Samsung outs world’s first 500 Hz OLED gaming monitor but it’s painfully pricey at nearly $1,500

Personally, I slightly lose interest above 240 Hz when it comes to monitor refresh rates. Of course, I hung up my competitive shooter aspirations a decade or more ago. But if you want to be really, truly competitive, you can’t have too many hertz. Which is why the new Samsung Odyssey OLED G6 is big news. It’s the world’s first 500 Hz OLED gaming monitor.

We’ve seen 500 Hz panels before, of course. But they’ve all been LCD panels—and if I remember correctly, 1080p LCD panels at that. Yuck. The new 27-inch Odyssey OLED G6 fixes that not only courtesy of OLED panel technology, but also 2,560 by 1,440 or 1440p resolution.

That means it’ll make a pretty nice all-round gaming panel, which is something you can’t always say about, for instance, a 1080p LCD monitor based on a TN panel with rubbish viewing angles.

What’s more, Samsung rates the panel at 300 nits for full-screen brightness, which is a step up on the 250 nits of most if not all previous Samsung-based gaming monitors. On that basis, it may be using Samsung’s latest super-bright QD-OLED panel tech, as announced at CES.

For sure, it’s enabled Samsung to up HDR rating from the usual HDR 400 True Black to HD500 True Black. You also get the usual OLED benefits, including 0.03 ms response times.

Combined with the 500 Hz refresh, that should make for just about the clearest and most responsive motion rendering of perhaps any display tech we’ve yet seen on the PC. There is, inevitably, a catch. The Odyssey OLED G6 is currently listed on Samsung’s website at $1,488.

That’s a faintly ludicrous price for a mere 27-inch 1440p panel, even one this fast. Long story short, you’ll have to be utterly desperate for that increase in speed and response to seriously consider this monitor when you can nearly buy a pair of 32-inch 4K OLEDs for the same money and still have a very nippy experience, plus a larger and more immersive viewing experience and far better pixel density, not to mention massively improved multi-tasking for non gaming apps.

Of course, you can also get a 49-inch ultrawide OLED with exactly the same pixel density as this new Samsung for about $900. That’s essentially two 27-inch 1440p OLEDs fused together and makes this Samsung look like an awfully rum deal—unless you’re all about that refresh.