I recently bought a monitor for my home office / corner of the living room and in order to be as thorough as possible in my research, I explored the possibility of buying a curved monitor. I couldn’t understand why on earth anyone would need a curved monitor for anything. They’re extra wide and narrow in height. The curvature seemed distracting, a gimmick that served no purpose. I bought a flat screen monitor and didn’t look back.
Until I encountered the Samsung Odyssey Ark UHD gaming monitor.
At 55 inches, it is big and bright and beautiful, capable of taking up most if not all of the space in your field of vision. Anywhere you look, there is screen, screen and more screen. It goes on forever. I felt like I was setting at an altar of some kind of diety wrapping its curved arms around me. The amount of real estate is almost gratuitous. It feels like no one should have that much screen space. Yet it’s extremely easy to get used to and, as I eventually learned, even a bit addictive.
The main attraction is certainly the gaming experience.
I played Far Cry 6, a first-person shooter game with a lot of unnecessary profanity and frighteningly stilted dialogue. The screen’s 1000R curvature stretched the world around me, creating a dazzlingly immersive experience. I didn’t need to turn my head once, feeling every movement of my character’s head and body. Enemies made me nervous. The beat downs I received were almost alarmingly palpable. It was completely seamless viewing (the monitor features Quantum Matrix Technology with Quantum Mini LED, as well as a 165hz refresh rate, 1ms response time and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro). There was no glare and no reflection, even with sunlight coming into the room.
It wasn’t the monitor’s fault, but the Xbox controller I was using did jerk the view side to side way too quickly and it was often very jarring. With a monitor of this size, that could become an issue and you might find yourself adjusting how you play a game. Or you might be impervious to that kind whiplash.
For maximum comfort, I leaned back in the provided Secretlab TITAN Evo 2022 Series Gaming Chair, rested my head on the limited-edition Odyssey Magnetic Head Pillow and got lost in a world of guns and pointless plot.
(The chair, pillow and a Samsung 980 PRO NVMe SSD1TB come as a bonus with every pre-order purchase from Samsung’s site before 23 October 2022..)
As for sound quality, Samsung’s 60W 2.2.2 channel speaker system with AI Sound Booster and Dolby Atmos provides good enough audio that you might not want to spring for external speakers.
While the top tier gaming experience is, to me, the primary reason for getting this monitor, it also makes for a great general workspace screen. The amount of screen real estate is awe-inspiring. In a given workday, I’ll have six to ten different applications open, sometimes multiple windows of each – all of which could be visible simultaneously on the Ark with minimal head movement. And the curve gave me easy access to programs tucked away into the monitor’s corners.
From a productivity perspective, the Ark’s Multi View function is especially useful, creating the effect of multiple monitors. You can keep one running your PC, another running Samsung Smart TV+ (Samsun’s smart TV entertainment app), another running YouTube, and another running a game app or streaming a movie (I watched a bit of Jaws and it looked incredible). That’s a lot of action to take in at one time and I’m not sure you’d want to do that unless you’re a TV executive or something, but it’s there if you want it.
One of the most curious things about the monitor is its vertical “Cockpit Mode”. Rotating the monitor was easy and while I didn’t get a chance to test it out personally, I could see how playing a flight simulator would be fantastic. When you’re reclined and you tilt the screen all the way, it’s almost on top of you. Otherwise, I didn’t find the vertical position particularly useful. In Multi View, I had to crane my neck to look up to the higher screens, which was not that comfortable.
The Ark offers a great deal of functionality – and its accessible and customisable through two remote controls, one of which is the solar powered Ark Dial. Under the best of circumstances, configuring a monitor can be a tricky, frustrating proposition, especially when you’re not acclimated to the controls. But while other monitors’ buttons tend to be lost in a no man’s land under the screen’s frame or some other god forsaken place, the Ark Dial puts them in a device that sits comfortably next to your keyboard and mouse.
It took a while for me to get comfortable with it, but that would be the case with almost any monitor, especially one that has this much functionality. With the Ark Dial, you can change screen size and position (Flex Move Screen), adjust the picture (Quick Settings) and gaming control (Game Bar).
VERDICT
At a heart-seizing $4,500, the Odyssey Ark is not cheap (though those pre-order deals certainly sweeten the deal). But I didn’t think of it as just a monitor. It felt much more like a TV and almost inspired an existential audio-visual crisis. How could I go back to the couch to play a game or watch a movie?
Of course, I found a way to live without the Ark’s totally transportive immersion. But I haven’t stopped thinking about it. 9/10
