This week was dominated by two news items. First, the PS5 price increase. The other, the celebration of a new edition of Gamescom after a few rather confusing years due to the whole issue of the pandemic.
We wanted to attend these events again and this year we did so twice. my partner David Martínez reported on the fair’s most interesting games and has been able to write many impressions of titles as interesting as The Callisto Protocol or Lies of P.
For my part, I have been approached to see “little gadgets” from the hand of Samsung, who had a new monitor to display, as well as the SD 990 Pro which is prepared for technologies such as Direct Storage in Windows.
After fiddling with the South Korean company’s new toy for an hour, I’ll give you my . narrate first impressions and opinion of the Samsung Odyssey Arka monstrous 55-inch monitor unlike anything you’ve seen before.
A monitor that could be the control center of the Enterprise
The first thing I have to tell you is (and I hate this expression) that the Samsung Odyssey Ark isn’t for everyone. Samsung is actually launching devices that fit that description perfectly — like the Galaxy Fold 4 — because they’re devices that meet very specific needs.
In the case of the foldable, the need for a user to have a “normal” mobile and a tablet on the same device. In the case of the monitor, the need for total immersion, both to work and especially to play.
This Ark isn’t really new since Samsung took it to CES in Las Vegas in January, but it took so long to arrive that many of us forgot about it. Now it has reappeared on Gamescom with price (2,999.99 euros at home) and, after seeing its capabilities, the truth is I can’t wait to have a unit to do the analysis.
And the point is, it’s a very, very versatile monitor that can be an impressive game station with brutal immersion, but it’s also a vertical setup with three monitors and even a SmartTV with apps such as Stadia, GeForce Now or Xbox Game Pass integrated.
I’m going to talk a little bit about the technique first and then about the experience. The panel is a VAa technology with which Samsung has extensive experience and which, if the panel is of quality, guarantees a good balance between colours, viewing angles and refresh rate.
Here we have a response of just 1 millisecond, with a refresh rate of 165 Hz and FreeSync Pro technology. It doesn’t have G-Sync, which I would have liked, but hey, in the end you can take advantage of the AMD system without too much trouble.
It has a 4K resolution of 3,240 x 2,160 pixels and the diagonal is 55 inches in 16:9 format. and with a curvature of 1,000R, that’s quite noticeable. What I really liked is the brightness. Yes, the room was not too bright, but Samsung promises a brightness of 600 nits, which is not bad for a monitor, HDR10+ Gaming and the good thing is that it has a MiniLED backlight with 1,056 zones.
This means that there are… well, over 1,000 backlight zones that provide more accurate lighting in each of the pixel groups, increase contrast by allowing for deeper blacks and, most importantly, eliminating or reducing problems. such as light leaks.
You don’t “plug” the devices you want to connect to the back of the monitor, but to the control center where one of the processors is located and where we have ports, among other things, 4 HDMI 2.1. So yes, you are going to reap the benefits of the new consoles, such as the VRR technology on PS5 and Xbox Series X.
And that control center connects to the monitor via a single fiber optic cable, making cable management a breeze, something we’ve seen on Samsung’s high-end TVs.
Something really cool is that you can have the monitor both vertically and horizontally. Depending on what you want to do, one orientation or the other is more comfortable and changing it is as easy as manually rotating the screen.
The foot and arm weigh over 20 pounds, so they don’t move the slightest bit when we change the position of the panel.
Two solar powered controllers that open up a world of possibilities
Nothing more than features and design, the Ark draws attention and its numbers are exaggerated in every way, even in the number of controls. And it’s that we have normal operation similar to that of any televisionthe typical one to control SmartTV functions.
Anyway, there’s another button, one that looks like a design wheel for professional video and photo programs and that’s the more interesting of the two. Both have a battery that charges with solar energy, a highlight of this, and the main controls make the Ark very versatile.
It has a series of buttons to activate quick functions of the monitor, but the most spectacular happens when we press the Home button and start choosing options with the control wheel.
Here we have several options, such as resizing the screen (if we want a window to occupy 55 inches or less, as well as its position on the monitor) or, most interestingly, configuring the multi-screen experience.
We can configure what happens when we have the monitor vertical or horizontal and I’ll tell you more about this in the analysis, but basically you can have up to four different image sources horizontally and up to three vertically, or have a single source horizontally and configure the system so that when you place it vertically it shows two or three applications.
In this vertical way you can have the PC desktop, the YouTube app, and the app from… I dunno, Game Pass at the same time. It’s like a vertical setup with multiple monitorsbut without having to buy three monitors, the special arm to put them on top of each other, etc.
With the command you can very quickly change the position of any “window” and in an instant change the window that is below, in the middle and above, which is handy because really, the one that is higher is the one that is worse. Let’s take a look at the height of it, so it should be pretty secondary content.
One configuration that comes to mind is the PC on the screen above with Discord, Game Pass with a Bluetooth controller on the central screen and YouTube at the bottom to have a video in the background while we play games like The Sims 4 or Two Points Campus .
The truth is that it has several possibilities and opens a window that was not available until now thanks to the integration of a SmartTV system in a monitor.
The playing experience is great, but not in all games
But you might be wondering how to play in a more traditional way, in that 55” in landscape mode. And well, if I’m being honest…I wonder too, since the titles available to try weren’t the most appropriate.
There was Fortnite and Tales of Arise and yes I like Fortnite and I like Tales of but I think games like Cyberpunk 2077 or God of War would have been better to enhance the immersive experience this monitor can provide.
Well, let’s get started. Games like Tales of Arise, sports or more adventure games are perfect for a monitor like this in my opinion. Yes, looking at the center of the screen, what’s on the sides is super blurry and even distorted by the curvature and our eye perception, but the immersion is amazing.
In reality, I think it’s even better than Samsung’s previous ultra-wide gaming monitorsbecause the curvature is a bit more closed here.
Like I said, it’s very spectacular, but for titles like Fortnite… it’s not worth it, because you have to turn your head, not just your eyes, to cover the whole panel and that’s one thing in a competitive game. death sentence.
For this, it is best to choose the option to resize the screen to make the game screen smaller and more centered. This way it keeps looking great and the sense of immersion isn’t lost, not quite at least, because the rest of the screen doesn’t remain black, but with colors adapted to what is displayed on the screen.
For example, in Fortnite it shows us a background of geometric shapes with quite bright and cheerful colors, but as I said, this dynamically adapts to what is currently running on the panel.
You can also play vertically on a smaller screen, but I think that loses all the spectacular effect. If you’re just going to play games and don’t need to multitask, set it horizontally.
For productivity, it’s a multi-monitor setup in one enclosure
And gaming aside, I think this monitor can succeed in a professional music, photo or video editing environment. But only if they allow us to do something that they have not confirmed to us can be done.
And it’s that, I already told you that you can vertically place three apps on top of each other. On the monitors they had a PC connected with a single HDMI cableso the monitor detected there was a PC and the two apps to fill out had to be SmartTV apps.
However, what I want in such a monitor is the video editing program in the central position, the real-time video preview in the top position and, in the bottom position, the folder of video files to import into the editor.
It’s a specific use, I know, but I already told you it wasn’t for everyone. The problem is, you can’t do that with a single HDMI cable, so I asked if I could theoretically do it by taking three HDMIs from the PC’s graphics card and connecting them to the monitor’s computer.
The answer from the person in charge at Samsung, who gave me a lot of information about the monitor and made it a lot easier for me, was yes, that would theoretically provide a multi-monitor setup that I could do that.
I wasn’t 100% sure though and agreed to ask the department that is currently testing the monitor before release, but hey, anyway, it’s something we’ll also try when the device arrives.
And in the end, it’s a spectacular monitor for both gaming and productivity that we look forward to testing in depth. It’s expensive, yes, very expensive, but you see it’s a different concept to what we had before, as it combines monitor functions with options and features of Samsung’s high-end monitors.
If you don’t want to miss anything we saw at the fair, we leave you the most interesting content here:
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