The average person spends approximately seven hours a day in front of a screen. And yet, many of us do so without considering the cost of this practice to our health, particularly as it relates to our eyesight. As the time spent staring at phones per day increases, our eyes become weaker and weaker.
We cannot escape the prolonged hours of working with a screen per day. For many people, screens are the avenue through which we work, study, and even entertain ourselves. But there are ways to reduce the negative impact of screens, even when we cannot avoid them. One way of doing so is using a larger screen!
Monitors can offer much-needed relief to your eyes, regardless of whether you spend most of your screen time working, playing, or fulfilling personal tasks. But that’s not all. Monitors often offer enhanced display quality, color accuracy, and (in the case of curved monitors) viewing angles.
To help you get started in your monitor purchasing process, we have prepared a list of five of the best Samsung monitors, among them some of the best business monitors and the best Samsung gaming monitors. We hope to provide you with a perspective of what is available in the market and introduce you to some of Samsung’s best offerings.
Samsung’s Smart Monitor lineup is one of the best smart monitor series on the market. They offer great display quality, many features that enhance productivity, and a minimal design, making them perfect for those seeking a work monitor.
The 43” M7 is the largest monitor in the Samsung Smart lineup. Initially, sitting in front of a 43” monitor may feel a bit overwhelming. However, you will soon get used to the size and how to appreciate just how productive you can become with the real estate this monitor gives you.
Design
The M7 offers a rather minimal design. It is made of a plastic frame and offers a very slim side profile. The smart design of the monitor’s power input allows it to be mounted onto a wall since the power cable neatly tucks in at the back of the monitor. But if you don’t want to mount it to a wall, there is a cable management flap that you can use to organize the cables at the back of the monitor.
The M7 offers excellent connectivity options, both wired and wireless. The inputs include two HDMI 2.0 ports as well as a USB-C video input. All the ports feature Auto Source Switch +, which means if you, for example, have your PlayStation connected to the same monitor as your PC, you don’t need to change the source when you turn it on as the monitor automatically switches to the PlayStation video input. This can save a lot of time and a lot of searching around to find the remote.
Smart remote and other exciting features
The smart, solar-powered remote is responsible for most of the smart features this product offers, and it is what makes it one of Samsung’s best monitors. The monitor features Samsung’s TizenOS, which can be controlled through the smart remote. Moreover, you can offer voice commands to Bixby (TizenOS’s virtual assistant) through utilizing the remote’s built-in microphone, allowing you to control the different functions of the monitor. Among the various benefits of TizenOSis that it allows you to stream your favorite content through the streaming service of your choice by using the monitor’s remote, without needing to connect to a computer.
Another notable feature of the display is that it could become an extension of your phone if you have a Dex-compatible Galaxy smartphone or an iPhone. Dex is an expected feature in a smart Samsung monitor. It allows you to turn your phone into a desktop-like experience, enabling you to use a mouse and keyboard in your phone’s “desktop” environment. AirPlay 2, however, is a feature exclusive to the M7, M5, and the newer M8 lineup, which allows you to mirror your iPhone, iPad, and Mac on the monitor. If you wanted to do that on any other TV/monitor, you would traditionally have to have an Apple TV connected to the display. There are, of course, numerous uses to this. For instance, you can check the framing of your shot if you are using an iPhone to shoot a YouTube video.
Overall, this is one of the best smart computer monitors Samsung offers. It is excellent for productivity, great for gaming, and comes with a price point that does not reflect the sheer number of smart features it has. Truly the best smart monitor for the price on the market!
The G-Sync-enabled Odyssey G5 is a perfect all-rounder gaming monitor that strikes a balance between a quality VA panel, a reasonable resolution that most modern GPUs can fully take advantage of, and a price tag that is comfortably mid-range. It is one of the best Samsung monitors for many gamers.
Design and refresh rate
The first thing that jumps out with this monitor when you look at it is the 1000R curve. Whether you go with the 32” or the 27” option, the immersion is truly next level. That is also in large part thanks to the combination of the 144hz refresh rate and the 1ms response time (MPRT)*. The Odyssey G5 is essentially the Odyssey G7, minus the more over-the-top features such as 240hz refresh rate, extra USB ports at the back, height adjustment, and swivel functionality.
Performance
At a 2K resolution, the G5 offers an image quality that is sharp enough to satisfy the pixel-peeping gamers at a reasonable distance, but not too sharp that it becomes a burden on any GPU that isn’t a 3080. It is one of the best Samsung gaming monitors for any gamer who has a relatively modern system, especially ones who have an RTX 2000 series and up.
*MPRT stands for Moving Picture Response Time, a number that is typically lower than Gray to Gray (GtG) response time. If you want to know more about the role of response time in monitors, check out the response time section in our guide to what you should be looking for when buying a monitor.
Affordable, 4K. Those are the most important features of the S70A Samsung monitor, and the reason why it is one of the best Samsung monitors for business or productivity-oriented users.
It’s a good thing that Samsung already has experience in this monitor category. Even before 4K started to gain mass appeal, Samsung had some of the most affordable 4K monitors on the market, like the U28E590D 28” model. It received praise at the time from the likes of YouTuber Linus Sebastian as being a great entry into the realm of 4K monitors when even video was rarely streamed at 4K and GPUs were hardly capable of driving that many pixels in a game. Fast-forward around seven years, and Samsung has built upon the legacy of its previous affordable 4K option with the S70A.
A newer and better version
Perhaps the biggest criticism that was directed towards Samsung’s previous affordable 4K monitor was its use of a Twisted Nematic (TN) panel. TN panels are known for their poor viewing angles, and they are usually not the best when it comes to color reproduction. So, Samsung took this criticism to heart and offered an alternative in the form of the In-plane Switching (IPS) panel found in the S70A.
Notice the use of the word “alternative.” Even though an IPS panel addresses both issues prevalent with TN panels (having much better viewing angles and color reproduction) there is one thing that TN panels have always been better at response time. The older model had a 1ms response time whereas the S70Adrops that to 5ms. Essentially, Samsung now has made an alternative for people who care more about having a more color-accurate display than one with marginally better gaming performance.
The S70A is the perfect entry-level 4K monitor for most people who don’t mind sacrificing a tiny bit of response-time, a gaming-focused metric, for visual clarity that they can otherwise benefit from not just in content consumption, but content creation, thanks to the IPS panel that can reproduce up to a billion colors! It’s one of the best business monitors around!
It is difficult to pick a feature to focus on as the selling point for this monitor. Is it the massive 49” ultrawide design, or the aggressive 1000R curvature that brings ultimate immersion? Is it the Quantum Mini-LED technology for the best possible image quality, or the 240hz refresh rate for the smoothest, most over-the-top gaming performance? One thing that is for certain, is that if you are looking for the absolute best Samsung monitor you can find on the entire market, you can’t look any further than the Odyssey G9 Neo.
How the Neo compares with its predecessor
The successor to the already impressive Odyssey G9 took what was amazing about the G9 and built upon it to separate itself even further from the pack as there is not a single consumer-grade monitor on the market that can compete with the Odyssey G9 on a feature-for-feature basis or as an overall package. The major difference between the G9 Neo and the G9 is that the Neo uses Mini-LED backlighting, resulting in a brighter image with many more local dimming zones (2048 compared to 10, to be exact) helping the monitor display much deeper blacks.
The G9 Neo also features HDMI 2.1 instead of the HDMI 2.0 offered by its predecessor. HDMI 2.1 is three times faster than the speed of HDMI 2.0; it offers 48 Gb/s compared to the 18 Gb/s of the 2.0 standard. The higher speed allows for a refresh rate of up to 120hz in 4K, compared to the lower refresh rate of 60hz with the same resolution in the older model.
Want even more?
If you are looking to get the full 240hz refresh rate out of this monitor, you still want to use the DisplayPort 1.4 instead of the HDMI. All you need to know about the Odyssey G9 Neo is that if your PC has enough power to run two QHD monitors at incredibly high frame rates, the Odyssey G9 Neo is the missing link in your setup.* * If your system cannot handle the G9 Neo, do not worry! Instead, we suggest you learn about the Odyssey G7 or the G5 from the same Odyssey lineup, two other great choices for those looking for the best Samsung gaming monitor that fits their needs.
Unique in its own right
Outside of the basics that this display gets right, it offers some extra features that really separate it from other displays. The monitor can connect to a laptop through a USB-C port while delivering up to 90W of power. There is also an ethernet port, which, through the USB-C connection with the laptop, essentially adds the possibility of a wired Internet connection to your laptop. These are especially important features for students or professionals who work from home and need a stable connection and a steady source of power for charging purposes while limiting the number of cables covering their desks. All these features come to make the S65UA one of the best Samsung monitors.
