured. That’s to be expected when you view sRGB / SDR content on a wide gamut screen and is normal.

From the bottom section we can see that the colour space also extends a small way beyond the DCI-P3 reference but matches it pretty well. We had a 109.7% relative coverage of DCI-P3 here, but with the panel’s colour space now more closely matching the reference space, the colour accuracy of P3 colours was better, with a 1.7 dE average measured which was good. There’s also a wide coverage of the Adobe RGB space available (97.8%) which means that if you’ve got the means to profile the screen to that colour space, you could use this panel for colour critical or photography work in the Adobe RGB gamut nicely. There is no provided emulation mode though for Adobe RGB in the menu.

Factory Calibration

There is also a factory calibrated mode, but as we’d commented on when we tested the 49″ G95SC model this is frankly stupid. According to the OSD menu section which reports the factory calibration result, the calibration is applicable to the ‘Graphic’ preset mode. Absurdly you can only get to this mode when disabling Game mode which then seems to restrict your maximum refresh rate to 120Hz. It’s not even a selectable preset mode otherwise, even though there are loads of others, and who is going to want to live with that refresh rate limitation?

Oh, and on that note you can’t even get to the preset modes within the ‘Game mode’ operation from the main OSD, only from the Game Mode quick launch bar that’s accessible using the remote control. So you can’t get to them using the OSD controller joystick at all! We’d hoped some of this mess had been cleared up since we reviewed the G95SC in Dec 2023 but clearly not.

Thankfully this mode isn’t really needed anyway as the setup is largely the same as the default ECO mode we’d tested before (available regardless of whether you have Game mode enabled or not). Very similar gamma, colour temp, greyscale and colour accuracy. This supposed factory calibration mode doesn’t seem to offer any real benefits over the Eco mode and is not really worth using when you have to have Game mode disabled to find it.

sRGB Emulation

Samsung have made it easy to switch to an sRGB emulation mode for occasions where you want to work with SDR content and get a more accurate setup and colour performance for that usage. There’s a ‘colour space setting’ option in the OSD menu (quite deep within the menu of course) with options for auto, normal, native and custom available. You still retain access to other controls like brightness, colour temp, gamma etc when you change this setting too, so it’s not a locked down mode like these are on some monitors.

The ‘auto’ mode will give you emulation of the sRGB colour space from Windows, so we measured that mode:

The gamma was now a bit lower than before, measured at 2.13 average but the high peak we’d seen near black before was gone now. Shadow detail improved slightly as a result. We still had a very similar greyscale colour temp, white point and greyscale accuracy to before which is not surprising as all we’ve done is change the colour space setting.

There are improvements though in the colour space and colour accuracy section for sRGB content. You can see on the left that the colour gamut of the panel has been reasonably well clamped back to the sRGB reference, but going too far in red shades especially. You will see the most significant visual change here in reds compared with the native gamut mode. The colour space has however been over-clamped here, giving us a 90.8% absolute coverage. This had certainly cut down on the large over-saturation and over-coverage we had before but was a bit too aggressive and resulted in under-saturated colours.

We did also try the ‘normal’ and ‘custom’ colour space modes in the menu, the latter of which is locked to ‘BT.709’ in the menu when you use it. Oddly these take the clamping even further, resulting in around 81.5% sRGB coverage. We’re not sure what these are supposed to be doing, but they don’t seem to be of much value. Stick with ‘auto’ for the sRGB emulation if you want to use that.

With the screen now operating in a smaller colour space closer to sRGB we had good accuracy of sRGB colours with an average dE of 1.6 measured. We would have liked to have seen an emulation mode provided for the Adobe RGB colour space, which is available on some competing OLED monitors in this size. The screen has a wide enough gamut to cover this, but needs clamping for more accurate mapping. You will need a calibration device to profile the screen if you want to work in that colour space.

Calibration

For calibration of the screen we turned ‘Game mode’ on and then selected the ‘ECO’ preset mode from the quick launch bar at the bottom – this is the only place you can choose between the presets when you have Game mode active. Note that we stuck with the ECO mode here as its one of only two modes (the other being ‘Standard’) which can remember different settings between SDR and HDR, so avoids you needing to change your preset mode each time you want to enable HDR. More on that later in the HDR section.

Calibration and profiling can produce some excellent results and could be useful though if you wanted to operate the screen within its native wide gamut mode, then map the colour space back to something else like sRGB or Adobe RGB for instance for colour-aware applications (e.g. Photoshop). You would need a suitable calibration device and software. In this section the screen was profiled to 2.2 gamma, 6500K colour temp and to the sRGB colour space. The screen was left in its native wide gamut mode, but this profile will be used in colour-aware applications to map back to sRGB in this instance.

Overall the calibrated results were excellent as you’d hope for gamma, colour temp, greyscale accuracy and colour accuracy. Note that we managed to achieve these results in the ECO mode (recommended to allow easier activation of HDR – explained later). For some reason when we’d calibrated in one of the other modes like ‘custom 1’, it had not been possible to fully correct the colours. Another reason to stick to the ECO mode. You can find our calibrated settings and ICC profile in our ICC profile database now.

The G80SD unfortunately does not feature support for hardware calibration, something that is offered on the competing LG 32GS95UE 32″ WOLED monitor. That is a useful feature that we’d like to see included on more high-end OLED monitors.

Best Settings Guide

Get the best settings for the Samsung Odyssey G80SD, not the easiest screen to configure and control! This guide video covers SDR and HDR modes as well as OLED care options. You can use these settings from a PC input, or equally for external devices like a games console.

Important: Since recording this video we’ve discovered that the ECO and Standard preset modes can actually remember different settings between SDR and HDR modes, so we would recommend using one of those (ECO is easier) instead of switching between the Custom 1 and Custom 2 modes. You can follow the rest of the settings within this video and just configure the ECO mode within SDR mode, and then within HDR mode. Thankfully using this mode also seems to result in the ‘peak brightness’ setting for HDR being remembered properly so you don’t have to activate that each time either.

Office and General Use

Resolution and Scaling

The fairly large screen size of 31.5″ provides a decent size upgrade from common 27″ screens, and this combined with the 3840 x 2160 “4K” resolution gives you a higher pixel density at 140 PPI. This 4K resolution is probably still a bit too high to use at native scaling (100%) for some people on a screen even of this pretty large size, although some people may find it ok. Text is small but if you’ve got good eye-sight and are up close then it’s still reasonable and does provide you then with a massive screen real estate and very sharp picture.

Other people will probably want to use operating system scaling to ensure fonts and text are a more sensible and readable size though. 150% is unnecessarily large despite being the “recommended” option detected by Windows, with 125% scaling offering a nice balance on a screen of this size we think. That gives you comfortable text size which is very similar to a 27″ 1440p screen, but does give you the equivalent desktop real-estate area of a 3072 x 1728 resolution. So that’s quite a nice jump up from common 2560 x 1440 resolution screens in this approximate size range. The extra pixel density of the 4K resolution will provide a very sharp and clear image for all uses including office and general applications. Just make sure that your software will support scaling effectively as it can sometimes be a bit difficult to get it right.

Keep in mind that not all Operating Systems and applications handle scaling the same. More recent versions of Windows tend to handle it all better, and recent versions of Mac OS are pretty solid as well. Some applications and games don’t handle scaling correctly and so you can end up with some things with very minute text and fonts and some things which don’t scale completely in every place. Keep this in mind if you’re selecting any super high resolution display as it could be an important factor. You need to ensure you have the necessary operating system and applications to handle scaling effectively for your needs. It does make life a bit more complicated than if you just ran at a native resolution and 100% scaling. If you have the necessary software and operating system then the 4K resolution provides a very sharp and crisp image though.

Sub-pixel Layout and Text Rendering

Because of the somewhat unusual triangular shaped RGB sub-pixel layout, slight text fringing has been a challenge on older QD-OLED monitors. This has been improved with the Second Generation QD-OLED panels including several we’ve reviewed in the past. The second gen panels have a slightly improved subpixel size and shape with more pixel fill, although still in the triangular RGB layout, but improving text rendering a bit as a result. We had been pleased with the results when we’d tested the second gen panels. That pixel shape improvement has carried through to these new third generation panels like that being used here on the G80SD.

Here, this updated pixel shape is also combined with the increased pixel density enabled by the 4K resolution and 140 PPI pixel density. The result is very good, and text clarity and sharpness is improved even further over the older ~110 PPI panels. It was very hard to detect issues at all with text clarity and fringing from any normal viewing position, and we tested the screen at 100%, 125% and 150% scaling levels. The combination of the updated layout and the higher pixel density and resolution seems to have almost entirely eliminated the issue and we expect this to be perfectly fine for the vast majority of people even for office and text work.

Comparing a 32″ 4K QD-OLED panel side by side with a 32″ 4K WOLED panel we felt that the text looked very slightly sharper and clearer on the QD-OLED version. It was very good on both, and we would not consider this a problem on either technology with their 4K panels, but the slight edge goes to the QD-OLED panel.

Panel Coating

The panel coating is more well suited to office environments and daytime usage than the semi-glossy coating of normal QD-OLED panels. As we talked about earlier in the review it handles reflections and glare really well, a little better than matte WOLED panels even. It does this without introducing unnecessary grain to the image, and so it remains clean and clear looking, although because of the added coating it will not look as sharp and crisp as a glossy coating. We think this is a really good coating choice though for these kind of uses.

Screen Brightness

	Brightness
Maximum brightness (SDR)	260 nits
Minimum brightness	19 nits
Uniform brightness behaviour
Flicker free

The screens brightness should be adequate for most users, reaching up to around 260 nits maximum in SDR mode with a uniform brightness behaviour. As a result that is all without the need for ABL to be used. This is great news as it ensures a consistent and stable brightness no matter the content you view, or no matter your window sizes and this is a big positive for desktop applications. The screen can’t reach as bright as LCD panels for desktop use, and is around 20 nits lower than some recent OLED screens we’ve tested, but 260 nits is still decent, and unless you need to use the screen in a very bright room it should be more than adequate. It also has a good lower adjustment range down to 19 nits if you need to use the screen in a darker room.

There are a couple of useful settings in the OSD menu within the ‘power and energy saving’ section. These include ‘brightness optimisation’ which automatically adjusts the brightness based on the ambient light level (i.e. an ambient light sensor). There’s also ‘motion lighting’ which has a motion-sensitive brightness control apparently.

Useful Features

	Features
USB type-C connectivity (DP Alt mode)
USB type-C power delivery
KVM switch
PiP and PbP support
USB data ports
Easy access USB data ports
Integrated speakers	2 x 10W
Audio output	HDMI ARC, Bluetooth
Mic input
Ambient light sensor
Motion sensor
Stand adjustments	Tilt, height, swivel and rotate
Tripod socket
Fan-less design

The Samsung includes a few extra features that might be useful in office environments, the most notable (and different to many screens in this sector) are the decent 2x 10W integrated speakers. Those are really useful for providing sound from the Smart TV functions, and when connecting external devices like a games console. They should also be useful for videos, music, alerts and other PC sounds when you need them. There is HDMI ARC support for outputting to a soundbar, although make sure you’re using HDMI from your PC to the monitor too for this. Bluetooth connections are also supported for audio although oddly Samsung don’t provide a headphone connection on this screen.

We would have liked to have seen USB type-C connectivity offered to handle single cable connectivity from laptops and other devices. That along with a KVM switch function to control two systems from a single keyboard and mouse setup have become widely available on monitors nowadays, so it’s a shame that they’re not on offer here. There is support for PiP/PbP modes through their ‘Multi View’ setting which could be useful here especially with the capability to use a TV streaming app as a mini picture within your PC desktop area for instance.

Blue Light

The native panel spectral distribution is shown above at a calibrated 6500K white point, where the blue peak is at 453nm. This means it is not outside of the Eyesafe certified range of products where there is a supposed harmful range between 415 – 455nm. There are no blue light filter options on this screen, but there is an ‘Eye Care’ setting with options for low and high. The low setting makes the image a bit warmer (5503K) and looks ok visually, but the high mode looks really washed out and pinkish in colour (4742K). The problem with these Eye Safe modes are that they are entirely locked down for all other OSD settings including brightness so this makes them pointless really. There’s the added annoyance of being warned 3 separate times from the menu that changing this setting will also change your power consumption. Yes, we know.

OLED Care and Cooling

One challenge with OLED panels in general is the inherent risk of image retention and burn-in. It’s a technology more suited to dynamic and changing content, which is why these are largely positioned as gaming and multimedia screens. There is more of a risk of image retention if you are using these screens for lots of static desktop and office use though. Display manufacturers provide a range of measures to help mitigate that risk, and maintain the panel over time.

Samsung have introduced a unique approach to cooling their monitor by using ‘Pulsating Heat Pipes’. This dynamic cooling system evaporates and condenses a coolant to diffuse heat “5 times better than older graphite sheet methods” apparently. This approach is silent in operate and avoids the need for an integrated fan which is good news.

Samsung provide just two OLED care functions in the menu, a logo dimming feature (which you can also turn off if you want) and a pixel clean/refresh cycle. This felt quite limited compared with other screens nowadays and was missing features like pixel shifter and taskbar detection that you will find on some competing 32″ models. Their website suggests that the monitor includes a ‘screensaver’ function as well, which should dim the brightness when it detects an extended period of static content. The website suggests you can turn this on and off, but we couldn’t find a setting for this anywhere in the OSD menu. Likewise the website mentions ‘taskbar’ detection but we couldn’t find this anywhere.

Warranty and Burn-in cover confusion

The Samsung US website lists a 3 year warranty period on the product page (may possibly vary by region) but there is no explicit mention of burn-in cover there. Digging in to their US warranty pages reveals the following in the ‘standard warranty – Limitations and exclusions” section:

We contacted Samsung US support to ask for clarification and confirm this was correct, but they actually told us that burn-in cover WAS included for the 3 year warranty period. They were unable to comment on why the website says something else, only apologise for the confusion.

In the UK the product page doesn’t even mention a warranty period, but digging in to the support pages reveals a 2-year monitor warranty for their OLED screens:

This is a year less than in the US for some reason. There’s no mention of burn-in cover that we could find at all, so we contacted the Samsung UK support team who confirmed that this IS apparently covered.

It should be easier than this for buyers to get proper, official information about these products. If it’s supported officially, it should be listed clearly on the product and support pages. It is promising that support are saying that it is covered, as ultimately it will be those teams you need to interact with if you ever did have a problem and wanted to claim under the warranty. It would just be a lot easier for buyers if this was clearly advertised for the product, and there was no ambiguity across different parts of their site. We’d also like to see the 2-year warranty period extended to 3 years for other regions like the UK.

Gaming

The Odyssey G80SD is heavily focused on its gaming capabilities. The screen uses a QD-OLED panel which is well-known for its near-instant response times. As a result it does not need to use overdrive technology in the same way as a desktop LCD panel would, and there aren’t any controls for the response time or overdrive in the OSD menu as they’re not needed. Samsung, like other OLED display manufacturers quote a very low 0.03ms G2G response time in their spec, and while true <1ms G2G should be expected from this technology this is a little unrealistic.

Refresh Rate and VRR

	Refresh Rate
Maximum Refresh Rate DisplayPort	240Hz
Maximum Refresh Rate USB type-C
Maximum Refresh Rate HDMI	240Hz
VRR range	48 – 240Hz
ClearMR certification tier

This year is the first time that 4K @ 240Hz has been available in the OLED segment and it’s a very attractive combination for many people. You will of course need a very powerful system and graphics card to get anywhere near 4K @ 240Hz, although you may of course want to play older games or at lower settings where this can be more achievable. There’s also plenty of future-proof room there as other system components are improved and updated over the coming years and new graphics card capabilities are developed. The 4K resolution provides a super sharp and crisp image, with more detail and clarity than lower resolution panels. It also makes the screen well-equipped to handle modern 4K gaming from PC’s and consoles.

The OLED panel provides super-deep blacks and a basically infinite contrast ratio which is of course excellent for gaming too. The per-pixel level dimming and high contrast ratio also make it well suited to HDR gaming, and we will measure HDR performance a bit later. The very wide viewing angles of this technology are also excellent and make the screen suitable for viewing from many different positions if you need. These wide viewing angles importantly include the freedom from things like the pale/white “IPS glow” that you get on darker content on that common LCD technology. There’s none of that here on the OLED panel.

	VRR capabilities and Certifications
AMD FreeSync certification	FreeSync Premium Pro
Native NVIDIA G-sync module
NVIDIA ‘G-sync Compatible’ certified
VESA ‘AdaptiveSync’ certification
HDMI-VRR (consoles via HDMI 2.1)

The screen has a native 240Hz refresh rate which is on par with a wide range of other OLED monitors on the market, including all the other 32″ models we’ve tested in recent months. This provides excellent motion clarity (demonstrated later), and can support high frame rates too, reducing overall system latency compared with lower refresh rate screens. Combined with a 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution, it’s a dream spec for many people.

To help support 3840 x 2160 @ 240Hz the screen features adaptive-sync, giving Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support for both NVIDIA and AMD systems which is great news. It’s been certified under the NVIDIA ‘G-sync Compatible’ and AMD ‘FreeSync Premium Pro’ schemes.

VRR flicker

VRR flicker is a very tricky area to quantify and measure on a monitor. All OLED panels can suffer from VRR flicker, it’s an inherent challenge with these panels. But whether or not you will experience that or see it depends on so many factors, it is hard to standardise a sensible and meaningful testing approach. Whether you will experience flicker can depend on the screen itself, your system and graphics card, the game you’re playing, the type of scene in that game, your settings, and also the frame rates you are achieving in the game. A large number of variables as you can see.

Large swings in frame rates within the VRR range seem to commonly trigger flicker though, especially in darker scenes and often on loading screens. At TFTCentral we are not keen on creating a “stress test” approach to testing VRR flicker; as just because a screen can show flicker in the most extreme scenarios and synthetic tests, doesn’t mean that it will show flicker in normal, typical situations or for your usage.

We are still exploring potential ways to measure and quantify flicker in the future in a meaningful way for our readers but even if we can standardise some testing, we clearly can’t test every scenario and game, and our system will be different to your system. We also don’t have the time and bandwidth to play lots of games around our testing and reviews, so it’s of questionable value to comment on whether we experienced VRR flicker or not. We would encourage you to read user comments when this screen is released, preferably based on the games you are going to play. Although always take feedback with the caveat that every scenario and test system will be different.

For now one standardised approach we are exploring as a starter is to use this small ‘VRR Flicker test’ application. The program creates a full-screen OpenGL context on the monitor in the desktop resolution, renders a gradient from mid grey to black and then varies the framerate up and down between 1/120th and 1/40th of a second. The unstable frame rate can cause flickering on many displays. We tested this application on the G80SD and saw some occasional flickering across the screen, and some artefacts produced in the darkest shades near black.

VRR Control setting

Samsung have introduced an additional “VRR control” feature on their screen. For some odd reason this is within the picture > expert settings section of the menu instead of within the Game section. This setting seems to eliminate flickering from testing and user experiences we’ve seen online but causes a significant increase to the input lag (measured later), as well as causing some stuttering. This same behaviour was evident on some of their older screens where it was used (like the Odyssey G7) as it seems to bypass adaptive-sync in a way which eliminates the VRR flicker, but causes other problems in doing so. We used the same VRR Flicker Test application above and confirmed that with VRR Control enabled, the flickering and artefacts we had seen before were no longer present.

However, we expect for most people the occasional VRR flicker will be less problematic than the added lag and stuttering you get by using this feature, but it’s there to experiment with if you want. You can of course always just turn off VRR altogether if you experience problems you cannot overcome, and revert to traditional vsync on/off approaches.

Gaming Features and Settings

	NVIDIA DSR / DLDSR
Support with DSC active
Support with DSC disabled	Not available
Max resolution and refresh rate supported over DisplayPort (with DSC disabled)	n/a
Max resolution and refresh rate supported over HDMI (with DSC disabled)	n/a

We tested support for NVIDIA DSR / DLDSR which can sometimes work on monitors with DSC (Display Stream Compression), but not always. We found that these technologies were not available on this screen, even if you drop down to a lower refresh rate like 60Hz or a lower resolution. There is no option to disable DSC from the menu anywhere either, so these technologies cannot be used from this display.

DSR/DLDSR is a lot less relevant on this screen anyway as it is already natively 4K, and has a high pixel density. DSR / DLDSR is more commonly aimed at use on lower resolution monitors with 1080p or 1440p resolution, where you can upscale the input image to 4K to improve sharpness and image clarity. In theory you could use it here to push beyond 4K but with the panel already offering a high resolution and density natively, its a lot less relevant. There is no benefit by the way in running the screen at a lower resolution and using DSR to upscale to 4K, you might as well just run at 4K natively which should be equally / less demanding on your system anyway.

There are a few extra settings in the OSD menu for things like ‘virtual aim point’ (crosshair), black equalizer modes, and a ‘mini map auto detection’ feature.

Response Times

As discussed in our detailed article about Response Time Testing – Pitfalls, Improvements and Updating Our Methodology we are using an improved and more accurate method for capturing G2G response times and overshoot, based on figures that are more reflective to what you see visually on the screen in real-World usage. Our article linked above talks through why this is better and how we arrived at this improved method in much more detail.

The above G2G response times are consistent at all refresh rates, including 240Hz, 120Hz and 60Hz and during VRR situations with changing frame rates. Thanks to the OLED panel the response times are super-fast and near-instant, with an average of only 0.49ms G2G measured. The best case was an incredibly impressive 0.36ms and the overall response times were as expected from an OLED panel. All transitions can keep up easily with the frame rate demands of 240Hz, and there was also no visible overshoot evident which is great news too, so overall there was nice and clean pixel transition times.

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Our thanks to the following manufacturers for support in the build of our new test system:

	AMD Ryzen 9 7950X | Buy AMD Ryzen 9 CPUs here on Amazon
	Asus ProArt B650-Creator | Buy Asus B650 motherboards here on Amazon
	Corsair DDR5 RAM | Buy here on Amazon
	Corsair H100i Elite Capellix AIO cooler | Buy Corsair coolers here on Amazon
	Corsair iCUE RGB Elite Fans | Buy here on Amazon
	NVIDIA RTX 3090 | Buy NVIDIA RTX graphics cards here on Amazon

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Motion Clarity – Pursuit Camera Photos

We captured some pursuit camera photos of the screen at a variety of refresh rates, designed to capture real-world perceived motion clarity. This gives you a good indication of how the screen looks in real use, beyond raw measurements. Let’s consider the native 240Hz refresh rate first of all:

Despite the amazing pixel response times you still get large amount of blur at 60Hz due to the sample-and-hold nature of the OLED screen, you can’t expect miracles just because it’s got fast response times. There are major and obvious benefits in motion clarity as you increase to 120Hz high refresh rate mode, and this brings it on par with 120Hz OLED screens such as the popular 42″ sized displays like the LG 42C2 and LG 42C3 TV’s, and the Asus ROG Swift PG42UQ.

Like with other 240Hz OLED screens we’ve tested, moving up to 240Hz offers another significant and noticeable improvement in motion clarity, and the moving image is now sharper and cleaner. Tracking of moving content is now much easier and clearer. This really was excellent motion clarity and very impressive. If you can push the screen up to 240fps in your games, which will be a challenge of course in many situations at 4K, you will benefit from excellent clarity and smoothness as well as improved system latency due to the higher frame rate supported. There is no overshoot or any associated artefacts or trails at any refresh rate like you might get on LCD screens which was excellent.

The motion clarity will be the same as the other 240Hz OLED monitors in the market including all the other 32″ models we’ve tested to date. This is unsurprising given they are all using 240Hz OLED panels. This motion clarity is very similar to a good 360Hz LCD panel so is very impressive.

Here’s some further comparisons of the motion clarity with other common OLED refresh rates, including the latest 360Hz QD-OLED panels which are currently available in 27″ screen size at the moment (e.g. MSI MPG 271QRX and Dell Alienware AW2725DF) and the new 480Hz-capable dual mode 32″ models (LG 32GS95UE and Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDP). The motion clarity is improved further as you move from 240Hz up to 480Hz on those models, although to benefit from this you’re going to have to be able to power very high frame rates from your system of course, but the capability is there as graphics cards and other components improve further over time and you upgrade your system. Keep in mind that the 32″ models which support the 480Hz refresh rate achieve this using their “dual-mode” feature, which necessitates dropping the resolution to 1080p as well.

Lag

Read our detailed article about input lag and the various measurement techniques which are used to evaluate this aspect of a display. The screens tested are split into two measurements which are based on our overall display lag tests and half the average G2G response time, as measured by our oscilloscope. The response time element, part of the lag you can see, is split from the overall display lag and shown on the graph as the green bar. From there, the signal processing (red bar) can be provided as a good estimation of the lag you would feel from the display. We also classify each display as follows:

Lag Classification (updated)

• Class 1) Less than 4.17ms – the equivalent to 1 frame lag of a display at 240Hz refresh rate – should be fine for gamers, even at high levels
• Class 2) A lag of 4.17 – 8.33ms – the equivalent of one to two frames at a 240Hz refresh rate – moderate lag but should be fine for many gamers. Caution advised for serious gaming
• Class 3) A lag of more than 8.33ms – the equivalent of more than 2 frames at a refresh rate of 240Hz, or 1 frame at 120Hz – Some noticeable lag in daily usage, not suitable for high end gaming

There is a nice low lag on the G80SD measured at 1.40 ms total display lag, and leaving us with ~1.28 ms of estimated signal processing lag. This is a little higher than some near-zero lag screens, but still perfectly fine for competitive gaming. This is higher at 60Hz refresh rate, measured at 7.67ms total display lag but this is common on most screens. Remember that it is the lower number (1.40ms) that will be relevant for VRR gaming as well, even where frame rates drop. The 60Hz figure is only applicable for fixed 60Hz input sources.

If you enable ‘VRR Control’ in the OSD menu to help reduce any VRR flicker, this does have a knock on impact to the lag unfortunately. Simply enabling VRR Control has no impact, but when you then enable Gsync / FreeSync from your graphics card, the lag is higher. We measured this at 8.38ms total lag when VRR Control was enabled, and VRR was active from the graphics card. Combined with a bit of stuttering you get with this mode, it’s probably best just to leave it turned off and live with a bit of VRR flicker. If that becomes too problematic, by all means experiment with this setting.

Console Gaming

The screen features offers a 4K resolution and support for high refresh rates including 4K @ 120Hz, making it very well suited to modern games consoles like the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. Samsung have included two full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports, delivering 48 Gbps speed.

The support for 4K resolution (natively here) means you can make use of HDR from the Xbox where that mode is only available at 4K, which is of course one of the key capabilities of this screen. The OLED panel with its amazing contrast and blacks comes in to its own here for HDR gaming, providing an excellent image quality and HDR experience. More on HDR in a moment.

	Console Gaming
Native panel resolution	3840 x 2160 “4K”
Maximum resolution and refresh rate supported	4K @ 120Hz
Virtual 4K support	n/a
4K at 24Hz support
4K at 50Hz support
HDMI connection version	2.1
HDMI connection bandwidth	48 Gbps
HDMI-CEC auto switch
HDMI-VRR (over HDMI 2.1)
Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM)
HDR10 support
Dolby Vision HDR support
Integrated speakers
Headphone connection	But HDMI ARC and Bluetooth supported
Ultra high speed HDMI 2.1 cable provided

We confirmed via an Xbox Series X that 4K 120Hz works fine along with HDR10 support and VRR. There is however no support for 4K 50Hz and 24Hz content which is a small potential gap. Unlike a couple of competing 32″ QD-OLED monitors available (the Dell Alienware AW3225QF and Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDM) there is no support for Dolby Vision HDR content on this screen which is a bit of a shame. HDMI-CEC is included as well to auto switch to that input when a device is powered on. There are some decent integrated speakers (2x 10W) available here which are likely to be useful for console gamers, along with HDMI ARC sound support and Bluetooth audio, although there’s oddly no sound headphone connection available from the screen itself.

HDR

Being an OLED panel, the G80SD is well equipped to handle HDR content with its per-pixel level dimming allowing for true blacks, a basically infinite contrast ratio and the avoidance of all blooming and halos. In these regards it can easily surpass any Mini LED backlit LCD monitor. However, it cannot reach the same luminance levels as Mini LED screens, and carries a “peak brightness” spec of 1000 nits, which will then also lower as the content on your screen changes and the APL increases which is normal on this technology. This is one key area where Mini LED screens can look brighter and deliver a more impactful HDR experience.

Being a QD-OLED panel it suffers from the reduced perceived black depth and contrast that are a challenge for this technology, even with the added matte AG coating on the panel. You still need to be mindful of your ambient light levels and the position of those light sources. Ideally the light sources would be behind the panel, or you’d be viewing HDR content in a very dark room.

One note is that unlike pretty much all the other modern OLED monitors, this screen has not been certified under the VESA DisplayHDR scheme for some reason. Perhaps that will follow soon.

HDR modes and Settings

To make use of HDR properly without a load of confusing configuration we would recommend using either the ECO or the Standard preset mode in the menu. These are the only two modes that will remember different screen settings properly when you switch between SDR and HDR. We have no idea why the other modes don’t do the same, it seems to be a bug with the Samsung software. If you use one of the other modes then settings you select in SDR will be retained when you enable HDR in windows. You don’t want that at all, as for instance you would have a lower brightness setting in SDR that would then cap your peak brightness in HDR, or you might be using ‘Auto’ colour space for sRGB emulation in SDR, which you don’t want for HDR. Stick to the ECO or Standard modes where settings are thankfully independent between SDR and HDR.

Here’s what happens when you enable HDR mode in Windows and what you have to do to get HDR mode configured correctly:

1. HDR mode is activated in Windows and the OSD quick launch menu for ‘Game mode’ now shows HDR “on”
2. The preset mode you were using before in SDR mode remains active, there’s no specific HDR preset modes as such. Stick to ECO or Standard for ease
3. The setting for ‘HDR tone mapping’ in the picture > expert settings menu is now available with options of ‘static’ and ‘active’ available
4. White balance menu remains accessible, and set to whatever you had it on for SDR – that’s fine really as you’d want the same D65 white point
5. Gamma is now locked to ST.2084 which is correct for HDR. An additional slider control for ST.2084 is available for manual adjustments
6. As long as you’re using the ECO or Standard preset mode, you can set a different brightness level within HDR mode than you had active in SDR mode. Bump this up to 50 for HDR.
7. There’s an additional new ‘peak brightness’ setting in the menu now, which is set to ‘off’ by default. There are settings for ‘medium’ and ‘high’ which we will test in a moment, but for HDR you’re going to want to switch to one of those modes, likely to be ‘high’ for the highest brightness. If you’re using the ECO or Standard modes then this should be remembered when you switch back and forth between SDR and HDR operation. In the other presets there seems to be a bug where this is forgotten each time you leave HDR mode.
8. Within the Game > game picture expert menu (yes, deep within the menu again!) is a newly available ‘HDR10+ gaming’ setting with options for off, basic (default) and advanced. The help text explains that “basic mode provides the most accurate representation of the game’s original creative intent. Advanced mode provides enhanced representation of game content to maximise visual impact”. We will test both in a moment.
9. There’s also an additional setting for ‘Game HDR’ with modes for off, basic and advanced again. The help text suggests this relates to HGiG support and so if your input device (e.g. a modern games console) supports it, you can leave this off.

HDR Testing

We took these measurements once we’d experimented with various settings and set the ‘ECO’ preset mode up to some optimal settings. This included the ‘natural’ colour temp, gamma left on ST.2084 (no alterations to the separate slider), brightness pushed up to maximum 50, peak brightness turned on (we measured both medium and high), contrast enhancer turned off, shadow detail at 0 and colour set at 25. We will test both HDR tone mapping options, ‘static’ and ‘active’ and a few other interesting modes.

PQ EOTF Tracking and Greyscale

Click between each tab to see results and analysis for each of the HDR modes

The static tone mapping mode follows the PQ EOTF curve closely in these tests and shows only a minor over-brightening in dark grey shades. If you switch to the ‘active’ tone mapping mode you can see significant over-brightening of the EOTF which results in an overall brighter image, but far less accurate grey shade brightness. Tonal values are crushed, you lose lots of detail in light scenes and light greys get clipped to white. It’s too far away from the intended PQ curve for our liking, more so than the bright modes offered from models like the Gigabyte AORUS FO32U2P even.

The colour temp, white point and overall greyscale accuracy was basically the same between the two modes, and using the settings we’d selected this was nice and accurate which was good news. There is flexibility to change the colour temp settings if you want.

Shadow detail was measured using a 256 step greyscale HDR test pattern in a fully dark room, where the first barely visible RGB greyscale shade was noted. Note that you can’t use SDR test patterns for this in HDR mode. The first visible greyscale box with static tone mapping mode was RGB 5 which was moderate. That could be improved a little to RGB 3 which is very good, if you use the Shadow Detail control. If you were to use the ‘active tone mapping’ mode then you can just see RGB 4 normally, or just about make out RGB 2 if you bump up the Shadow Detail to max.

Measuring the luminance accuracy across a full range of APL areas reveals familiar behaviour for a QD-OLED panel. With ‘static’ tone mapping and with peak brightness set to ‘high’ the panel can reach the highest peak white luminance for smaller APL’s. As the APL area increases, the tracking of the EOTF becomes less accurate though, and you get a significant roll-off of light grey shades where you can see the grey measurement line dips below the yellow target line a lot for the 50% and 100% APL examples. We’ve seen this same behaviour on other 32″ QD-OLED monitors, and in practice this has a direct impact on real-scene brightness. We will look at that more in a moment, but we can see that in this mode (static tone mapping / peak brightness high), the luminance is lower than it should be for the larger APL areas. This mode behaves very similarly to the ‘peak 1000’ modes you will see on other QD-OLED monitors.

If we change the peak brightness setting to ‘medium’ (still with static tone mapping) this mode behaves more like the ‘True Black 400’ modes you see on other monitors. The PQ EOTF tracking is overall more accurate across the APL range, without the major drop-off in light grey shades that we saw in the ‘high’ mode. However this mode doesn’t reach as high for peak white luminance and is capped to a much lower peak brightness. We will compare the HDR brightness between the medium and high modes in a moment. In this medium mode, the EOTF tracking shows a little more over-brightening in the darker grey shades than in the ‘high’ mode, but it’s minor.

If you were to use the Active tone mapping mode you can see the significant over-brightening of basically all the grey shades, by huge amounts especially for the smaller APL areas. This leads to loss of light grey tonal values, clipping to white and impacts the overall image. It looks brighter, but its not accurate at all.

Colour Accuracy

Changing the tone mapping modes had no impact on this area and we had a reasonable colour accuracy for Rec.2020 HDR colours with a dE average of 2.6 measured. These same results for colour accuracy are relevant for the different tone mapping and peak brightness modes.

HDR Brightness

We have compared several different areas of brightness here between the two tone mapping modes. See the expandable explanation section if you are unsure what any of this data means or how it’s calculated.

The common peak white luminance measurements are included here. You can see that it is the peak brightness setting in the menu which impacts the measurements here, regardless of the tone mapping mode used. With peak brightness set to ‘high’ the panel is capable of reaching the advertised 1000 nits peak brightness, reaching 1009 nits in our measurements for the smallest APL areas. As usual, this drops off as APL increases. There’s no real difference in white luminance between the static and active tone mapping modes, but there is in other HDR brightness measurements which we will go through in a moment – a reflection of the varying PQ EOTF tracking we looked at a minute ago. If you lower the peak brightness setting to ‘medium’ the maximum luminance is capped significantly, down to 509 nits peak.

If we then look at the average greyscale luminance graph this provides a more relevant indication of real-world brightness in normal HDR content. The two ‘active’ tone mapping modes reach higher luminance here but it’s at the cost of accuracy, and you lose a lot of the light grey shades to white which reduces lighter detail and tonal values. We wouldn’t recommend using ‘active’ tone mapping really. You can see though that in the ‘static’ mode, the ‘medium’ peak brightness setting (akin to ‘True Black 400’ mode) can look brighter than the ‘high’ mode (akin to Peak 1000 modes) in many situations because it has a more accurate EOTF tracking. This is a similar trend to what we saw with other QD-OLED monitors. You may want to experiment with these modes to see which you prefer in practice.

Samsung have provided a “brightness boost”-type mode to try and offer a brighter experience in the ‘high’ setting, and that’s available using the active tone mapping option. However, it feels too aggressive to us and leads to significant inaccuracy in the EOTF, more so than models like the Gigabyte AORUS FO32U2P which offered a brighter HDR mode too. It’s taking things a bit too far, although you may still want to experiment with it for your content and uses.

Conclusion

The Samsung Odyssey G80SD is a very good screen in many areas and offers some excellent performance, although we hate to say it, but we couldn’t help that it was let down somewhat by the software and user experience. There’s quite a few features that set this screen apart from the competition that we should talk about.

The screen coating is a significant change from all the other QD-OLED monitors released to date. The added matte anti-glare coating does an excellent job of handling reflections and glare, far better of course than the normal semi-glossy QD-OLED panels and actually better than standard matte AG coatings like those on WOLED alternatives or typical LCD monitors. It achieves this without introducing any noticeable grain which is excellent news, so the image still looks clear and sharp.

The Smart TV features, built-in streaming apps and Gaming Hub may be really useful to some people, especially if you want a hybrid TV and monitor cross-over, without needing to get a massive TV-sized display. These are unique to Samsung’s screen at the moment in OLED monitor segment and could be considered a significant value-add. We welcome their inclusion, but the problem comes in that the software needed to run a screen like this is pretty awful. It’s hard to navigate and use, the menu system is unintuitive, options are many clicks away and the user setup is really difficult to get right. Thankfully we have you covered there with our Best Settings Guide which will hopefully help a lot. We continue to really dislike the software on these Samsung monitors to be honest, and would really like to see the user experience improved.

We liked the professional and premium design of this model, and the included remote control is a useful extra. Decent integrated speakers are rare in this market, and these could be useful to those who want to use the built in TV apps, or connect an external device to the screen. It seemed a bit odd though to not then include a headphone connection here. Other modern monitor features like USB type-C and KVM switch were notable by their absence but not everyone needs those.

Default setup was pretty good, although the factory calibration was basically pointless. There was a flexible and reasonable sRGB emulation mode too, although it wasn’t as accurate as we would like for colour space clamping. This could have been a bit better. Text clarity was very good thanks to the gen 3 QD-OLED panel and high pixel density, and the uniform brightness behaviour for SDR was very welcome. OLED Care features seemed to be a bit limited, despite some being mentioned on the product page but absent in the OSD menu. It seems that Samsung do include burn-in warranty which is great news, although we want to see clearer and more transparent confirmation of this on their website and support pages.

For gaming you get the usual amazing response times and motion clarity you’d expect from an OLED screen, and the 4K 240Hz combination is excellent. Input lag was nice and low and console support was decent. HDR performance was similar to other QD-OLED monitors, although can be a bit fiddly to get set up. The peak brightness mode was darker than intended in many cases which is a shame, but typical for this segment. Samsung have provided a way to boost brightness by using the ‘active tone mapping’ mode which might be useful, but it was very inaccurate and pushed this a bit too far for our liking, more so than on some competing screens. Still, it’s at least there as an option for some people. The OLED panel remains well-suited to HDR content thanks to its excellent black depth, contrast and per-pixel level dimming.

Where to Buy

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The Odyssey G80SD retails at the time of writing for ~$1200 USD which places it around $100 less than alternative popular 32″ QD-OLED models like the Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDM and Gigabyte AORUS FO32U2P. It is however more expensive than the MSI MPG 321URX which has a very aggressive price point of $949 USD if you can find it available. If you are keen on the Smart TV features and extras, or want a QD-OLED monitor that is more suited to more well-lit rooms and daytime use thanks to its added coating, this is definitely worth considering.

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