Samsung has a crack at ye olde glasses-free 3D monitor thing but it’s new cheaper 49-inch ultrawide OLED is far more interesting

Samsung has announced a slew of new gaming monitors and on paper, the big news is a glasses-free 3D model. However, it’s a new lower-cost version of Samsung’s 49-inch ultrawide OLED that could be most interesting in the real world.

The Odyssey 3D G90XF is a 27-inch 4K model with, “advanced eye-tracking technology and a proprietary lenticular lens deliver a natural-looking high-definition 3D image.” The combination of eye-tracking and lenticular lenses to enable glasses-free 3D is not entirely new.

Lenovo announced something essentially identical back in 2023. Indeed, our own Jacob experienced a Samsung prototype over a year ago and came away impressed. And yet, 3D displays never seem to take off.

Admittedly, most attempts in the past, including Nvidia’s 3D Vision, involved glasses which typically prove quite the impediment to adoption. So, could this glasses-free version take off?

Jacob only had five minutes with the concept display, but said, “It delivers a genuinely decent 3D image.” One catch is that it requires an Nvidia RTX GPU with Samsung recommending RTX 3080 at minimum. But then this is not a cheap monitor.

For the record, this is an LCD monitor, not OLED, and thus has claimed 1 ms response. The refresh rate is 165 Hz. Samsung hasn’t released an official price. But it is listed on Samsung’s South Korean pre-order page at a price that converts to around $1,575. Ouch.

With that in mind, it could be the new Odyssey G9 G91F that’s more interesting. In most regards it’s familiar and similar to the Samsung Odyssey OLED G9 G93SC we reviewed way back in 2023. So, it’s a huge 49-inch 5,120 by 1,440 OLED.

Except instead of 240 Hz refresh, it’s 144 Hz and designed to allow, “more gamers to experience curved ultrawide gaming.” In other words, it’s cheaper. Again, Samsung hasn’t listed a price. But it’s on that South Korean pre-order website for a price that converts to $850. That’s about half the original launch price of the G93SC.

What’s more, Samsung monitors tend to slip under their MSRPs pretty quickly. So the G91F could dip below $800 in fairly short order. Fingers crossed.

Samsung also announced refreshed versions of its 4K OLEDs in 27-inch and 32-inch variants, rather oddly claiming “industry first” implementation of 240 Hz 4K technology, something that’s been widely available for years.

Anyway, the 32-inch version seems to be priced at around $1,100, with the 27-inch option not yet listed. We’ll keep an eye out for US and UK availability of all of those new monitors.