This week has been marked by two pieces of news. First, the PS5 price increase. Secondly, celebrating the new release of Gamescom after a couple of rather confusing years due to the whole pandemic issue.
We wanted to visit these events again and this year we did it twice. My partner David Martinez covered the most interesting games of the fair and was able to write many impressions of such interesting titles as “The Protocol of Callisto” or “The Lies of P.
For my part, I walked over to see Samsung’s “small gadgets” which had a new monitor as well as an SD 990 Pro ready for technologies like Direct Storage in Windows.
After spending an hour fiddling with a new toy from a South Korean company, I’ll tell you my first impressions and opinions about the Samsung Odyssey Arka monstrous 55-inch monitor like nothing you’ve seen before.
A monitor that can be an enterprise control center
The first thing I have to tell you (and I hate this phrase) is that the Samsung Odyssey Ark is not for everyone. In fact, Samsung is releasing devices that fit that description perfectly – such as the Galaxy Fold 4 – as they are devices that cater to very specific needs.
In the case of a foldable device, the user needs to have a “regular” mobile phone and tablet on the same device. In the case of a monitor, total immersion is required both for work and, above all, for play.
This ark isn’t really new, as Samsung unveiled it at the January CES in Las Vegas, but it took so long that many of us forgot about it. Now it has reappeared at Gamescom with a price (2999.99 euros put at home) and after seeing its capabilities, the truth is that I can’t wait to have a device to analyze.
And the thing is, it’s a very, very versatile monitor that can be an impressive hard-immersive gaming station, but it’s also vertical setup with three monitors and even SmartTVs with built-in apps like Stadia, GeForce Now or Xbox Game Pass.
I’m going to start talking a little about technique and then experience. VA panela technology with which Samsung has a lot of experience and which, if the panel is of good quality, guarantees a good balance between colors, viewing angles and refresh rate.
Here we have a response of just 1 millisecond, with a 165Hz refresh rate and FreeSync Pro technology. It doesn’t have G-Sync, which I’d love to see, but in the end, you can take advantage of an AMD system without too much trouble.
It has a resolution of 4K 3240 x 2160 pixels and a diagonal of 55 inches in 16:9 format. and with a curvature of 1000r, this is very noticeable. What I really liked was 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 it’s good that there is a MiniLED backlight with 1056 zones.
This means there are… well, over 1,000 backlight zones that provide more precise lighting in each of the pixel groups, boosting contrast with deeper blacks and, most importantly, eliminating or reducing issues like light leakage.
You will “plug” the devices you want to connect not to the back of the monitor, but to the control center where one of the processors is located and where we have, among other ports, 4 HDMI 2.1. So yes, you will take advantage of new consoles like the VRR technology on PS5 and Xbox Series X.
And this control center connects to the monitor with a single fiber optic cable, making it easy to manage the cable, something we’ve seen on high-end Samsung TVs.
What is very cool is that you can position the monitor both vertically and horizontally.. Depending on what you want to do, either orientation is more convenient, and changing it is as easy as manually rotating the screen.
The base and bracket weigh over 20kg so they don’t move when we change the position of the panel.
Two solar-powered controllers that open up a whole 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 that’s what we have normal control, like any TVtypical for controlling SmartTV functions.
Nonetheless, there is another knob that looks like a designer wheel for professional video and photo applications. and this is the more interesting of the two. Both have a solar powered battery which is the highlight of this one and the main controls are what makes the Ark very versatile.
It has a row of buttons to activate the quick functions of the monitor, but the most impressive thing happens when we press the home button and start selecting options using the control wheel.
We have several options here, such as scaling up or down the screen size (if we want the window to be 55 inches or smaller, as well as its position on the monitor) or, most interestingly, setting up the multi-screen mode.
We can customize what happens when we have a vertical or horizontal monitor and I will talk about this in more detail in the analysis, but in principle you can have up to four different image sources horizontally and up to three vertically, or have one source horizontally and configure the system so that when placed vertically, it shows two or three applications.
In this vertical way, you can have a PC desktop, a YouTube app, and an app… I don’t know, Game Pass at the same time. This is similar to a vertical multi-monitor setup.but without the need to buy three monitors, a special bracket to put them one on top of the other, etc.
With a command, you can very quickly change the position of each “window” and instantly change what is at the bottom, in the center and at the top, to something convenient, because, really, what is above is what is worse Let’s look at height, so this must be pretty secondary content.
The configuration that comes to mind is a PC on the screen above with Discord, a Game Pass with a bluetooth controller on the center screen and YouTube on the bottom to have videos 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 up a window that was not available until now thanks to the integration of the SmartTV system into the monitor.
The gaming experience is amazing, but not in all games
But you might be wondering how to play in a more traditional way on those 55-inch screens in landscape mode. And well, to be honest… I’m also interested, since the games that you could try were not the most suitable.
There were Fortnite and Tales of Arise, and yes, I love Fornite and Tales of, but I think games like Cyberpunk 2077 or God of War would be better to enhance the immersive experience this monitor has to offer.
But let’s get down to business. Games like Tales of Arise, sports or other adventure games are perfect for this monitor, I think. Yes, when we look at the center of the screen, what is on the sides is super blurry and even distorted due to the curvature and our visual perception, but the immersion is amazing.
Actually, I even like it better than previous Samsung ultra-wide gaming monitors.since the curvature here is somewhat more closed.
As I said, it’s very impressive, but for games like Fortnite… it’s not worth it, as you have to turn your head, not just your eyes, to cover the entire panel, which in competitive play is death. sentence.
For this, the best option is to change the screen size to make the game screen smaller and closer to the center. In this way, it continues to look great and the sense of immersion is not lost, at least not completely, since the rest of the screen will remain not black, but with colors adapted to what is displayed on the screen.
For example, in Fortnite, it shows us a background of geometric shapes in quite bright and cheerful colors, but, as I said, it dynamically adapts to what is currently running on the panel.
You can also play on a smaller vertical screen, but I think that would lose all the spectacle effect. If you’re just going to play games and don’t need multitasking, put it horizontally.
To increase productivity, this is the installation of several monitors in one case.
And gaming aside, I think this monitor can do well 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.
And that’s what I already told you, vertically you can place three apps, one on top of the other. On the monitors, they had a PC connected with a single HDMI cable.so the monitor has detected that there is a PC, and the two applications to complete must be SmartTV applications.
However, what I want in such a monitor is to put the video editing program in the center position, the live video preview in the top position, and in the bottom position the folder with video files to import into the editor.
I know it’s a specific use, but I already told you it’s not for everyone. The problem is that you can’t do this with a single HDMI cable, so I asked if I could theoretically do this by taking three HDMIs out of a PC’s video card and plugging them into a monitor computer.
The answer from the person in charge at Samsung, which gave me a lot of information about the monitor and made things a lot easier for me, was: yes, in theory this would create a multi-monitor setup that would allow me to do this.
However, I wasn’t 100% sure and agreed to ask the department that is currently testing the monitor before releasing it, but hey, anyway this is what we will also try when the device arrives.
And in the end, this is an impressive monitor for both gaming and productivity, which we look forward to thoroughly testing. It’s expensive, yes, very expensive, but that’s a different concept. to what we’ve had before as it combines the features of a monitor with the 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 highlights:
- Impressions from Dead Island 2
- Impressions of the devil in me
- Impressions of killer clowns from outer space
- Impressions from Gungrave GORE
- Impressions from One Piece Odyssey
- Vengeful Guardian Moonrider Impressions
- penthouse experience
Source: Computer Hoy
