Samsung's new gaming monitor is brilliant but bonkers

(Image credit: Future)

published 17 August 2022

We’ve been looking forward to this: after teasing us at the beginning of 2022, Samsung is now ready to ship its brilliant and bonkers Odyssey Ark display. If you have the cash, the space and a suitably beefy gaming rig this could be the best gaming monitor money can buy.

The Ark isn’t like other monitors. For starters, it’s really curved – 1,000R, the same as a circle with a 1m radius. It’s a 55-inch, 4K mini-LED display with a 16:9 aspect ratio, 1,000,000:1 contrast and a peak brightness of 2,000 nits. There’s a 165Hz refresh rate with FreeSync Premium Pro support, and there’s built-in upscaling of non-4K games. There’s also a punchy sound system with six speakers and you can connect four different HDMI sources simultaneously for a multi-screen setup.

But the most interesting thing about it is a hinge.

Why cockpit mode is going to sell a lot of Odyssey Arks

What’s really different about the Samsung Odyssey Ark is its cockpit mode. Like some other monitors you can rotate it from landscape to portrait mode, but those other monitors don’t have that curvature.

What Samsung’s done here is to make the bottom half of the display pretty much vertical, with the curve going over your head. Hence the name, cockpit mode: it’s going to make flying and space sims feel incredible. And in landscape you can adjust the aspect ratio from the default 16:9 to various super-wide resolutions too.

I’d love one of these but it’s way beyond my budget: the price is expected to be $3,500. But if you’re looking for the ultimate in immersive gaming, this could well be it.

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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).