My increasingly battered bank balance hates Black Friday, but the part of my brain that has zero willpower when it comes to buying new tech can’t get enough of the sales event of the year. That’s why I’m currently hungrily eyeing up one of the best Black Friday monitor deals like a lion that’s having to wait in line at an all-you-can-eat zebra buffet.
Right now, the Samsung 49” Odyssey OLED G9 Curved Gaming Monitor is on sale for $999 at Amazon. That’s a huge 38% discount that equates to a $600 saving compared to its regular $1,799 list price. Being on the other side of the pond here in the UK, I’ve got all the envy. Sure, the Samsung Odyssey OLED G9 is on sale for £1,434 at Amazon. Yet that’s nowhere near as good a deal as in the States as you’re only saving £215 from its usual £1,649 price tag.
Maybe I should be glad the UK deal isn’t quite as enticing. After all, I do already own an incredible Alienware ultrawide display. Speaking of which, the Alienware AW3423DWF QD-OLED Gaming Monitor is on sale for $799 at Dell. That’s a tasty saving of 200 bucks off its normal £999.
Getting back to the Odyssey OLED G9, hot damn do I ever want one. I owned the mini-LED Samsung Odyssey G9 for the best part of a year. Spoiler: it was awesome. Well, at least for productivity. Working with a 49-inch/32:9 aspect ratio display is incredible for juggling multiple work tasks, as you’re essentially getting the screen real estate of two 16:9 monitors joined together.
Even with its hundreds of dimming zones, black levels were never ‘OLED good’ on my old Odyssey, though. And my obsessive eagle eyes eventually spotted some annoying banding — basically vague vertical lines across the screen — when playing the best Steam games. That’s why I ditched it for the Alienware, owing to its peerless black performance and near flawless screen uniformity.
The jump from mini-LED to OLED remains cavernous in my opinion, so now that Samsung has an OLED version of the G9 out (and at a heavy discount as discussed above), I’m seriously thirsting for one.
During our Samsung Odyssey OLED G9 review, my colleague Tony succinctly summed up just what makes this monitor so special: “Truly immersive gaming.” He went on to praise its “gorgeous display quality, immersive field of view, and a host of Samsung TV and gaming apps” that make this colossal panel a beauty of a screen that was given one of the easiest Editor’s Choice awards we’ve dished out over the last year.
The specs sheet on this thing is incredible. You’re dealing with a 49-inch display with a native resolution of (5,120 x 1,440) with 1,880R curvature. I can tell you from my experiences with the older mini-LED model, that’s a full-on, wrap-around viewing experience that provides truly incredible immersion in games — especially in racers, like the awesome Forza Horizon 5.
As you can see in the table below, our testing shows this matches the Alienware AW3423DWF blow for blow when it comes to HDR brightness and sRGB color gamut accuracy.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | Odyssey OLED G9 | Alienware AW3423DWF | Acer Predator X32 FP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nits (brightness) | 236 | 236 | 404 |
| sRGB | 194.5% | 194.5% | 226% |
| DCI-P3 | 137.8% | 137.8% | 160% |
| Delta-E | 0.12 | 0.1 | 0.26 |
This bad boy delivers the numbers, there's no denying that.
I'm almost certain it will end up passing my Terminator Eyes Test when I cave and evenutally buy one of these. Almost all OLED displays have damn near perfect screen uniformity, and the Odyssey OLED G9 will have substantially less 'Dirty Screen Effect'/vertical banding than its mini-LED predecessor if my years obsessing over monitor and TV tech has taught my peepers anything.
So if you want the ultimate OLED gaming monitor that also has every chance of boosting your productivity if you work from home thanks to its sheer size and that incredible aspect ratio, you really shouldn't sleep on this amazing Black Friday deal.
Just try to resist playing Doom Eternal on one of the best gaming monitors when you're supposed to be combing over work spreadsheets.
