SAMSUNG 32 Odyssey G55A QHD 165Hz 1ms FreeSync Curved Gaming Monitor with HDR 10, Futuristic Design for Any Desktop (LS32AG550ENXZA)

Ive been searching for a curved 32 inch gaming monitor for quite some time now, and until recently, most options were priced out of my range. In particular, the Samsung Odyssey G7 seemed like my ideal holy grail monitor, but at holy grail pricing. So when Samsung released a pared-down version in this G5 recently, I took notice. The G5 takes the essentials of the G7 and drops the extras. You lose the quantum dots with true HDR 600 support, 240hz, lose the adjustable stand, the RGB, and the extra USB ports. That sounds like a lot to sacrifice...but what youre left with is a gaming monitor that is reduced down to its essentials, for under half the price. You still get 1440p, a low response time especially for a VA panel,144hz--which still is more than enough for most people--and the 1000R curve in a 32 inch monitor. Reading some of the reviews about ghosting, I was a little apprehensive as I have personal experience with VA panel ghosting and know what to look for, but out of the box and with a little setup, that apprehension is unfounded. When the monitor is set to 144hz with Freesync enabled, there is, to my peception, essentially zero perceptible VA overshoot over on BlurBusters. The little UFOs are as crisp as Ive seen on any other good 144hz panel. Theres none of the dark overshoot typical of VA panels present. The panel behaves more or less like its more expensive brother did at 144hz, where it had zero ghosting, and then the tiniest bit at 240, indicating to me that 144hz is this technologys current sweet spot. If I had to suspect, the issues other reviewers encountered might have to do with disabling Freesync and setting the monitors response rate to overdrive mode. I have yet to ever see a VA panel that DOESNT ghost in their overdrive setting; even the mighty G7 and G9 suffer from it. Its best avoided. Overdrive is necessary to reach the advertised 1ms response rate, and you get a drop to 2-3ms response times when you let the monitor manage itself, but thats still class-competitive and only perceptible to a professional-grade, hardcore gamer. And if youre one of those, why are you buying this panel? Setup was easy. My Nvidia drivers recognized the monitors capabilities right out of the box, setting the correct resolution and refresh rate and automatically enabling Freesync. The on screen controls are very easy to use, and it has some helpful features like crosshair overlays that I probably wont be taking advantage of...but theyre nice to have. If I have some criticisms about the monitor they would be that the stand does lack any real adjustability to it. Youre left with just a bit of tilt, though you do have a VESA mount to install your own mounting solution. Also, while the HDR looks supririsingly good in my testing, the lack of full Freesync Premium Pro means youre left choosing between HDR -or- Freesync, rather than using both simultaneously. I didnt buy this monitor for its HDR, but its something to note if thats a selling point to you. Finally, the elephant in the room: the curve. I personally like it quite a bit, but I come from a similarly-sized, less aggressively curved monitor, so I adjusted quickly. If youre coming from a flat panel, you may have issues with it. After while, I think most will come to appreciate the edges of the monitor being brought to the same distance from their eyes as the center in a monitor of this size. At the same time, I can understand its a dealbreaker for some. In the end youre left with a gaming monitor that has everything you need but very, very little extras. If I could knock half a star off for the not-quite-realized HDR support and stand, I would, but balancing it with the $370 MSRP and the fact I scored it for $295 on Prime day, I cant in good faith pull a full star from my rating. Once a product is that far removed from flagship monitors in price, you cant reasonably expect a full flagship experience. But to get the essence of that experience at this price is, to me, closer to a 5 stars than anything.

I really enjoy the monitor itself, however the manufactures made big mistake with original stand is glaring. Along with the purchase of this monitor I also bought a swing arm mount to use instead on the original stand. I first assembled the monitor and validated that it was working. See that everything was working i removed the original stem and legs and I then mounted it on the new swing arm.. At this point the monitor would no longer turn on. I contacted vendor support via chat to troubleshoot (which was limited to the basics of is it plugged in, didnt you use the right button, etc..) After unsuccessful chat, I requested an exchanged, which Amazon getting high marks for. Upon reciept of replacement, to my surprise, this one doesnt come on either. I decided too try a hunch and was amazed and dishearten to find that the original stands stem has to be attached!!! This is total nonsense!! Its looks like crap! I had expected more from Samsung!

I ordered the g50a 2022 refresh for $347 including tax. I saw that Amazon has these monitors listed completely wrong because I ordered a curved qhd 165hz monitor and the g50a doesnt have a curved option on the Samsung website. I looked up the serial number that was on the box when it got here and it showed a g5 that costs $500+ so I got a pretty damn good deal.

The monitor has come down in price and now its one of the best budget options for gaming and ultrawide. The biggest problem with this monitor is the smearing that happens. For non-competitive games, this is not an issue at all. Youre only going to notice this if you look for it. However, when it comes to FPS or other more competitive titles, its going to make a big impact on your performance. I dont dig the aesthetics, especially the fact that the front cutouts are basically just fake speakers. At least there is no red accents so its not too obnoxious. The bezels are OK, theyre not terribly thick but there are many monitors that will beat it. Overall, its a good budget ultrawide gaming monitor. The colors out of the box are off, but can be tweaked to get pretty good results. The blacks are good as expected from a VA panel, but unfortunately like other VA panels it suffers from ghosting.

I did a ton of research before buying this monitor and it definitely was worth the purchase but one thing I want to say is the stand is very cheap, it’s very squeaky and wobbly and actually kinda keeps the monitor at a lopsided stance, for this price you would think that they maybe would have put a little more effort into it, I mean it’s literally a push and a twist to get the stand on, so if you’re gonna buy this monitor I recommend getting a wall mount for it, but over all it’s great for gaming by far one of the most impressive performance monitor I’ve bought but yeah the stand is kinda bs.

The cable the monitor comes with is an HDMI cable, instead of a DisplayPort cable. This would be fine if this was a 60hz refresh rate monitor, but it is 144hz, which the cable this comes with doesnt support. If you want to make use of the full product, make sure to pick up a DP cable along with this, so you can actually use the 144hz you pay for.

I didnt know the curved screen would make such a difference. My Grandsons did an awesome job packing our all the components to their gaimg system.

For context, Im coming from using an ASUS VG248Q, and this monitor is an upgrade in (almost) every way. TL;DR: Compared to the other 1440p 144hz 27-inch monitors out there, this one is a great value for those who want to upgrade to a larger or higher resolution monitor but cant quite afford the more expensive ones. Positives: + Build quality is A+, it doesnt feel cheaply assembled. + The anti-reflective coating on the front does a decent job at getting rid of reflections. + The colors look pretty accurate and have some vibrancy without feeling oversaturated. + The black equalizer, which seems to adjust the backlight brightness based on the content on-screen to make black levels deeper, works pretty well and isnt distracting most of the time. Only when there is a rapid change from black to white does it feel distracting. + All the settings out-of-the-box gave me the best picture, I didnt find the need to change anything Mediocre: ~ The response times are what youd expect from a VA panel, in that theyre better than an IPS display but worse than a TN panel. Leaving the response time set to the Faster seems to be the best option. Even the Fastest (MBR) mode, which strobes the backlight for less trailing and faster perceived response times, was jarring and looked worse to me. ~ It might be because I have a NVIDIA card, but the AMD FreeSync setting, which does work on my card, seemed to make the response time worse and didnt seem to provide a noticeable benefit to screen-tearing. Probably best to leave it off unless you have an AMD card. ~ The curve. Its a very tight curve, and coming from a flat screen it was pretty jarring at first. However, Ive quickly gotten used to it. The most its made me uncomfortable was quick horizontal movement on-screen, whether in a top-down game or in a first-person game. However, Ive gotten used to this as well, so I wouldnt consider it a downside. It does make it a bit easier to see the whole display edge to edge. Negative: - The stand. Its extremely barebones and definitely where they saved cost. Its just a fixed height stand with no swivel, no rotation - only tilt. - The on-screen display and the control nub. The joystick on the bottom of the monitor feels like the cheapest part of the monitor, and the OSD is, to me, pretty ugly. - The auto-switching between the two inputs, DP and HDMI, was hit or miss for me. Overall, Im extremely satisfied with this monitor and dont regret purchasing it. Even if I didnt purchase it on sale, I still would have been satisfied. The response times are acceptable for the price you pay, and even in competitive first-person shooters its not distracting to me. I only wish that it came with a better stand - height adjust would have gone a long way as a taller person. I recommend it to anyone looking to move into the next tier of monitors but arent ready to spend upwards of $400.

Slight ghosting but only certain games it is amazing other than that:) resolution is great

UPDATE*** So after having the monitor for about a month, I started getting extreme artifacts all over. Getting into the menu settings doesnt work all the time as the monitor decided to restart over and over. The bios is not always a guarantee to get into even if you have the settings to 60HZ and other options off. I got frustrated enough I guess to finally return this. I read the reviews carefully here before deciding to buy this monitor. For starters, I have an AMD system and using Nvidas graphics card (Geforce RTX 2080 Super). I enabled FreeSync on the monitor menu (it was not enabled by default). The monitor was automatically set at 144hz. Its plugged into the one and only HDMI port it has. I dont use DP so I cant comment on that part... just yet. My issue during setup: I couldnt figure out for the life in me why the monitor wasnt detected by my PC during boot-up. I was accessing the monitor menu, but there was no picture being fed into it. It turns out that I had my HyperX headset plugged into my computer and it did funny things. After 20 minutes of frustration, rebooting over and over and googling, I unplugged the USB headset and the monitor showed up just fine after that point. I knocked off a star for this because I always seem to have issues with other types of Samsung monitors when setting them up in the past. They are very finnicky monitors in general when setting them up. No problem. When I didnt have FreeSync enabled, the colors did not need to be adjusted and worked fine for me out of the box. The blacks were rich and I saw no need to even bother adjusting the colors. BUT THEN... when I enabled FreeSync about 10 minutes later, I noticed a yellowish tint immediately and the blacks not looking as a rich. I believe this has nothing to do with the monitor since I saw other people reporting this same nuisance with FreeSync using Acer and other brands of monitors (just do a google search for freesync looks yellowish.). For the time being, I switched FreeSync back to off until i figure out if I want to do a custom color setting through the moniters own menu or find a way to not have AMDs drivers affect the color profile. Other Experiences so far: - Geforce experience and having ingame overlay on = terrible for me. I updated to the latest driver and reinstalled geforce experience. I guess I somehow turned the ingame overlay on (I usually had it off). I was experiencing huge artifacts when tabbing to dark-themes programs such as Discord, Spotify and even Geforce experience itself. This may not have anything to do with the monitor persay but if youre complaining about seeing artifacts tabbing around or dragging your mouse around, the ingame overlay feature is the culprit. I think this is Geforces problem really since I read some people rolling back to an older driver. - You have to turn down to 120hz if you intend to stream (Netflix and Prime). No way around this. The whys and the hows have already been addressed in other reviews here. Final thoughts: - Samsung monitors are finicky during setup, but if you always had just about any of them you already know this. Once you realize and overcome the setup process with these types of monitors you are golden. I knocked a star off because of how terrible it is to access the menu, the weird USB issue when booting up, and the fact that the stand this comes with is terrible. I highly recommend this monitor for the price-point thought, and I am going to switch to a mounting stand anyhow. - I came from a 21 inch Samsung (flat screen). The switch to a curved 32 inch screen was a huge change. In fact, I am regretting not going for a 27 inch instead since I couldve done a dual monitor setup side by side, but this thing is HUGE. Its about 28 inches wide by the way, so make sure you measure you space.