Samsung 49'' inch monitor (CRG9) release date 22 April and cost about 1.400£

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My fourth panel is coming tommorow. Fingers crossed.

Sadly even if it is perfect, if I'm impressed by the LG 55'' OLED I might just go for that. I phoned Currys and their techknowhow for £6 does cover burn in.
 
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My fourth panel is coming tommorow. Fingers crossed.

Sadly even if it is perfect, if I'm impressed by the LG 55'' OLED I might just go for that. I phoned Currys and their techknowhow for £6 does cover burn in.

They confirmed that? For PC use? I do wonder if it would be a loophole, given the use an OLED would get on a PC... far more than it would as a TV (its 'intended' use). I know they can check software for usage, so if burn-in occurred, it would concern me that this could be used as a reason for them to not cover burn-in, as you wouldn't be able to pretend the display hadn't been hammered.

My concern with burn-in on any OLED relating to PC usage wouldn't be gaming, but rather web browsing or work stuff (Photoshop, Premiere etc.), anything where you have fixed windows on screen for hours. I don't think gaming would be a concern, unless you were doing mammoth sessions in the same game, EVERY day of the week.
 
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They confirmed that? For PC use? I do wonder if it would be a loophole, given the use an OLED would get on a PC... far more than it would as a TV (its 'intended' use). I know they can check software for usage, so if burn-in occurred, it would concern me that this could be used as a reason for them to not cover burn-in, as you wouldn't be able to pretend the display hadn't been hammered.

My concern with burn-in on any OLED relating to PC usage wouldn't be gaming, but rather web browsing or work stuff (Photoshop, Premiere etc.), anything where you have fixed windows on screen for hours. I don't think gaming would be a concern, unless you were doing mammoth sessions in the same game, EVERY day of the week.

I can ask them to confirm it. I think tbh for a big company like curries with a warranty program, they won't try to delve into the usage of a device and whats used. Legally it becomes very difficult for them to discern what was and what wasn't PC use.

Yup. Very true. TBH I'm planning to mount on a monitor arm a second display (34'' UW) which I'll connect via display port and use for every-day browsing as I imagine browsing on a 55'' TV from a desk would be quite annoying.

As is the same with plasma, there are definitley inherent risks to the tech for a far superior experience so its just balancing up the risks vs rewards.
 
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Fourth panel is perfect. FFS. I get a perfect panel now that I've ordered the 55'' C9 OLED. Will do a comparison and probably a thread next week to describe my thoughts on what I think are the two best value gaming panels on the market.
 
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Fourth panel is perfect. FFS. I get a perfect panel now that I've ordered the 55'' C9 OLED. Will do a comparison and probably a thread next week to describe my thoughts on what I think are the two best value gaming panels on the market.

Congrats!

May I suggest you to do a video review since you're so enthusiastic about both CRG9 and C9?
 
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Got mine set up on the arm tonight. Looks amazing. Hard to appreciate how big it will be until you actually get it. I have one stuck pixel in the top right corner. Can only see it on white background so it won't bother me. Can't see any backlight bleed just looking at it in a dark room which is good enough for me. Colours look great and the increased contrast from my IPS is noticeable.

Motion clarity has been good in the very limited testing I've done so far, so at the moment I think I'll be keeping it.

Pixel count is a struggle for my GPU in some games but it still looks alright if I drop the resolution, so I can live with that till I upgrade the rest of the PC.
 
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Got mine set up on the arm tonight. Looks amazing. Hard to appreciate how big it will be until you actually get it. I have one stuck pixel in the top right corner. Can only see it on white background so it won't bother me. Can't see any backlight bleed just looking at it in a dark room which is good enough for me. Colours look great and the increased contrast from my IPS is noticeable.

Motion clarity has been good in the very limited testing I've done so far, so at the moment I think I'll be keeping it.

Pixel count is a struggle for my GPU in some games but it still looks alright if I drop the resolution, so I can live with that till I upgrade the rest of the PC.


Which arm are you using?? I'm contemplating how to keep the CRG9 and possibly the C9 OLED. Do you have an arm in mind which can make that happen?

Great news. A dead piel in the periphery is no big deal.. i had mine in the middle of the screen on my old one.
 
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I spoke to soon. The clicking sound is still here. At the ends of each monitor I'm hearing the same ****** noise. doesn't seem as severe as the last set but we'll see... ..

....
...
 
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Just to let anyone know, whos been following my grumbles. Called Samsung, they said "Thats not right" to the clicking noise (regardless of the Ghosting on top of that). So I will be sending the monitor back, thats the 3rd Monitor that's been faulty!!

I have just noticed, though, OC has a new stock in - so I'm buying another one, that will make it 4. That just shows how wonderful this monitor is, when you get one that works. I could not go back to a smaller monitor.

4th time lucky, I hope!

Thanks.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1FODi_cPdASLu_4HaA-PuhmDzywoVJE7J?usp=sharing
The 3rd monitor is going back because of the cracking noise, I recorded it and sent it to Samsung. They said that's definitely not right. Upon putting the 4th monitor away today, I looked at the poly inside the box and saw a big hole, then looked at the box there was a corrisponding hole. Someone at the depo hammered in a bit of iron or poll, or something similar, that went through the box, through the poly and hit the screen.

DPD.. Suck.

Just to reiterate, is your clicking noise from the peripheries of each monitor?

I seem to have the same (again). I just took off the plastic from the screen, i hope its just that which was expanding.. but we'll see.
 
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Just to reiterate, is your clicking noise from the peripheries of each monitor?

I seem to have the same (again). I just took off the plastic from the screen, i hope its just that which was expanding.. but we'll see.

Hey mate, clicking noises could be heard from all over the monitor, they went away after 10 minutes though, so it's surely a heat issue. But why take the risk, the other 3 monitors I got didn't have it. The first panel had a loud buzzing noise near the top right, you could hear it changing frequency, which was annoying.

I have a bad problem with Ghosting as well, which I think is down to having a Nvidia card. There's slight stuttering as well. Lol, I have the 5th panel being delivered in about 30 minutes, this is the last one I will try, after this I will admit defeat and wait for a year until we get a full G sync option that is not filled with issues.


EDIT: Ok, got the 5th panel. This panel does have the clicking noises, but not as bad as the 2nd panel. Its mainly when I first turn on it, start up an intensive game or close a game down. Its got to be a heat issue; pretty sure its the plastic expanding, but of course cannot test this. I wonder whether to return it or not. I won't get another one. I could put up with the clicking as long as its not going to get worse.

Are you keeping your panel?
 
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Which arm are you using?? I'm contemplating how to keep the CRG9 and possibly the C9 OLED. Do you have an arm in mind which can make that happen?

Great news. A dead piel in the periphery is no big deal.. i had mine in the middle of the screen on my old one.

Spent some more time messing with screen. Need to get to grips with all the settings for HDR etc. Definitely keeping it. iracing looks amazing.

Definitely need a new PC now though

The arm I'm using is:

FLEXIMOUNTS D7L Heavy Duty Gas Spring Swing Monitor Arm Desk Stand Monitor Mount Fits for 10"-34" Monitor Weighting 6-15KG
 
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Hey mate, clicking noises could be heard from all over the monitor, they went away after 10 minutes though, so it's surely a heat issue. But why take the risk, the other 3 monitors I got didn't have it. The first panel had a loud buzzing noise near the top right, you could hear it changing frequency, which was annoying.

I have a bad problem with Ghosting as well, which I think is down to having a Nvidia card. There's slight stuttering as well. Lol, I have the 5th panel being delivered in about 30 minutes, this is the last one I will try, after this I will admit defeat and wait for a year until we get a full G sync option that is not filled with issues.


EDIT: Ok, got the 5th panel. This panel does have the clicking noises, but not as bad as the 2nd panel. Its mainly when I first turn on it, start up an intensive game or close a game down. Its got to be a heat issue; pretty sure its the plastic expanding, but of course cannot test this. I wonder whether to return it or not. I won't get another one. I could put up with the clicking as long as its not going to get worse.

Are you keeping your panel?

Hi mate, I'm once again getting the clicking noise and beyond all else, its just freaking annoying.
Its actually just as bad as my first one but seems to calm down if I leave it on. Given its in my bedroom and I turn the monitor off at night, I'm inclined to return it. I hate having this stupid clicking noise at night time just plagueing my sleep.

I'm actually ready to call it a day on the CRG9. I did a mini-review of it on reddit. Ultimately I think I'll return it and sadly I'm not going to take part in this panel lottery anyore. Its now 4 returns and I feel like a weird person, constantly switching screens. Even with a mint condition working screen, it still has actual limitations which aren't panel lottery.

It has severe limitations despite being IMO the best monitor around £1,000. I have an LG OLED C9 arriving on Sunday. If I'm impressed with it given the lower PPI, I'll be using that in conjunction with an Alienware AW3418DW (I just trust this monitor so much) and end my love affair with the CRG9.
Its a great experience and for immersion, has to be up their at £1,000.
 
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The CRG9 in my mind has the following pros:
  1. Best in class 32:9 FOV
  2. Better than IPS black levels and colours
  3. 120hz refresh rate
  4. Nice responsiveness
  5. Comfortable for productivity
  6. Striking appearance with a next gen-like experience
Cons:
  1. Flickering inconsistently secondary to freesync +/- VA panel
  2. HDR sucks.
  3. QA issues (creaking/cracking issues, dead pixels, stuck pixels) - I went through 4 panels
  4. Sucks for films/movies/TV shows
  5. Compataibility for games does involve a lot more fiddling, and 21:9 fixes are more common
  6. Colour shift
  7. Poor viewing angles (although does it matter?)
  8. Stand does not go high enough for some users
  9. Poor build quality for price paid


So if I was to write about the CRG9, I'd basically describe it as a beautiful but flawed product. Its a rough diamond. You don't get is promised on the box. You get an awesome 32:9 experience with black levels which are a clear upgrade from the IPS glow infested high end ultrawides. Its a very good SDR picture. The install is painless and easy, albiet not as easy as my AW341DW. The stand is significantly poorer quality with cheap plastic legs and it does not feel like a premium product. However it does look like one. It doesn't come with built in speakers but I don't expect a high end monitor to.

Touching on the actual panel, its better than any other VA panel I've used. However, it still a VA panel. It has severe color shift issues from the top of the screen to the bottom and it also has issues from the middle of the side to the peripheries. It has no IPS glow which is great and backlight bleeding is at a minimum but definitley still there. Luckily the corners are so far away from your periphery, you have to look for it. The edgelit display also can sometimes show a bit of a bloom.

Bright room performance is great. It has PLENTY of brightness for any envrionment and possibly even direct spotlights.
Dark room performance is great compared to any IPS screen I've used simply due t lack of IPS glow. Is the ghosting due to being a VA panel an issue? No. This is the best VA panel at dealing with ghosting, but just like IPS glow on IPS panels, its a limitation of the technology.
Its built in black equaliser can get the darks a bit darker but it comes at the expense of changing the general color gamut, which resulted in Witcher 3 geralt having more orange skin.

Onto gaming with this screen. Its great. I wouldn't go as far to say its incredible but its far more immersive than 21:9. This comes at a cost of actual gaming ability being hampered due to the overstimulation of content in the peripheries and times the feelings of motion being a bit too strong. I didn't get motion sickness but I can see other users getting it. A question I had to ask myself was am I enjoying this because of the 32:9 aspect ratio or because my peripheries are filled with content?
For Media, this screen was always going to struggle due to the awkward aspect ratio. I commend anyone who watches their favorite film or TV show on this. It just doesn't fit.
For productivity, its simply amazing.
For competitve gaming, this is not the screen for you. It just simply is too immersive and distracting to properly refine and master a game. Also HUDs move to the side.

For immersive single player games, if the support is there, its an amazing experience which is better than 21:9. However, how much more immersive it is and how much the extra GPU power is worth it, is based on how the game uses the peripheries. A LOT of game uses the peripheral vision to warm the edges of the image into a fish eye like perspective. A few don't and they're the most enjoyable.

Now the age old question comes up, is the rendered peripheral vision (which costs the same as the middle) worth it compared to the higher FPS you can save? This is a tough one and it depends game to game. But honestly, probably not.

On the vertical real estate, do you ever feel like you want a little or a lot more? Yes quite simply. Is it enough? Of course; its the same as most people's monitors.

Where the monitor kind of falls apart is on the promises it fails to keep. Its described as HDR, but its not. The local dimming zones might as well not be there as it creates huge halo-ing in SDR content and the HDR performance severely struggles against any FALD or OLED capable set. The promised freesync support is a flickery experience whenever you need it to actually work (at low FPS) and can therefore be distracting. Being a VA panel, the flickering could also be accountable to that.

The QA is historically beyond defensible at present. I am so happy for any owners who get a good panel or can ignore the dead or stuck pixels but for £1,000, I do not expect such poor QA. The samples I've used have included dead and stuck pixels in the middle of the screen, and cracking noises which don't settle from the peripheries of the monitor.

For driving the monitor you'll need a 2070S, 1080ti, 2080 or 2080ti. Its difficult to drive as the pixels are close to 4k but its worth it.

I also have to question the 120hz refresh rate as I've experienced on every panel LESS flickering at 100hz. Could the panel actually be pushing itself to its limits at 120hz which is causing the increased frequency of artifacts? 100hz/10bit or 100hz/8bits gives less severe flickering than at 120hz.

So, in conclusion its a mixed bag.

So do I reccomend this monitor? If you're lucky in the panel lottery department, YES. Its an amazing experience which betters the competition at the £1,000 price range from many perspectives. Is it perfect? No. Are there many compromises from poor HDR performance and support, color shift, QA issues, a redundant local dimming alogorithm, poor compataibility with some games, poor media playback performance due to black bars galore, a subpar build quality, general VA panel flaws and flickering when engaging the freesync in certain circumstances? Yes.

Is it future proof? Yes and no. From an ability to drive perspective, absolutley. However the lack of real HDR support means it will age badly. I see HDR, deep blacks and colour reproduction as more important than chasing a silly resolution number just as much as I see a wider aspect ratio more important than the pixel count. However here, the redundancy of the HDR feature will leave a lot of people scratching their heads in years to come.

For my money and if new to ultrawides I'd suggest the AW3418DW on a sale. It'll come with 3 years warranty, has IPS viewing angles, much much better build quality, a great panel replace system, a better physical design and IPS colour accuracy. It lacks the 32:9 aspect ratio, it has IPS glow which is horrible in darker envrionments, and is a native 100hz screen but its out of the box experience is a lot simpler than the CRG9 and due to HUD placement, will be much more useful for competitive games. It'll also play better with media content, showing less black bars and really shining with 21:9 monitors. Oh and most importantly it'll be half the price.

For veterans to UW looking for an upgrade, this is possibly the best bang for buck purchase you can make. No UW above £1,000 upgrades the experience like this. You can have as much local dimming as you like but an increase in the actual field of view is unparalleled. The LG 38 incher, if it didn't completely fail at HDR, would have been a good rival. However for the little bit of extra vertical real estate that monitor gives you, this one completely fills your peripheries. For the CRG9, just understand that all the tech its packed in has its limitations and is somewhat flawed.



___________________________________________

My feedback to samsung would be please sort out your QA issues. Its inexcusable. For future freesync monitors, please test them thoroughly with Gsync capable cards and see if they are compataible and if they aren't, get them to work. For a near 4k resolution, most of us will have to turn to RTX cards to power this. Also please include some semi-calibrated profiles for users who want to activate the black equaliser so that it doesn't completley destroy skin tones. And if you're going to include local dimming, do it properly or don't do it. I hate to think we are possibly paying a premium on these unengaged local dimming zones. And please in regards to HDR, if you're going to write it on the box, make sure its to an acceptable degree with the relavant Nvidia and Windows support. I've heard Samsung have actually taken returns for people who've questioned the HDR support, accepting its muddled.

If the next CRG9 can add a strong local dimming algorithm and huge increase in number of zones, fix QA and fix HDR support/performance, we would be nearing the perfect monitor for a current available GPU power; with the only foreseeable upgrade being to dual 4k resolution at some point when GPU power catches up.

To all my fellow CRG9 fans, sorry for the neutral review as I'm sure it will trigger a few people sadly. I'd like to reiterate, despite the flaws, I still reccomend this monitor for the £1000 price range. Expectations just need to be controlled because in the monitor world, we always will sadly get flawed products.

For all prospective UW buyers, I hope I've helped with this completley honest review of the CRG9 which has involved multiple hours of gaming and using 4 different CRG9 panels and comparing them to both IPS, FALD, VA panels.
 
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Well... although obviously subjective, that’s about as thorough a write up as can possibly be in a forum post! Kudos!!

I think as it is now, the CRG9 is an excellent base for evolution.

I’m really hoping that based on this model, Samsung release a similar specced 34 inch screen with the addition of gsync (and maybe the omission of HDR).

One of those at native 120, or even 144 is clearly the way to go.

I’ve gone for a cheap stop gap because every UW panel right now has major drawbacks, but in an ideal world my next monitor will be a Samsung as described above.

Gaming monitors for grown ups!
 
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