SAMSUNG 55″ Odyssey Ark 2nd Gen 4K UHD 1000R Curved Gaming Monitor, 165Hz, 1ms, 4 Input Multi View, Quantum Mini-LED, AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, HDR 10+, Height Adjustable Screen, LS55CG970NNXGO, 2023

Death Star Command Center Monitor
Odyssey Arc from Samsung, 55”This is a big unit. Very heavy. Follow directions for setting it up to be on easy street. I am strong enough that I set it up myself, but help would have been preferred. While I surface mounted mine it comes with the wall mount. The stand is stout and heavy. It adjusts vertically to clear the swing if you want to use the screen tall instead of wide. It’s comes with a ‘relay’ box. All your inputs can go to this for cleaner wiring. I only use this for gaming, but it’s basically a TV. Plenty of connectivity options and ‘smart’ stuff I don’t use currently. It has a clean design front and back, the wiring routes nicely. For gaming I have no issues. Make sure you can get the distance you need from the screen for best viewing. Great picture quality. Playing Eve Online the panoramic view is awesome. First person shooters are wild, for me it’s playable but too large. It’s like watching a tennis game from very close and following the ball. No obvious lag, not a competitive gamer just having fun. Overall I’m happy with it. Very expensive, but it is worth it to me. Odyssey Arc 55”

An Incredible Concept of a Display (update – don’t buy until issue with firmware resolved!!!!!)
Edit 3 (12/9/22) – Nvidia updated the drivers so 165hz works at 4K HDR! However, Samsung blundered and pushed an update that made all the HDR colors washed out in game mode. Nothing you can do to fix it; can’t go back to previous firmware. Many people having the same issue on the Samsung forums. Avoid until this is resolved!!! I will update my score once it hopefully is. Make sure to turn off auto updates if you already purchased and are waiting on delivery. Wish I could return it.Edit 2 (10/25/22) – Ok so today was day 30 and I officially decided to keep it, and because of that I’ve knocked it up to five stars.Nvidia announced on their forums that the next driver update will fix the 4k 120hz bug to allow full 4k 165hz use. Expect the update later in the month.I also did a quick swap to a 65 inch LG C1 OLED that was originally being used in the living room, and I instantly regretted it. Blacks were better but after finally tweaking the settings to what they needed to be on the Ark, the colors were just as good and gaming felt better on the Ark. I found myself really just using only horizontal mode, and I think most people will use it for that case only until Samsung decides to update to allow more than one HDMI input. So it’s a huge monitor you will mainly use in one orientation 90% of the time, but that’s ok – you can switch it when you need it easily. And the immersion is something you will really appreciate. I highly recommend it, especially now that it’s a better price (unfortunately I doubt they will do the price match now haha).——-Edit 1:After purchasing an RTX 4090 with the latest Nvidia drivers, you can only do 4k 120hz. This is a bug with the Nvidia drivers. Unfortunately we will have to wait for Nvidia to update.Also, I have played around with the settings more. I have turned off Local Dimming, and the screen color quality is much MUCH better, especially with white text on black. Only issue is there is backlight bleed on mine that’s more visible. Very disappointing if you’re used to OLED BUT it’s not the worst I’ve seen and it’s only on an all black screen. It’s not enough to knock any stars, especially since now with the HDR colors it looks very close to OLED.——-Original Review:Odyssey Ark has finally arrive (despite being a day late). It’s really massive and despite the warnings to set up with two people, I was able to do it myself (not recommended at all) First impressions were initially mixed but after a week of using this thing I’ve grown quite fond of it despite its quirks.Pros-The 1000R screen I can easily see everything going on despite the screen being larger than the 48” it replaced and with 165hz refresh rate at 4k it’s a great gaming experience. I don’t notice any noticeable color shift in the panel so it’s very uniform. Backlight bleed exists but if you make sure Local Dimming is on you’ll never see it with a black screen (all noticeable on a full black screen with it turned off). It’s still a VA panel after all. And the 165hz at 10-bit color looks amazing and games play fast and smooth with no ghosting or flicker. GSync works great and VRR is detected when enabled with no issues. And as a TV the picture look fabulous out of game mode in Netflix and on the web browser.The stand is heavy and solid, and is very easy to move the monitor into the different positions. Moving from landscape to vertical is easy; just lift up the screen and turn. Never had an issue.The sound is absolutely amazing for computer speakers. I’m going to use this for night gaming instead of headphones. I’m using this with speaker setup with optical in and I’ve had no issues.Ark Dial is fun and seemed easy to use (and despite what you may have read there is volume control on the dial). It’s very satisfying to use and works very well. Changing the screen ratio was fast and easy and worked as intended. Switching the aspect ratios with the dial made the game much more manageable for playing FPS games.After fiddling around with picture quality, I was able to finally get it to my standards. Having previously used an OLED, that contrast ratio is hard to beat, but this does come close. I do plan on getting an HDR calibration tool to make adjustments in the near future.Also this is a monitor, and one of the drawbacks to using an OLED TV is burn-in risk, and we don’t have to worry about that here.Cons -For starters, it is an LED panel. Previously using an LG C1 OLED contrast made the picture richer. I couldn’t duplicate the quality not matter how hard I tried in the settings. This is very important to me because soon curved OLED monitors are coming and you might get a better experience with those (expect the price tag to be about the same despite C2’s being cheaper). And forget using the Samsung Calibration software – it doesn’t work. I tried to get it to work on an iPhone 14 Pro Max and it just won’t come up.Switching sources is a little laggy. Switching between sRGB and HDR is laggy (and you get a blue screen for a second). Multiple sources at once are bad. As one of the main selling features, I noticed considerable lag playing in this mode and it was unusable playing an FPS, or since it didn’t change the resolution even text wasn’t legible. Hopefully this gets resolved in an updated. Again, maybe I need to play around with the settings more but I planned on using this frequently and as it stands it’s unusable. I tried using it as “two” monitors on windows – one as HDMI and one as a wireless, and I was somewhat successful in getting it working. Launched correctly, could use multiple programs on both monitors no problem, but when I tried to play a game on HDMI the whole thing crashed, and I had to restart the monitor. For getting use out of vertical mode, I had better luck with Windows latest update and snap windows and the hot key switching it to vertical – works much better since you cannot use more than 1 HDMI port at at time (which would be amazing). So because of the latest Windows 11 update, I found it more useful (Samsung also has a software on their Ark page to download but it’s useless with the new update since it does the same thing). I also programmed my Razer Stream Deck to have a Vertical/Horizontal key so I don’t have to mess with the Ark (which isn’t hard to use at all, but this makes it even faster to swap).RGB colors are mixed. Yeah, they work and the settings aren’t difficult to set up, but the colors don’t quite match what was on screen, and having my PC mainly be a white colored setup, I couldn’t get white to show up (would look blue-ish). I noticed this with a few other colors as well – colors were just not accurate. Maybe this is just my panel, but I don’t ever plan to use it since it’s quite bright.The price tag is hefty. Samsung/Amazon dropped the price by $200 and gave out $100 credit. I contacted Amazon support and after a little escalation they gave me the price adjustment and the credit. Good on Amazon support for that call. But for the price you can get smaller monitors or OLED TV’s and it can be hard to justify unless you want to pay for the experience.Verdict -Overall, it’s a great concept of a monitor/tv, but at times it still feels like a concept instead of a polished product. I hope with some future firmware updates Samsung can really make this panel shine more. Gaming with that 55″ curve is amazing, the response of the panel is incredible for 4k/165hz/10-bit color (you need a beefy graphics card to hit even close to this – my 3090 Ti still struggles). The sound is quite simply the best TV/Monitor sound I’ve ever heard. And the picture quality the most immersive experience and is one of the best I’ve seen in years outside of OLED TVs. For $3200 after discounts, this is a great monitor if you want to have a whole new experience on your PC… abet with the early adoption fee that comes along with trying something new. It’s a much better value at the discounted price.

Single handedly the worst purchase experience in the 25 years I have had on this planet, first of all the I dont wanna discount the fact that the screen look beautiful, its just the OS thats soo bad and the big box that comes with it, very bad overall there are like 2 remotes and im tech savy guy but I couldnt get my hand on it at all. also the it trys to be a tv and monitor both which adds to the issue. it shows error every time I tried to connect my laptop via hdmi and yes I tried different hdmi’s. also amazon was soo bad they didnt pick it up from my home and I had send them the parcel via fedx cause no one else is willing to ship a package of this size. I injured my hand while handling this tv, its very heavy. I paid 408$ for the fedx and amazon gave me so much trouble when it came to getting this money back, im not joking when I say this that I had to contact customer support 8 times and they keep on transferring you to different departments. Fianlly they decided to pay me back but only via gift card which is so inconvenient. What am I gonna buy with this much money in a gift card. OVERALL RECOMMENDATION, DONT BUY EXPENSIVE THINGS FROM AMAZON, PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE USED BEST BUY, THEY OFFER HOME PICKUP IF THERE IS A ISSUE AND A REFND PROCESS TAHT IS MUCH FASTER. IT TOOK ME 20 DAYS TO GET MY REFUND VIA AMAZON. I HOPE THIS HELPS!

I got a defective screen that keeps flashing, so had to return. But the panel itself is also terrible, and I’d like to share my experience.Though “mini LED” may sound premium tech, you need to understand the mini LED on a large panel is different from iPad pro screen or Macbookpro screen. On iPad Pro, the only thing bothering is the blooming/cloud around white text with black background, but the white is still white. However, on Samsung’s large panel, they dim the entire zone if most of the content of the area is black,and the color starts to offset. It’s wierd. I use pure black wallpaper, and that’s why I noticed it right away. I have a bunch of icons on my desktop, they look normal. I also have one Windows folder on my desktop, where it’s not close to other icons, and because it’s the only bright thing around a large area of black background, I can see the screen start to dim and the icon of the folder turns darker and the yellow of the folder becomes purple-ish washout grey.Using bright wallpaper will solve the issue right away as the local dimming zones light up, or you can simply drag the folder to your groups of bright icons. I got super confused that I think a monitor should display accurate color prior to contrast, but apparently, Samsung does not think so. In addition, if your are using dark mode apps, you will probably have similar issue.A fun fact: I was using black mode Microsoft Teams. On the left side are taskbars and icons of my contact, it’s colorful, and the local dimming zones are all good. On the right side are simply dark, and the local dimming starts to kick in. If I am reading a sentence, it’s actually reading from White text (left side), to grey text (middle), and to purple-ish grey (right side). Again, changing it back to light theme will solve the issue right away. But I personally like dark mode and it’s giving me pains.You can also turn off the local dimming feature to avoid everything I mentioned above… but…… if I do that why I am spending $3000 for a mini LED monitor???

Samsung TVs are plagued with issues on the one connect box. For these monitors in particular the screen goes black for 1-2 seconds, and audio drops.There is no fix for it except to get a replacement board. The issue with that is this gen of one connect boards is already obsolete. The gen2 isn’t backwards compatible, and Samsung doesn’t sell replacement boxes, just a replacement board for $200.It’s over priced garbage and should be avoided. I love my monitor but Samsung has purposely made the one connect box a weak point that has always failed for extra $$ on replacement parts. Avoid anything with from them that uses the one connect box.