Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 (2024)

Verdict

Samsung’s Quantum Dot OLED technology combines with the same ultra powerful processor found in Samsung’s flagship 8K TVs to deliver a class-leading gaming monitor that’s also great for passive entertainment.

Introduction

Samsung’s S32G80SD is on a mission to take the brand’s gaming monitor division to a whole new level.

After wowing us in 2023 with its massive, ultra-wide Odyssey G9 monitor, Samsung is today out to win gaming hearts and minds with something a bit more subtle. The OLED G8 display is a relatively compact 32 inches across, and arrives in a more regular 16:9 aspect ratio. There’s no curvature to its screen, either.

Don’t be foiled by the OLED G8’s relatively demure appearance though. Tucked away inside its elegant form are such premium features as a full 4K resolution, Samsung’s latest Quantum Dot OLED screen technology (probably the most powerful video processor in the monitor world), a unique new cooling system, Samsung’s Tizen OS and a video performance so good that calling it just a gaming monitor hardly seems fair.

Design and build

• Slim, elegant sculpting and premium metallic finish
• Core Lighting system
• Simple, screw-free set up

The Samsung OLED G8 is one of the most elegant looking gaming monitors in town. Elegant feels like a strange word to be using in the gaming monitor world, where the emphasis is so often on aggressive sculpting, glossy plastic, flashy lighting or, at the other end of the spectrum, dull rectangles with all the design appeal of a breeze block. The OLED G8’s ultra-minimal bezel, premium silvery metallic finish and unusually thin and delicately shaped rear all add up to a look that feels more appropriate to a high-end TV than a typical gaming monitor. As we’ll see, this is no typical gaming monitor.

The OLED G8 doesn’t do away with every traditional monitor design trope; a large circle of LEDs around the stand attachment point can be utilised to deliver a variety of static or dynamic light effects if you wish. Personally I found these lights a bit incongruous against all the elegance elsewhere – but I still couldn’t resist using them to provide more ambience while gaming all the same. I did prefer to turn them off while watching films and TV shows on the monitor, but its presence might be more appealing to some.

Impressively, even though the screen features a clearly premium, heavy duty build quality, you can attach it to the neck of its stand simply by click locking them into place. No screwdriver skills are required.

The stand neck carries a simple cable tidy band on its back edge, and supports tilting, swivelling, pivoting, and height adjustment. The screen also carries standard VESA mounting points.

The OLED G8’s connections comprise a single 1.4 DisplayPort, two HDMI ports, two type A USB ports and one type B USB port. This is a fair rather than ground-breaking selection – though it’s bolstered by the fact that the HDMI ports support both 4K/120Hz and 1080p/240Hz feeds.

A couple of negatives about the mostly lovely design are that the connections are awkward to get to as they’re placed right in front of the stand neck, and that the screen can wobble a bit on its neck if you nudge it.

As with 2023’s Odyssey G9, the OLED G8 sports a 5W stereo speaker system. These speakers prove sensitive enough to bring out plenty of detail and clarity, and there’s just about enough dynamic range behind this detail to give you a sense of the scale of enemies you’re facing and the heft of the weaponry they’re using. 

The detail helps game worlds (and movie soundtracks) sound reasonably busy and involving too – though I can’t help but wish Samsung would port over the Object Tracking Sound system found on its TVs that places details in the the right place on the screen with almost forensic accuracy. 

It’s a relief given how close you’re often likely to be sitting from it that the speakers never distort or crackle, while the heavy duty bodywork never ‘buzzes’ under pressure. Volume levels and bass impact are limited and there isn’t much forward impact to the sound. These aren’t big problems if you’re sitting quite close to the monitor for gaming. The resulting sound is less satisfying though if you’re using the monitor as a video display and are sitting further away. If this really bothers you, however, in a sign of the increasing crossover between Samsung’s monitor and TV divisions the OLED G8 can also pass its sound wirelessly to Samsung soundbars. 

Image quality

• 4K visuals with tons of detail
• Incredible colour accuracy thanks to Quantum Dot
• Screen ratio might not suit all gamers

Thanks to the wealth of new features Samsung has introduced with the OLED G8, there’s a lot to get through here – pretty much all of it spectacularly good. First up, there’s the innate brilliance of Samsung’s latest Quantum Dot OLED panel. This sees the S32G8SD taking to an instantly spectacular new level, going beyond the now classic OLED advantages of gorgeously deep, rich black levels, incredible local contrast (since every pixel can create its own light independently of its neighbours) and ultra wide viewing angles. 

Seeing the darkest and brightest parts of today’s ever more aggressively mastered high dynamic range creates an intensity to dark game environments that you just don’t tend to see with LCD monitors. This in turn makes the gaming experience more immersive, as you’re not distracted by typical LCD light control side effects such as backlight clouding, blooming or the dimming down of bright objects to preserve black levels.

The startling decision by Samsung to equip the OLED G8 with the same picture processing engine found on the brand’s flagship 8K TV really helps too, as subtle shadowy details in dark gaming areas are reproduced without a hint of the sort of noise or shading coarseness that can occur in near black areas with less immaculately controlled OLED monitors.

The processing enhances the OLED G8’s colour performance too, joining with a mild HDR brightness boost over previous Samsung OLED monitors to unlock a wider but also seemingly infinitely subtle range of colours which hold on to their vibrancy and saturation even when showing seriously bright HDR graphical elements.

Using our usual Calman calibration and measuring system confirms that the OLED G8 is capable of covering 100% of the sRGB colour spectrum, and a very impressive 99.2% of the DCI-P3 spectrum used for mastering most of today’s HDR content. Colours are remarkably accurate out of the box for such a spectacular looking screen. With the exception of a tiny bit of red overshoot in DCI-P3 mode, colour accuracy never slips outside the Delta 2000 error level of three where an error might actually be noticeable. 

Samsung quotes a good ‘typical brightness’ of 250 nits for the OLED G8, with my own measurements showing that the screen is capable of hitting almost 1000 nits on a 2% HDR test window, and 473 nits on a 10% HDR window in the screen’s Movie mode. In Game mode these figures drop to 703 and 319 nits respectively. The fact that the screen can show small specular highlights with so much brightness, even if they appear against a black backdrop, really does create a blistering sense of HDR fidelity by monitor standards.

With full-field bright HDR feeds, the brightness drops to between 200 and 266 nits depending on which picture preset you’re using. This is in line with other OLED monitors, but full screen brightness is one area where LCD monitors can still deliver a potential advantage. In SDR mode Samsung’s new monitor peaks at 190 nits.

It’s important to stress at this point that the OLED G8 almost always feels like it’s outperforming its measured brightness performance thanks to its new Anti-Reflection screen filter. This is more or less the same as the one used to remarkable effect on Samsung’s latest S95D range of flagship OLED TVs, and does an uncanny job of dissipating pretty much all reflections. This again has a huge effect on your immersion in the game or movie world you’re enjoying.

The only slight disappointment with the OLED G8’s stellar colour and HDR performance is that the monitor doesn’t support the Dolby Vision HDR format; though it does support the premium HDR10+ system as well as the more basic HDR10 and HLG systems.

The OLED G8’s high peak brightness inevitably raises concerns about its susceptibility to OLED’s permanent screen burn problem. Cue another of the OLED G8’s killer features: Its all-new Pulsating Heat Pipe cooling system. Remarkably, despite the slimness of the screen, this system can dissipate the heat that’s the main cause of permanent OLED image retention down to very localised levels by evaporating and condensing coolant that runs behind the screen through tiny pipes. Having sat up close and personal to numerous OLED monitors before and felt as if I was being cooked, I can say that the OLED G8’s new cooling system really does work astonishingly well. Even white HDR test windows remain cool to the touch. 

The Pulsating Heat Pipe system is joined by other older Samsung screen-protection mechanics such as Thermal Modulation, where the brightness is adjusted to compensate for predicted high surface temperatures; logo and taskbar detection where the brightness of static image elements is mildly reduced; and a simple screen saver that blacks out the image if nothing on it has changed for a few moments. Maybe because of the Pulsating Heat Pipe system, though, I never felt aware of any of the secondary OLED protection systems having any negative impact on the consistency of the picture.

The OLED G8’s stunningly fine control over brightness and colour plays into a stellar sense of sharpness and detail. The screen’s native 4K resolution means that 4K games output by the Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5 and suitably able PC cards can appear in pixel for pixel purity, while lower resolution graphics from consoles are also upscaled in real time astonishingly effectively by the NQ8 AI Gen3 processor. The OLED G8’s upscaling is so good, in fact, that it can be hard to spot the difference between native 4K and sub-4K games. Though PC users without top-end native 4K graphics cards should note that the upscaling only works over the screen’s AV inputs; so while it can work with consoles, it won’t work if the screen is set to PC mode.

The sharpness of the OLED G8’s images is bolstered further by its buttery smooth 120Hz and even 240Hz support, which essentially make both judder and motion blur a thing of the past. As well as making the gaming experience feel spectacularly responsive, of course. 

Samsung quotes a GtoG response time of just 0.03ms for the OLED G8, while my own measurements using a Leo Bodnar signal generator recorded an extremely impressive 10.5ms with 1080p/60Hz signals, which essentially halves and halves again as you step up to 120Hz and 240Hz. Note that you can, if you wish, choose to sacrifice a few milliseconds of response time to call in Samsung’s excellent Game Motion Plus system, where mild motion smoothing processing can deliver some very pleasant results with low frame rate titles where split second responses aren’t crucial to gameplay.

The OLED G8’s handling of motion and pans is bolstered, too, by its support for variable refresh rates. This covers both the core HDMI-based VRR system, and AMD’s FreeSync system. It does not, however, cover NVidia’s G-Sync system. 

The OLED G8’s 16:9 aspect ratio may be an issue for certain high-end PC gamers who’ve grown accustomed to playing games with much wider fields of view. The Odyssey G9 exists for those sorts of players though. For many users, the OLED G8’s 16:9 shape will feel more satisfying with the majority of content and applications they’ll use on it. The image feels big even if it doesn’t stretch into the periphery of your vision; the screen easily accommodates four very legible and comfortably shaped document windows in each corner; you aren’t left with gaping black bars at either side of your picture when not gaming in a wide aspect ratio; and finally, of course, the screen perfectly matches the outputs of all the latest games consoles.

At this point we’d typically be done with our assessment of the OLED G8’s image quality. Samsung’s latest monitor however works way harder than any other monitor I’ve seen to also deliver a stunning video performance. There are times where the OLED G8’s combination of self-emissive OLED pixels, unprecedented processing power and the incredibly small pixel pitch associated with fitting a native 4K pixel count into a 32-inch screen serves up some of the finest video images I’ve ever seen, and this is coming from someone who also regularly tests the world’s finest television sets.

The thing that first hit me as I switched to a mix of video streams and 4K Blu-rays was how incredibly crisp its pictures are. With native 4K images, the amount of detail and texture the OLED G8 can reproduce feels almost beyond belief at times. Netflix’s new black and white short series production of Ripley for instance looks so detailed and pure that all thoughts of pixels disappear and you just feel like you’re looking directly into the film’s stylish world. 

The astoundingly detailed and pure images are underlined, of course, by the phenomenal black levels, peerless light control and impressively intense HDR highlights the QD OLED panel can achieve. The reflection-free screen is particularly helpful with Ripley’s black and white show too.

This doesn’t mean Samsung’s monitor doesn’t respond well to video colour though – far from it. It actually adapts its tones and values fantastically well to the different demands of both SDR and HDR. More so than with any other monitor I’ve seen, in fact. Even darker skin tones always look 100% natural in terms of both general more subtle colouration (provided you avoid the over-enthusiastic Dynamic preset, anyway).

Video motion is superbly handled by the NQ8 AI Gen3 processor, meanwhile. The unique ability of this processor to detect small objects and predict their trajectory delivers incredibly clear results with live sporting events such as tennis, cricket and football, while choosing a Custom setting for the TV’s Picture Clarity settings with blur and judder reduction set to around their five and four levels respectively and noise reduction turned off helps 24p movies look crisp and clean without completely losing the cinematic feel associated with the 24p frame rate.

One little niggle to note here is that due to the OLED G8’s monitor rather than TV heritage, it can only take in 50 and 60fps video feeds from the Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles – even if you’re playing a 4K Blu-ray. I’d also add that the Dynamic Tone Mapping feature that’s on by default in the screen’s Standard video playback mode can cause some distracting ‘jumps’ in overall picture brightness during sharp cuts. This is solved easily though by just switching to the beautiful Movie preset for most TV and film viewing.

While the OLED G8’s performance with native 4K content was so good it had me feeling like I was seeing some images for the very first time, the screen is also a revelation with HD sources. That high-end processor was designed after all to be capable of turning HD and even SD sources into 8K, so converting them to 4K is a relative walk in the park. Even relatively tricky HD sources with lots of grain and a bit of compression noise are rendered in outstandingly convincing 4K that’s typically barely distinguishable from the real 4K deal. 

In short, as well as being a glorious gaming monitor, the OLED G8 is also by far the best 32-inch video display I’ve ever seen.

Interface and apps

• Tizen OS is as slick as ever
• Bixby and Alexa support
• A few key streaming apps missing

In keeping with Samsung’s ambition to make the OLED G8 more of a home entertainment centre than a straight up gaming monitor, it comes with essentially the same Tizen-based operating system you get with the brand’s latest TVs. 

The best bits of this from a gaming perspective are a dedicated Game Bar menu and a Game Hub home screen. The Game Bar can be called up when you’re gaming to access info on the incoming graphics, the settings you’ve got enabled, and a few gaming aids such as a virtual aiming crosshair, and a system for raising the brightness of dark areas of the picture without affecting the brightness elsewhere. The Game Hub home page brings together all of your gaming sources, from connected consoles and PCs to Samsung’s impressively wide range of gaming apps.

These apps include Nvidia GeForce Now, Luna, Utomic, Xbox, Boosteroid, Blacknut, and Arcade AntStream, and it’s refreshing to find the smart TV-like interface doing such a helpful and well-presented job of showcasing, curating and providing direct links to games across every platform.

There’s also a ‘Daily+’ screen available from the home menu that takes you to more utilitarian monitor apps and features. Options here include Easy Connection with Windows PCs, Remote PC apps for both PC and Mac, Multi Control, Microsoft 365, Multiview for watching multiple inputs at once in picture and picture mode, and Samsung’s DeX system for teaming the monitor up with one of Samsung’s smartphones or tablets.

Supporting the newly bolstered video side of the OLED G8’s performance are apps for pretty much all the key video streaming services. There are one or two significant absentees, though; there’s no sign of the Freeview Play ‘umbrella’ app for bringing together all the catch-up services for the UK’s main terrestrial broadcasters, and at the time of writing there’s no sign of the BBC iPlayer or All4 catch up services, though Samsung is hopeful they will be added at some point.

The OLED G8 supports the Bixby and Alexa voice recognition systems, and these integrate so comprehensively with the TV’s slightly unwieldy menus that you can skip them altogether just by telling the monitor verbally what you want it to do.

One last handy feature that helps the OLED G8’s all-rounder potential is its support for the HDMI 2.1 Auto Low Latency Mode switching feature, where the screen switches automatically between its Game and Video presets depending on what sort of content you’re watching through your console or PC.

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