**The Reality of the Neo G9: A Gaming Monitor with Unmet Expectations**

I recently had the opportunity to test the Neo G9, a mini LED gaming monitor that has been touted as one of the best on the market. However, my experience with this device was far from ideal. As I mentioned in my initial impressions, the Neo G9's local dimming system is impressive, but it also comes with some notable drawbacks.

One of the most significant issues I encountered with the Neo G9 is the noticeable glow effect that occurs around lighter objects on screen. This can be particularly distracting when playing games or watching videos with vibrant colors. The effect is not as severe as some other monitors I've tested, such as the PG27UQ, which had a much more pronounced issue with this problem. However, it's still an annoying aspect of the Neo G9's design that detracts from the overall viewing experience.

Another area where the Neo G9 falls short is in its automatic brightness adjustment system. Normally, when you have a full-array local dimming backlight, it responds to what's happening on screen directly in front of it, adjusting the brightness accordingly. In contrast, the Neo G9's backlight can cause issues even with simple changes in content. For example, if you open an OSD (On-Screen Display) on one side of the screen, it can cause the brightness on the other side to spike suddenly and flicker. This is a frustrating problem that doesn't seem to have any practical solution.

These issues are particularly disappointing given the Neo G9's impressive specs and price point. At $2300, this monitor should deliver an exceptional gaming experience, but unfortunately, it fails to meet those expectations in several key areas. The company behind the Neo G9 seems to be missing opportunities to address these problems, which is all the more galling considering that similar issues have plagued previous models from their competitors.

**Comparing the Neo G9 to Other Monitors**

In my opinion, the Neo G9 falls somewhere between the first-gen monitors like the PG27UQ, which had some significant issues with local dimming and brightness adjustment, and current-gen high-end IPS monitors like the PG-32 Uqx, which do a much better job in these areas. While the Neo G9's performance is not bad by any means, it's still noticeably inferior to its competitors.

For those considering purchasing the Neo G9, I would caution against doing so unless you're willing and able to tweak the monitor extensively to get it performing on an acceptable level. Even then, there are better alternatives available that might be worth exploring. For example, a nice OLED TV for HDR gaming, or even a 38-inch LG UltraWide monitor that offers a similar all-around experience.

**The Odyssey G9: A More Reliable Alternative**

One potential alternative to the Neo G9 is last year's Odyssey G9. While it had some issues when it was first released, Samsung has since fixed many of these problems and released revised models with improved performance. The Odyssey G9 offers a similar format to the Neo G9 but with much fewer drawbacks.

If you're considering purchasing either of these monitors, I would suggest waiting for Samsung to fix any remaining issues or until a new model is released that addresses some of the concerns I've mentioned. Until then, there are better options available that might be worth exploring.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso today i want to talk about this samsung neo g9 and what was my experience with it so far and if you look at the specs this monitor should be very unique and just absolutely amazing it is a large 49 inch monitor with a mini led backlight it has 5120 by 1440p resolution and a curve to support it it has 240hz refresh rate it offers an incredible hdr 2000 experience and then all that for less money than you would have to spend on other mini led monitors on the market so i was personally really excited to finally get one and to check it out and i even considered using it as my main monitor instead of my current 38 inch lg ultrawide unfortunately this monitor ended up being far from impressive and i dare to say quite a disappointment to me uh there have been multiple issues with hardware uh issues with firmware there have been firmware updates that would fix one thing and then break another and just an overall mess of issues that should not be found on a product of this class and this is the third one i ended up testing so the first one came in late july or something like that and now it's end of november so i think it's finally time to draw that line and talk about some of the reasons why you should not spend over two thousand dollars on this monitor right now and maybe a couple of reasons on why you despite all of the problems might still want to so let's begin this video is brought to you by seasonic and their prime series power supplies these top quality power supplies are very efficient they're whisper quiet extremely reliable and my go-to choice for most of my test tricks and builds around here and to make the deal even sweeter seasonic wraps it all up in a cozy 12 year long warranty check them out using the links in the description below now first of all i completely understand why this monitor was like super hyped it is a very unique 49-inch ultra wide with a resolution of two quad hd monitors which sounds great from both a gaming and a working perspective and with a 240hz refresh rate it should be faster than basically any other ultra wide on the market and now its predecessor the odyssey g9 that came out last year was already offering all these specs above but this neo g9 adds two more things to the list so the hdr 2000 and the mini led backlight and you know there are just no other monitors like it i mean you could settle for a smaller slower ultrawide like the lg 38g and 950 that i bought for myself last year or you can consider an oled panel for example which is cheaper and it offers a pretty impressive hdr experience but really isn't suited for pc use because of the infamous burning now the closest competitor when it comes to hdr experience would be the asus rog swift pg32uqx but that one costs 3 500 and it's a 32-inch monitor which is hardly an alternative for a massive ultra wide like this one so again on paper it sounds beyond impressive but pure specs don't really make a monitor great the experience that comes with it does and that is exactly where it all went wrong here now i will be focusing entirely on a variety of issues that i've seen both hardware and boxed and ratings have already done excellent technical reviews on the product and i can only confirm what they've said on this panel in terms of color gamut in terms of contrast and in terms of performance and how this is actually a pretty fast monitor in games especially considering it's a large va panel back in late july my first neo g9 sample arrived and it was instantly problematic they shipped these monitors out of the factory in the 120 hertz mode by default and if you want to run it in 240 hertz mode which you should because this is a 240hz monitor you need to go into the osd and set it to 240 hertz yourself and on this very first sample that i got this would completely crash the entire panel it just wouldn't work at all anymore and the only thing that will help was to do a factory reset so it goes back to that maximum of 120 hertz now samsung responded that it must be a sample issue which can happen but while doing research for this video i've actually seen multiple other reports of users that had the exact same problem so i would say it's a bit more than just one faulty sample the second issue that applied to both the first and the second sample that samsung sent out was the hdr tone mapping now the whole point of this monitor and the reason to spend a thousand dollars more than on its predecessor was that amazing hdr experience and in the beginning this was just terrible so for the first few months of actively selling this monitor to consumers it offered one of the worst hdr gaming experiences i have ever seen the colors were completely off the image was way too dark to the point where games that have a lot of dark areas were completely unplayable and i honestly just wondered if the samsung quality control was so bad that they never even bothered to turn the monitor on and test the hdr before releasing this product so i gave up i was really angry and i just returned both after a couple of weeks and several firmware updates later they finally managed to release an update that should give a respectable hdr image so against my better judgment i agreed to test a third unit this one right here and while i'm happy to say that they managed to fix that particular hdr problem the fact that it took so long to fix something so obvious is just concerning anyway with the last two firmware so 1007.3 and 1008 hdr was now for the most part fixed it's not perfect but the hdr standard mode does show a fairly accurate image hdr dynamic on the other hand is still not great it kind of over saturates way too much which gives these odd red skin tones but if you just turn on the hdr standard profile hdr games and agr content will finally look really impressive but the next problem popped up so with earlier firmwares the neo g9 would basically only hit the advertised 2000 nits in very specific scenarios so something that i also confirmed with my first few samples but with this last firmware that actually fixed the bad image quality it was struggling to hit even 1000 nits and ended up hitting around 800 to 950 nits in most scenarios i test for now on a monitor of this size even 1000 nits is extremely bright and enough to make it really stand out from other monitors on the market but it is not even close to hdr 2000 as they claim in their own marketing and i also kind of have a problem with that whole term in general because there is no official hdr 2000 certification so saying you offer hdr 2000 doesn't actually mean anything unless you explain what you exactly mean by it i would probably be less annoyed by it if it actually hits 2000 nits but since it doesn't i do have to call it a pretty misleading and a pretty false marketing unfortunately for samsung the problems do go beyond that hdr performance now the absolute worst that i experience are very clear very visible vertical lines at certain points of the screen accompanied by some horizontal gradients or just yellow lines there are dozens of threads on reddit as well that are discussed in scan lines or fold lines and i would say it isn't always clear if people are talking about exactly the same thing or not but there are some lines dots or gradients that are there and then make the whole image just extremely uncomfortable to look at now i do have to say that you cannot really see it as much if you are just watching a movie or if you're just playing a game that has a lot of motion so if you buy this monitor to just exclusively play games this problem i would say should not bother you as much as it does me but with static images especially with large areas in one color or if you have a white background they can be like super obvious and just very uncomfortable for your eyes which makes it impossible to use this screen for work i mean even if you want to google something it can be a pain so for me this is a pretty big deal especially again on a monitor of this price class now it is true that some samples are more strongly affected than others but i really doubt that you can avoid it completely a good friend of mine who was stubborn enough to buy three of these monitors as well because he is a die-hard optimist and he really just wanted at least one of them to be great had to return all three because of the same issue plus a bunch of weird dark spots behind the screen but i'm gonna talk about those a bit later now the hdr with the update was fine but he wasn't able to use this monitor for work without straining his eyes and he still spent days on each one of them trying to tweak them in a way so they can be you know just usable enough and it was still disappointing which i would say is not a feeling that you should have after spending 2300 euros on a monitor and he ended up buying the odyssey g9 for 1000 euros less and is much happier with that screen than he ever was with this neo g9 so his three plus my three are six monitors from various shops here in the netherlands that all have these exact same issues just like with a firmware issue seeing too much variance between samples does point to poor quality control and that brings me to my next topic backlight lead so backlight blade will always vary from sample to sample now i've seen three g9s by now and all vary a lot from quite mediocre to acceptable which is enough to just conclude that you should probably not expect it to be perfect if you are very sensitive to backlight bleed a good ips monitor will still be the way to go i would say and speaking of poor quality control the friend that i mentioned earlier showed me another issue that he had so two out of the three monitors he ordered had dust or some other particles like that uh stuck in the panel itself so first it looked like a dead pixel but if you look from the side you can see it's just stuck in there now this can happen when manufacturers repair your tv or your laptop display on location for example but it really should not happen with a mass-produced product like this one right something that isn't quality control related but more inherent to the panel itself is the full array local dimming haloing and that is something that will happen on any mini led panel and not a direct problem with samsung so i'm just going to quickly touch on that as well so basically any mini led slash fold monitor even with thousands of local dimming zones will show a bit of glow around lighter things on your display especially if they're surrounded by those darker areas the effect of the neo g9 isn't too horrible uh i would say it falls between the first fault monitors like the pg27uq which had it quite bad and current-gen high-end ips monitors like the pg-32 uqx which simply does it significantly better i don't think it's a huge deal per se but it is definitely another thing that you need to consider if you want to buy a mini led monitor and the last thing i want to talk about that is a huge deal for me is the automatic brightness adjustment that is locked now normally when you have a full array local dimming backlight it responds to what's going on on the screen directly in front of it so a sunrise should cause the leds behind it to light up even more giving you that extra brightness that you really want where the backlight in darker areas should stay darker now on this monitor right here if something bright is happening on one side of the screen it will affect the brightness on the other side as well so even something that is as simple as opening an osd on the right side can cause the left side to suddenly just spike in brightness now this literally happens all the time as content changes and it doesn't matter if you're looking at the desktop or if you're playing a game and i would say sometimes it can even cause parts of the display to actually flicker when you hit that sweet spot now the only way to fix this is to turn the local dimming off completely which i don't think is a valid solution because that defeats the whole point of this product yet again and then you might as well just buy the odyssey g9 that will cost you half as much and not have this problem at all now this is theoretically something that samsung could fix with a firmware update yet again so maybe this won't be an issue in the future but considering that this has been an issue for months now i just had to bring it up today as well so i have to admit that i am personally genuinely just disappointed i didn't just expect a way better product i honestly expected way better quality control and i also expected a company of this size to deal with any issues quickly and aggressively especially on their flagship gaming monitor now it has been months since this very expensive monitor has been available in shops and while some issues have been fixed there is still so much more to be done so i personally will definitely not be buying this for myself and i honestly think that you shouldn't either it is just not worth its price at least not in this current state i understand that this format is very impressive but if you're expecting that great awesome all-around experience that the specs suggest you won't be getting it just yet and i don't think spending days trying to tweak a 2300 euro monitor just to have it perform on an acceptable level is worth it at least not for me for about the same price you could get a nice oled tv for an equally or maybe even more impressive hdr gaming experience plus get an ultra wide like the 38 inch lg for example for that all-around productivity or i would say something along those lines to get the best of both worlds now i do know that two devices are not an ideal solution but i would say it's still a lot better experience than getting one neo g9 having said that uh there are actually some cases where it might be an interesting option now that they've fixed the hdr if most of what you do is play games that benefit from this ridiculous size like racing games for example or flight sims many of the issues that i mentioned before might not be relevant to you and i can see why you still might want to go for it and that's okay because it is true that there are no other monitors like this one unless you go for the odyssey g9 from last year so the hdr experience might not be as impressive on that one but the format is the same most issues i mentioned are not there and it will cost you way less so that is always an option but keep in mind when the odyssey came out last year it had a bunch of problems as well and it took months before they fixed them and released a revised version so if you can wait for them to do the same for the neogenei or until a completely new model with much better performance comes out i would honestly suggest you do so they're just way too many things with this product that you have to settle for to justify spending so much money on it now that's it for today i really hope you liked this video if you did please click that like button and don't forget to subscribe to tech testers to never miss an upload bye guys and see in the next one youso today i want to talk about this samsung neo g9 and what was my experience with it so far and if you look at the specs this monitor should be very unique and just absolutely amazing it is a large 49 inch monitor with a mini led backlight it has 5120 by 1440p resolution and a curve to support it it has 240hz refresh rate it offers an incredible hdr 2000 experience and then all that for less money than you would have to spend on other mini led monitors on the market so i was personally really excited to finally get one and to check it out and i even considered using it as my main monitor instead of my current 38 inch lg ultrawide unfortunately this monitor ended up being far from impressive and i dare to say quite a disappointment to me uh there have been multiple issues with hardware uh issues with firmware there have been firmware updates that would fix one thing and then break another and just an overall mess of issues that should not be found on a product of this class and this is the third one i ended up testing so the first one came in late july or something like that and now it's end of november so i think it's finally time to draw that line and talk about some of the reasons why you should not spend over two thousand dollars on this monitor right now and maybe a couple of reasons on why you despite all of the problems might still want to so let's begin this video is brought to you by seasonic and their prime series power supplies these top quality power supplies are very efficient they're whisper quiet extremely reliable and my go-to choice for most of my test tricks and builds around here and to make the deal even sweeter seasonic wraps it all up in a cozy 12 year long warranty check them out using the links in the description below now first of all i completely understand why this monitor was like super hyped it is a very unique 49-inch ultra wide with a resolution of two quad hd monitors which sounds great from both a gaming and a working perspective and with a 240hz refresh rate it should be faster than basically any other ultra wide on the market and now its predecessor the odyssey g9 that came out last year was already offering all these specs above but this neo g9 adds two more things to the list so the hdr 2000 and the mini led backlight and you know there are just no other monitors like it i mean you could settle for a smaller slower ultrawide like the lg 38g and 950 that i bought for myself last year or you can consider an oled panel for example which is cheaper and it offers a pretty impressive hdr experience but really isn't suited for pc use because of the infamous burning now the closest competitor when it comes to hdr experience would be the asus rog swift pg32uqx but that one costs 3 500 and it's a 32-inch monitor which is hardly an alternative for a massive ultra wide like this one so again on paper it sounds beyond impressive but pure specs don't really make a monitor great the experience that comes with it does and that is exactly where it all went wrong here now i will be focusing entirely on a variety of issues that i've seen both hardware and boxed and ratings have already done excellent technical reviews on the product and i can only confirm what they've said on this panel in terms of color gamut in terms of contrast and in terms of performance and how this is actually a pretty fast monitor in games especially considering it's a large va panel back in late july my first neo g9 sample arrived and it was instantly problematic they shipped these monitors out of the factory in the 120 hertz mode by default and if you want to run it in 240 hertz mode which you should because this is a 240hz monitor you need to go into the osd and set it to 240 hertz yourself and on this very first sample that i got this would completely crash the entire panel it just wouldn't work at all anymore and the only thing that will help was to do a factory reset so it goes back to that maximum of 120 hertz now samsung responded that it must be a sample issue which can happen but while doing research for this video i've actually seen multiple other reports of users that had the exact same problem so i would say it's a bit more than just one faulty sample the second issue that applied to both the first and the second sample that samsung sent out was the hdr tone mapping now the whole point of this monitor and the reason to spend a thousand dollars more than on its predecessor was that amazing hdr experience and in the beginning this was just terrible so for the first few months of actively selling this monitor to consumers it offered one of the worst hdr gaming experiences i have ever seen the colors were completely off the image was way too dark to the point where games that have a lot of dark areas were completely unplayable and i honestly just wondered if the samsung quality control was so bad that they never even bothered to turn the monitor on and test the hdr before releasing this product so i gave up i was really angry and i just returned both after a couple of weeks and several firmware updates later they finally managed to release an update that should give a respectable hdr image so against my better judgment i agreed to test a third unit this one right here and while i'm happy to say that they managed to fix that particular hdr problem the fact that it took so long to fix something so obvious is just concerning anyway with the last two firmware so 1007.3 and 1008 hdr was now for the most part fixed it's not perfect but the hdr standard mode does show a fairly accurate image hdr dynamic on the other hand is still not great it kind of over saturates way too much which gives these odd red skin tones but if you just turn on the hdr standard profile hdr games and agr content will finally look really impressive but the next problem popped up so with earlier firmwares the neo g9 would basically only hit the advertised 2000 nits in very specific scenarios so something that i also confirmed with my first few samples but with this last firmware that actually fixed the bad image quality it was struggling to hit even 1000 nits and ended up hitting around 800 to 950 nits in most scenarios i test for now on a monitor of this size even 1000 nits is extremely bright and enough to make it really stand out from other monitors on the market but it is not even close to hdr 2000 as they claim in their own marketing and i also kind of have a problem with that whole term in general because there is no official hdr 2000 certification so saying you offer hdr 2000 doesn't actually mean anything unless you explain what you exactly mean by it i would probably be less annoyed by it if it actually hits 2000 nits but since it doesn't i do have to call it a pretty misleading and a pretty false marketing unfortunately for samsung the problems do go beyond that hdr performance now the absolute worst that i experience are very clear very visible vertical lines at certain points of the screen accompanied by some horizontal gradients or just yellow lines there are dozens of threads on reddit as well that are discussed in scan lines or fold lines and i would say it isn't always clear if people are talking about exactly the same thing or not but there are some lines dots or gradients that are there and then make the whole image just extremely uncomfortable to look at now i do have to say that you cannot really see it as much if you are just watching a movie or if you're just playing a game that has a lot of motion so if you buy this monitor to just exclusively play games this problem i would say should not bother you as much as it does me but with static images especially with large areas in one color or if you have a white background they can be like super obvious and just very uncomfortable for your eyes which makes it impossible to use this screen for work i mean even if you want to google something it can be a pain so for me this is a pretty big deal especially again on a monitor of this price class now it is true that some samples are more strongly affected than others but i really doubt that you can avoid it completely a good friend of mine who was stubborn enough to buy three of these monitors as well because he is a die-hard optimist and he really just wanted at least one of them to be great had to return all three because of the same issue plus a bunch of weird dark spots behind the screen but i'm gonna talk about those a bit later now the hdr with the update was fine but he wasn't able to use this monitor for work without straining his eyes and he still spent days on each one of them trying to tweak them in a way so they can be you know just usable enough and it was still disappointing which i would say is not a feeling that you should have after spending 2300 euros on a monitor and he ended up buying the odyssey g9 for 1000 euros less and is much happier with that screen than he ever was with this neo g9 so his three plus my three are six monitors from various shops here in the netherlands that all have these exact same issues just like with a firmware issue seeing too much variance between samples does point to poor quality control and that brings me to my next topic backlight lead so backlight blade will always vary from sample to sample now i've seen three g9s by now and all vary a lot from quite mediocre to acceptable which is enough to just conclude that you should probably not expect it to be perfect if you are very sensitive to backlight bleed a good ips monitor will still be the way to go i would say and speaking of poor quality control the friend that i mentioned earlier showed me another issue that he had so two out of the three monitors he ordered had dust or some other particles like that uh stuck in the panel itself so first it looked like a dead pixel but if you look from the side you can see it's just stuck in there now this can happen when manufacturers repair your tv or your laptop display on location for example but it really should not happen with a mass-produced product like this one right something that isn't quality control related but more inherent to the panel itself is the full array local dimming haloing and that is something that will happen on any mini led panel and not a direct problem with samsung so i'm just going to quickly touch on that as well so basically any mini led slash fold monitor even with thousands of local dimming zones will show a bit of glow around lighter things on your display especially if they're surrounded by those darker areas the effect of the neo g9 isn't too horrible uh i would say it falls between the first fault monitors like the pg27uq which had it quite bad and current-gen high-end ips monitors like the pg-32 uqx which simply does it significantly better i don't think it's a huge deal per se but it is definitely another thing that you need to consider if you want to buy a mini led monitor and the last thing i want to talk about that is a huge deal for me is the automatic brightness adjustment that is locked now normally when you have a full array local dimming backlight it responds to what's going on on the screen directly in front of it so a sunrise should cause the leds behind it to light up even more giving you that extra brightness that you really want where the backlight in darker areas should stay darker now on this monitor right here if something bright is happening on one side of the screen it will affect the brightness on the other side as well so even something that is as simple as opening an osd on the right side can cause the left side to suddenly just spike in brightness now this literally happens all the time as content changes and it doesn't matter if you're looking at the desktop or if you're playing a game and i would say sometimes it can even cause parts of the display to actually flicker when you hit that sweet spot now the only way to fix this is to turn the local dimming off completely which i don't think is a valid solution because that defeats the whole point of this product yet again and then you might as well just buy the odyssey g9 that will cost you half as much and not have this problem at all now this is theoretically something that samsung could fix with a firmware update yet again so maybe this won't be an issue in the future but considering that this has been an issue for months now i just had to bring it up today as well so i have to admit that i am personally genuinely just disappointed i didn't just expect a way better product i honestly expected way better quality control and i also expected a company of this size to deal with any issues quickly and aggressively especially on their flagship gaming monitor now it has been months since this very expensive monitor has been available in shops and while some issues have been fixed there is still so much more to be done so i personally will definitely not be buying this for myself and i honestly think that you shouldn't either it is just not worth its price at least not in this current state i understand that this format is very impressive but if you're expecting that great awesome all-around experience that the specs suggest you won't be getting it just yet and i don't think spending days trying to tweak a 2300 euro monitor just to have it perform on an acceptable level is worth it at least not for me for about the same price you could get a nice oled tv for an equally or maybe even more impressive hdr gaming experience plus get an ultra wide like the 38 inch lg for example for that all-around productivity or i would say something along those lines to get the best of both worlds now i do know that two devices are not an ideal solution but i would say it's still a lot better experience than getting one neo g9 having said that uh there are actually some cases where it might be an interesting option now that they've fixed the hdr if most of what you do is play games that benefit from this ridiculous size like racing games for example or flight sims many of the issues that i mentioned before might not be relevant to you and i can see why you still might want to go for it and that's okay because it is true that there are no other monitors like this one unless you go for the odyssey g9 from last year so the hdr experience might not be as impressive on that one but the format is the same most issues i mentioned are not there and it will cost you way less so that is always an option but keep in mind when the odyssey came out last year it had a bunch of problems as well and it took months before they fixed them and released a revised version so if you can wait for them to do the same for the neogenei or until a completely new model with much better performance comes out i would honestly suggest you do so they're just way too many things with this product that you have to settle for to justify spending so much money on it now that's it for today i really hope you liked this video if you did please click that like button and don't forget to subscribe to tech testers to never miss an upload bye guys and see in the next one you\n"