Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 G85NB Review: 4K at 240Hz, With Caveats

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 was the first gaming monitor in the world to combine 4K resolution with a 240 Hz refresh rate. That is the headline, and it is genuinely earned.

Before you buy on the strength of it, there are two things independent testing found that the marketing does not tell you — one about brightness, and one about who this monitor is actually for.

Samsung markets this monitor as Quantum HDR 2000, a badge that implies a peak brightness of 2,000 candelas per square metre. The UK retail listing carries the same HDR2000 branding.

Independent measurement recorded a maximum of 976 cd/m² — slightly under half the advertised figure. The test was blunt about this, stating that the manufacturer both misleads potential buyers about the real peak brightness and implies a VESA certification that does not exist.

That criticism deserves to be read carefully, because it is not the same as saying the monitor is dim. Just under 1,000 cd/m² is still an enormous peak, and combined with the high contrast typical of a VA panel — measured up to 3,582:1 — it produces genuinely brilliant HDR in both films and games. The finding is not that HDR performance is poor. It is that the number on the box is not the number you get.

The backlight is the other half of the HDR story, and here the engineering is real. Rather than a single strip of LEDs lighting the panel from the edge, the Neo G8 uses 1,196 individually addressable dimming zones, which light at full power only where the image needs to be bright.

Testing found this produced even illumination across the panel with only very small brightness deviations — which is the outcome that matters, because poorly implemented local dimming is worse than none.

Black levels are strong, helped by the VA panel, and the monitor renders deep blacks. If you want blacks that are genuinely switched off rather than dimmed, that still means an OLED panel.

There is also a Black Equalizer setting for lifting shadow detail. Turned fully up it backfires: detail in very dark areas drowns. In racing games that hardly matters, but in shooters it makes spotting enemies harder — so it is worth setting deliberately rather than maximising it.

This is the part that most impressed in testing, because it defies the usual weakness of the panel type.

VA panels are traditionally feared for smearing during fast movement. Samsung fitted the Neo G8 with switching times measured at 3.5 milliseconds — the retail listing advertises 1 ms, so treat that as the manufacturer's own figure rather than a tested one. Either way, the combination of those short response times and 240 Hz produced what the test described as beautifully fluid gameplay with no artefacts and no streaking.

Because the panel refreshes 240 times per second, opponents also appear on screen fractionally sooner, which is the practical argument for a high refresh rate in competitive play.

AMD FreeSync is included to prevent tearing. Usefully, testing found the synchronisation also worked with an Nvidia GeForce card, not only with AMD hardware.

This is the practical catch, and it should be part of your budget rather than an afterthought.

Driving 4K at a genuine 240 frames per second in current titles at high settings effectively requires a top-tier graphics card — the test named the RTX 4090 as more or less mandatory to exploit the refresh rate fully. If your GPU cannot approach those frame rates, a large part of what you are paying for sits unused.

Running costs, at least, are modest: the monitor drew 37.2 W at factory settings.

The 32-inch panel is curved at 1000R, which is an aggressive curvature and a deliberate signal about the intended audience.

The logic is sound. The human eye is itself curved at approximately 1000R, so every point on the screen sits the same distance from you — provided you are centred in front of it. That is what makes it immersive in games.

The consequence is that the seating position is unusually critical. Move even slightly to the left or right and the curvature distorts the image significantly. The VA panel compounds this: compared with the viewing-angle stability of IPS, colours wash out quickly when you are not directly in front of the screen.

For work it is only partly suitable. Testing specifically flagged uneven row rendering in Excel spreadsheets as an irritation. It also found scanlines — visible pixel lines — at 240 Hz in desktop use, most noticeable with white text on a blue background and when selecting text on web pages. That phenomenon disappeared at 120 Hz, and in later testing was no longer visible even at 240 Hz, but the conclusion drawn was that Samsung needs to work on its quality control.

Anyone doing colour-critical creative work is pointed elsewhere: the test recommended the Philips 27B1U7903 instead, for its more stable viewing angles and near-perfect factory calibration.

Resolution is 3840 x 2160, and the image was described as wonderfully sharp.

One setting to change immediately: the default brightness arrives at step 13 out of 100, which is too dark. A value between 30 and 50 was recommended. The monitor can also adjust brightness automatically according to room light if you prefer.

Colours are rendered largely naturally, and look most accurate in the sRGB picture mode — which fits, because coverage of the sRGB colour space measured 99.8%.

The connections sit below the RGB-lit ring on the rear, the styling signature of current Odyssey models, on a chassis that is mostly white and distinctly futuristic in the manner of its larger sibling, the Neo G9.

For a PC there is DisplayPort, which is the connection that carries 4K at 240 Hz. For consoles there are two HDMI 2.1 ports, enough to feed a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X with 4K at 120 Hz. A USB-B upstream port supplies two USB-A sockets, and there is an audio output for headphones or a stereo system.

That last one is not optional: the monitor has no built-in speakers at all, so budget for headphones or external audio.

Buy it if you play games on a powerful PC or a current console, you sit centred in front of your monitor, and you want the sharpest, fastest combination available in a single screen. The 4K-at-240 Hz combination, the mini-LED backlight and the absence of VA smearing make it a genuinely strong gaming display.

Look elsewhere if you spend most of your time working rather than playing, if you do colour-critical work, if two people ever need to view the screen at once, or if your graphics card cannot push high frame rates at 4K. And do not buy it expecting the 2,000 cd/m² the branding implies.

Truthful Reviews has not tested this monitor. The measurements above — the 976 cd/m² peak brightness, the 3,582:1 contrast, the 1,196 dimming zones, the 3.5 ms switching times, the 99.8% sRGB coverage and the 37.2 W consumption — are published results from an independent German technology publication on our approved source list, which tested this exact model. That source URL is stored as this page's editorial provenance. We have not converted the source's grading scale into a star rating, so this review is published without a score.

We are not quoting a UK price. When we checked Amazon UK on 3 August 2026 the exact model (LS32BG850NPXXU) was listed, but no dispatch party could be identified at all — no merchant information and no seller profile — so we do not link it.

In the United States the exact same monitor (US model code LS32BG852NNXGO) was available new on 3 August 2026, sold by Beach Camera and shipped by Amazon. The current verified price is shown in the buying panel above. Beach Camera appears on Samsung's own authorised-reseller list.

Check Amazon UK availability or check the price on Amazon US.