A common flaw of curved gaming displays is that they often fail to lean hard enough into the advantages of a curve – in other words, most don’t curve hard enough. The Samsung Odyssey Ark is one of the rare few that doesn’t suffer from this issue, and at the ideal viewing distance (right around 31 inches), you feel totally enveloped by what is on screen, both with your eyes and your ears.
But at the same time, the Odyssey Ark is just too much screen, and the aforementioned ideal viewing distance is just too close to actually enjoy what you’re playing for any length of time. It’s even more impractical for casual computer use and becomes downright absurd when converted into its portrait orientation.
Samsung succeeded in the goal of enveloping you in an experience, and it’s perhaps not Samsung’s fault that such an experience is, generally, unpleasant.
I really wanted to like the Ark, but I found it akin to trying to eat a bucket full of candy on Halloween: you can have too much of a good thing and even if you enjoy some of it moment-to-moment, it’s going to make you sick in the end.
When I first sat in front of the Ark, my eyes legitimately hurt as they attempted to deal with the closeness of content as well as the speed at which it was coming. They eventually got used to it, but I never really got over how close I had to be in order to fully experience the benefits of the curve. There are things to like, but the overall package is often unusable, not to mention extremely expensive.
Samsung Odyssey Ark – Design and Build
In order to give you a fully immersive 55-inch curved display, Samsung had to balance that monitor with an extremely heavy stand and hold it all together with weighty parts throughout. In my time with the Ark, I tried it in a few different orientations and locations, which was probably a mistake: moving this display is an arduous, nearly impossible task since it weighs 91 pounds.
The entire thing is so heavy that it easily outweighs any display I’ve ever had in my house and I worked up a serious sweat setting it up the first time – and even more adjusting it to a location in my office that made sense.
But all that extra weight is designed to make articulating the Ark very simple once it’s in place. The counterweighted stand allows you to easily rotate the Ark between portrait and landscape orientation and up and down to fit your particular setup.
The rear of the Ark features two strips of colored LEDs that you control through the TV’s settings. These aren’t super bright, but in a dark room, they do cast a nice glow against an opposing wall.
I like how Samsung chose to route all of the connectivity to the Ark through its One Connect box, so the rear of this display is beautifully clean. The One Connect provides optical audio, Ethernet, and four HDMI 2.1 ports in one convenient location that you can stash away under a desk or in a separate control closet, which I really appreciate.
What’s strange to me is that the Ark is advertised as a monitor more than a television, but using it and looking at the inputs really puts it squarely in the other camp. This is a television, both in the fact it doesn’t accept DisplayPort and also in that, once it’s on and operational, it acts just like any of Samsung’s other televisions, for better or for worse.
Samsung Odyssey Ark – The Remote
When I first pulled out the Ark’s remote, I was excited. This looked different than any remote I’ve used before and it seemed like it was going to be fun to use. I was wrong.
This remote and the overall control experience are really unpleasant largely due to the incongruity between the remote’s design team and Samsung’s Tizen television software. The center of the remote features a giant dial that is used to scroll up and down across the system’s screens, and that works okay. It’s the other buttons that are confusing, as their layout isn’t intuitive and I constantly had to look down at it and ponder exactly what I wanted it to do. Go forward? Go back? Undo? Open a menu? Which was it again, the arrow going left into a box, right into a box, or maybe it was the offset diamond? Wait, where is volume?
Maybe this is just my user error, but I constantly held this remote upside down, because in my mind it feels like the sloped part should be facing towards me (that, and none of the icons on this remote immediately tell me what way is up and what way is down). But even if I did get the hang of this remote, which I imagine would happen after another month of dedicated use, it doesn’t jive with on-screen commands.
You see, Samsung gave us a brand new remote to use with the Ark but didn’t update the software on the TV to recognize it. All of the indicators on the screen assume you’re using one of Samsung’s more standard television remotes, and multiple times it told me to push a certain button that doesn’t even exist on the Ark’s remote. For example, it would prompt me to open the Game Bar by holding down on the back button, but that doesn’t work with the Ark’s controller, since there is a dedicated Game Bar button.
Can I figure it out? Sure. I was able to get it to work reasonably well, but it was a struggle to do so and I always dreaded needing to use the remote to do anything, knowing full well I was going to mess it up a few times before getting it right.
One thing I do like about the remote, and all Samsung remotes, is that it is solar-powered. The strip at the top brings in light and keeps the remote charged at all times, which is one less peripheral I need to keep AAA batteries around for.
Overall, I like the idea of this remote, I just don’t like the implementation, as it feels like Samsung came in with some new grand and innovative plans, but gave up halfway through.
Samsung Odyssey Ark – Software and UI
As I mentioned, I don’t want to call the Ark a monitor, because it’s not: it’s a curved 55-inch Samsung TV. In addition to it lacking DisplayPort, the Ark acts just like any other Samsung Television when you turn it on.
It is powered by Tizen, which is Samsung’s operating system for televisions that allows you to install a wide range of streaming apps, which is kind of nice, but really unnecessary for a monitor that is connected to a computer that can access all those services on its own. But with Tizen, you get another experience I’ve come to truly dread about Samsung TVs: Samsung TV Plus.
Samsung absolutely loves to autoplay Samsung TV Plus, a streaming service filled with hundreds of channels of content you don’t care about. Just about everything is decades-old, like ancient episodes of Survivor, Fear Factor, and the Fairly Odd Parents. If the Ark is at any point left idle or you go and try and fiddle with the settings from the home screen, it immediately plays Samsung TV Plus, which you can’t turn off again until you complete what you’re doing or back out. Technically, you can disable Samsung TV Plus, but it’s not the most straightforward process to do so (there is a difference between “Remove” and “Disable” in the UI, for example). I would much rather the company not make such an invasive feature the standard.
I complain about Tizen every time I review a Samsung TV, which for those of you who read my previous reviews, must feel like I am beating a dead horse. Maybe I am, but as much as I don’t want this experience in my living room, I doubly don’t want it on my computer station.
Also like its television counterparts, the settings you can adjust on the Ark are particularly meager when compared to competitors, especially if you consider it as a gaming monitor. Like on Samsung’s recent TVs, the settings for the display and for the gaming setup are separated into the settings menu and the Game Bar.
The settings menu lets you adjust things like contrast, brightness, and Gamma, but only the bare minimum here. The TV also has a few preset picture options, like Standard and Vivid, but these are also extremely limited. As it is a Samsung display, the Ark doesn’t support Dolby Vision either, so you’ll have to make do with HDR 10+.
The Game Bar is where you can see information and settings pertaining to your current on-screen gaming content, like framerate, HDR, resolution, and FreeSync. This is, again, identical to all other modern Samsung displays, and I really like it. I think Samsung and LG are the leaders when it comes to on-screen gaming information, and that doesn’t change here.
Where the Ark diverges from other displays is how it can work as both landscape and portrait orientations. In landscape, it works just like any other Samsung TV, but when you orient it to Portrait, it automatically switches to a format that lets you customize what you see in different sectors of the screen. You can set the Ark to operate as one giant vertical display or break that into two or three sections.
In order to do this, you have to tell the screen what you want it to do with each slice, which means you have to use the remote to build this out. That experience, as I touched on above, isn’t the most intuitive, but it isn’t too hard to get it to where you want it after some fiddling.
From a software usability standpoint, I think this could have been better, but from a hardware usability perspective, I don’t think this is a very good layout anyway. I tried to use the display like this, both at a standing desk and a traditional one, but just could not vibe with it: it’s just too big, and too often required craning my neck to see everything.
Samsung Odyssey Ark – Picture Quality
I may have my issues with Samsung, but the quality of the display is rarely one of them and that is no different here: I’m very impressed with the viewing experience of the Ark.
For starters, the Ark is matte rather than glossy, which means it strongly reduces glare. In my desktop setup, I often have to close my blinds in order to get any work done during the day on my leftmost monitor. I typically use a three-monitor setup, and the width of this arrangement is about the same as what the Ark becomes. In contrast to my typical arrangement, I could keep the window blinds wide open when using the Ark, even with the left side curve directly facing the window. There was, of course, a bit of a bright blob that I could see if I was looking for it, but the display gets bright enough to not make this an issue, especially combined with the matte finish.
The Odyssey Ark uses a mini LED array that, at least in monitors, is pretty uncommon. It’s much more common in TVs and what I saw here was pretty in line with what I have come to expect from Samsung displays using the technology. Blooming was nonexistent thanks to the direct backlighting and haloing was held to a minimum due to the mini LEDs (though it’ll still show up to a small degree if you’re looking for it closely).
Because Mini LEDs can more directly control on-screen contrast, black levels are pretty great on the Ark, though they are not as exceptional as you get with OLEDs. Given the cost of the Ark (more than $3,000), you’re not paying for just the panel, but also the fact it is curved. If you are going to compare the panel directly against an OLED, curvature ignored, then OLED is going to win every time, which means you have to put some significant value in that 1,000R curve.
Samsung promises a typical brightness of 600 nits that will peak as high as 1,000, and I definitely noticed the advantage of that level of brightness. This display is perfectly able to handle lighting conditions of any time of day, and at night I actually found I had to turn it down a bit. For a guy who loves a super-bright display, that should say something.
As far as color accuracy goes, Samsung promises up to 95% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut, but I was only able to verify it to 90.2%. It also hit 99.4% of sRGB and 78.9% of Adobe RGB with an average Delta E of 4.12. These aren’t great numbers when viewed without context, but you have to consider this is a 4K gaming display capable of 165Hz and it’s curved. With that in mind, this is really impressive.
Even more so is the screen uniformity which, with a few minor exceptions on the left side, was really nice. I was expecting a lot poorer results here because of the extreme curve, but I was very pleasantly surprised.
Hard numbers aside, I really enjoyed both the standard viewing experience as well as how games looked on the Ark. I think the colors are, overall, pretty balanced, if not shading a bit too much in the greens (not atypical of Samsung panels).
Samsung Odyssey Ark – Audio Quality
I usually have only bad things to say about audio quality on displays this large – TV or monitor – but the Ark changes that narrative.
While the audio isn’t what I would call “great,” it’s more than serviceable. Samsung characterizes the audio working in unison with the curve to create a strong immersive gaming experience, and I would agree to that to a certain extent. I did feel like the audio “enveloped” me pleasantly and improved the overall experience.
But as good as it is, I found it to be a bit too weak on the low-end. It could hit highs and mids decently well, but audio lacked the punch you get from a strong bass. Rumble was entirely absent as well, which can suck some of the life out of particularly dramatic movies or video games.
So while the Ark definitely sets a new standard for audio quality in a television, it’s still my recommendation to either use headphones or pick up a dedicated audio system for it.
Samsung Odyssey Ark – Gaming Experience
I tested the Ark on my PlayStation 5 and with a gaming computer (with an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti), playing mainly Horizon Forbidden West, Apex Legends, Halo 5, and Destiny 2. While the display can push 165Hz in 4K with a one millisecond response time if your PC’s GPU is powerful enough, I spent most of my time playing at 4K at 120Hz and found it to be a pretty excellent experience.
HDR gaming looks especially good, and both Destiny 2 and Apex Legends look fantastic, with on-screen content popping off the screen and responding quickly to my input commands. Horizon Forbidden West also looked fantastic, with night scenes especially showing off the panel’s great dynamic range.
What I will say is that the viewing experience isn’t great with a computer. This is a very nice gaming display and even puts in work for movies and TV, but I just could not get into using it as a computer monitor when I wasn’t gaming. If you’re going to own an Ark, I think there is some expectation that you’re going to be able to use it for more than just gaming, since it’s going to dominate any space you put it in. From that perspective, I wasn’t a fan.
The sheer size and the recommended viewing distance make pixels appear not especially sharp, at least for my liking. Even with this much resolution, looking at a screen that close isn’t really a great experience. It’s going to sound weird to some of you, but I much prefer my three smaller 27-inch monitors next to each other than I did using the one giant 55-inch display.
Purchasing Guide
The Samsung Odyssey Ark is available from Amazon, Best Buy, and Samsung with an MSRP of $3,499, though it received a discount of $700 for Black Friday.
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