Samsung Odyssey OLED G6, The First 500Hz OLED Gaming Monitor, Is Now Available
Samsung is laying claim to the world's first OLED gaming monitor to sport a blistering 500Hz refresh rate, and if that's the kind of thing you've been waiting for, it's now available to purchase. The caveat is that it doesn't come cheap. Samsung has priced its new Odyssey OLED G6 at $999.99, making it one of the more expensive 27-inch displays on the market. On the bright side, that's cheaper than the previous preorder pricing.
The other upshot is that in addition to being a premium OLED panel with a smoking-fast refresh rate, it's also brimming with amenities that are of interest to gamers. For example, it boasts a 0.03ms response time, which is typical for OLED. It also bears VESA's DisplayHDR TrueBlack 500 certification and can hit an eye-searing 1,000 nits of peak brightness for HDR content. To that end, it features HDR10+ support (Samsung continues to stubbornly not support Dolby Vision, though that's a bigger deal for its TVs as opposed to gaming monitors).
Arguably of more interest, this is an AMD FreeSync Premium Pro display that is also certified as being NVIDIA G-Sync compatible. That basically means its GPU agnostic for a tear-free gaming experience.
All of this comes wrapped in a 27-inch quantum dot OLED (QD-OLED) panel with a 2560x1440 resolution and 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio. For connectivity, the display includes two HDMI 2.1 ports, a single DisplayPort 1.4 input, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and two downstream USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports (plus a single upstream USB-B port).
"Additionally, the Odyssey OLED G6 is Pantone Validated, ensuring highly accurate color reproduction, with the ability to display over 2,100 colors and more than 110 SkinTone shades from Pantone’s library. Combined with its brilliant QD-OLED display, the monitor delivers vivid, true-to-life visuals that bring gaming worlds to life just as developers intended," Samsung says.
Samsung's Odyssey OLED G6 (G60SF) is in stock and available to buy for $999.99 at Amazon. You can also find it at Best Buy and direct from Samsung.
It will be interesting to see how gamers react to the new display, and specifically whether or not the 500Hz refresh rate is enough of a draw to pay several hundred dollars more versus a 360Hz OLED panel. For example, Samsung's 27-inch Odyssey G6 (G60SD) with a 360Hz refresh rate is on sale for $699.99 at Amazon (save $200). And a couple of other comparative options include Gigabyte's Aorus FO27Q3-27 OLED that's on sale for $699.99 at Amazon (save $100) and Alienware's AW2725DF OLED that's on sale for $641.51 at Amazon (save $258.48).
Samsung also unveiled a couple of Odyssey G7 monitors, including the 37-inch Odyssey G7 (G75F) for $899.99 and a bigger 40-inch Odyssey G7 (G75F) for $1,199.99.
Both monitors feature a curved panel (1000R). The 37-inch model is a 4K display (2840x2126) with a 165Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time, while the 40-inch model is a WUHD panel (5120x2160) with a 180Hz refresh rate, 1ms response time, and DisplayHDR 6000 certification.
