The screen has an anti-glare coating to combat overhead lighting, and its 256 nits of standard brightness (as tested) should be enough even without HDR enabled. However, setting up a custom profile for color, brightness, contrast, sharpness, gamma, and more should please those who want things looking perfect.

The Samsung Odyssey G5 is a 32-inch curved gaming monitor with QHD resolution, 144Hz refresh rate, 1ms response time, HDR10 support, and AMD FreeSync and NVIDIA G-Sync compatibility. We consider ‘AMA = 1’ to be interest here, with ‘AMA = 2’ of possible interest if you’ve got a fairly high overshoot tolerance. I personally think that resolution is massively overrated in importance when it comes to gaming, with frame rate, refresh rate, response time, panel type and extra visual effects like real time ray tracing and HDR doing much more to generate immersion.

The monitor's HDR10 capabilities are fairly limited, and anyone thinking they're getting a true HDR display will likely be disappointed.

There are nine color mode presets available, 10 if you include the Custom profile that you can set up yourself. You’ll also notice ‘G-SYNC Compatible’ listed under ‘Monitor Technology’ in this section, as shown below. A more achievable near-term goal is support for at least 90% DCI-P3 (Digital Cinema Initiatives standard colour space) coverage. A range of other downsampling settings are also available with the same refresh rates listed, including 2560 x 1440.

Impressive bright highlights and bright shades are an important part of HDR, so we didn’t particularly like the idea of brightness being eaten away based on ambient lighting. But there was some fairly bright and at times colourful ‘halo’ trailing for a small number of transitions, particularly below 80fps and where brighter shades were displayed in the background.

But can also be selected under SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) where various adjustments are made to the image – think of them as a sort of ‘filter’, but there’s nothing ‘HDR’ about the resulting image with an SDR signal. He is an avid PC gamer and multi-platform user, and spends most of his time either tinkering with or writing about tech. We again consider ‘AMA = 2’ optimal here due to it slightly reducing how bold the strobe crosstalk appears without a clear negative impact. AMA = 2’ removes these traces of ‘powdery’ trailing but introduces extra overshoot or intensifies it further.The video below shows the Lagom text test, a mixed desktop background, game scene and dark desktop background from a variety of viewing angles. The setting is referred to as ‘AMD FreeSync Premium’ in both cases, although the exact wording may depend on the driver version you’re using. If you’re intending to use the monitor with the PS5 or Xbox Series X/S, be aware that a small settings tweak may be required to ensure 120Hz is selectable for the Full HD resolution. This isn’t sufficient to give HDR content the intended look, where strong DCI-P3 coverage is desirable and good coverage of the very wide Rec.