 My sponsored unboxing of the Samsung Odyssey G9 over on ShortCircuit got more views than lots of LTT videos. And actually, why not? It's 49 inches of the highest resolution this form factor comes in, it's 240 freaking Hertz, and it's display HDR 1000 certified. I mean, on paper, this is the new god of gaming monitors. If it can overcome the shortfalls of its VA panel lineage. And we're gonna find out today in our unsponsored full review. Which isn't to say we don't have a sponsor at all, it's just not Samsung. Origin PC has got powerful high-end desktops and laptops with a multitude of options, including up to two terabytes of fast storage with Samsung's 870 QVO SSDs. Check them out today at the link in the video description. The big concern with VA panels, like in the G9, has to do with pixel response times. That's how long it takes a pixel to go from one value to another value, like the blue pixels of my desktop background here turning white as I move a window across them. Gaming monitors, including our G9 here, often advertise a gray to gray switching time of about one millisecond. But these are marketing numbers that never tell the whole story, in part because they are averages. In the real world, pixel response times vary depending on the value the pixel is starting at, and the value it's driving toward. Looking at measurements from the first 240 Hertz VA monitor ever, the Samsung C27RG50, we can see that the slowest transitions occur when going from the lowest values, so the deep blacks that VA panels are known for, up through other dark and medium grays. Now, there is a way to get faster response times. Just send more voltage to the pixels, but as with most good things, you can have too much. Pixel overdrive comes with a trade-off where you can overshoot the target value, introducing inverse ghosting coronas that I personally think look way worse than regular smearing. So the question for the G9, and I guess also the G7 by extension, because it's similar but just in a 16 by 9 form factor, is whether Samsung has been able to find that overdrive Goldilocks zone. To find out, we set up a pursuit camera to photograph response time artifacts without capturing the human brain-imposed motion blur that you see when looking at moving objects on a screen. This is at 240Hz with adaptive sync on. The blacks are smeared more when the ship is against a dark background, but overall, there's very little smearing compared to the pursuit camera pics that TFT Central took on their review of the C27RG50. Instead, we see coronas on the backside of the ship, as well as a color inversion of yellow to blue caused by overshoot. And this is what you're gonna get if you plan on gaming with G-Sync, or FreeSync, or AdaptiveSync, or variable refresh rate turned on. However, with variable refresh rate off, you can actually adjust the overdrive setting through three steps, with standard introducing fewer coronas, though you still can notice them in games. If it bothers you too much, you could in theory turn the refresh rate down to 120 or even 60Hz at the expense of clarity, but in our testing, it really didn't seem to help much. Now, as someone who isn't terribly bothered by VA black smearing in general, and in light of these test results, I stand by what I said in that sponsored video. This monitor delivers an absolutely incredible high refresh rate, immersive gaming experience. But don't click away yet, because there are some things that you should know about it. You may recall that our previous god of monitors, the ASUS PG27UQ, was capable of 4K HDR gaming at 144Hz, but only with 422 chroma subsampling, which introduces color fringing on fine details and can make text harder to read. That was because of the bandwidth limitations of DisplayPort 1.4, but this monitor also uses DisplayPort 1.4, and it's refreshing at an eye-peeling 240 times per second. Yet, you get full RGB, 10-bit color. How is this even possible? Is it because 5120 by 1440 is fewer pixels than 4K? Well, that does help, but the main reason is actually that this monitor's DisplayPort 1.4 port supports a feature called DSC. DSC, or DisplayStream Compression, is only supported on 20 series Nvidia cards and AMD cards from 2019 onward. Without it, you're actually stuck with 8-bit color at 120Hz, and ours wouldn't even overclock to 144Hz. By the way, hooking up two cables? That won't help. With DSC, though, you can unlock the Odyssey's full potential, and to our eye, even though it is being compressed, there's no visual fidelity loss, just way more efficient use of the available bandwidth. Speaking of visuals, they're fantastic. LTTStore.com, by the way. The G9 uses a quantum dot enhancement film to achieve near-professional levels of color accuracy, and has 73% coverage of the Rec.2020 color gamut. The screen is also quite uniform, and of course, the 1000 nit peak brightness makes your HDR movies and games really pop. One thing I will say is that if you're watching a movie, I would recommend doing that alone, because she ain't built for great viewing angles. She is built for immersion, though, with apparently the world's first 1000R curve, which is tighter than anything we've seen before. 1000R is said to be similar to the curvature of the human eye, increasing the proportion of the screen that you can see without strain, and decreasing fatigue. And there are actually some studies that seem to back this up. I do have one fairly big problem with this monitor, though. The noticeable flickering when HDR is on. Now, it's more obvious on the desktop than when you're actually watching or playing content, but I was able to tell while playing CSGO, and I don't know if this is related, but there was some talk of this monitor being recalled, though now Korea tells us that they're just doing additional testing, not recalling it. So whatever's going on, I hope that it's related to the flicker, because somebody's got to address it. Leaving only then the final question. Should you buy this monitor? It's definitely not the highest performance 240Hz gaming display on the market, but what it is, is one of the most complete packages out there. Sure, it only has 10 local dimming zones, which sometimes looks bad, even compared to our previous god of gaming monitors, which is a couple years old now. And the overdrive coronas are definitely going to annoy certain people. But at $1,800, which is a lot of money, it's still $200 cheaper than our previous god of monitors, while being great for both gaming and productivity, something we didn't really address much in this video. So that's an extra benefit. It's not cheap, but I think these are going to be very popular indeed, especially if Samsung can fix that HDR flickering issue. What's in your online security toolkit? Adding a VPN lets you mask your IP and encrypt traffic to and from your devices, and private internet access has reliable service with thousands of servers in dozens of countries. They offer no bandwidth caps, configurable encryption with a kill switch to keep you in control of your connection, and when combined with private browsing, PIA can make websites think you are in a different country. Try it out risk-free with their 30-day money-back guarantee at the link below. You can connect up to 10 devices at once with clients for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Linux. What are you waiting for? If you guys enjoyed this video, you might enjoy our budget gaming monitors roundup to address the other end of the spectrum. Yeah, why don't we go watch that one? Get this, you know, out of our system.