Samsung Odyssey S27FG810S Review: Glorious Gaming Monitor

Design

• Premium metallic build quality and finish
• Impressively flexible set up and optional backlighting
• Good connectivity

The S27FG810S follows the established Odyssey 16:9 OLED template to a tee. Which is fine with me, as it delivers a beautiful combination of stylish minimalist lines and excellent build quality, complete with a premium metallic finish for the hexagonal desktop stand and the screen’s outer trim.

The attractive rounded sculpting of the rear side is set off by a crisp silver finish, while a roster of LEDs encircling the point where the stand attaches to the screen’s rear add eye-catching and immersive coloured lighting to your gaming experience. You can turn this Infinity lighting system off, if you want to save a bit of running power or you’re just not a fan.

Another lovable design feature of the S27FG810S is how easy it is to put together. No screws or screwdrivers are required, with the neck attaching to the base with a simple twist, and the screen locking effortlessly onto the neck’s head mount with a simple angle and click motion.

Even a klutz like me was able to get the monitor assembled in well under a minute – yet, crucially, unlike all my IKEA furniture building efforts, the result still felt robust and stable.

Despite how easy it is to assemble, the S27FG810S’s screen can easily be tilted or twisted round, as well as being rotatable through 90 degrees if you want to use it in a vertical orientation.

Connectivity is impressive. A pair of HDMI inputs (switchable between HDMI 2.1 and 1.4 specifications) are joined by a 1.4-spec DisplayPort input and no less than three USB 3.0 ports: One USB-B Upstream, two Type-A downstream.

There’s no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth support, but then this isn’t one of Samsung’s smart monitors and so doesn’t carry any streaming apps/services or support direct online cloud gaming. It also doesn’t carry any built in speakers, reducing the potential usefulness of a Bluetooth connection.

The only negatives about the design are that the connections are a little tricky to get to, placed as they are directly behind the chunky stand neck, and that the small joystick controller knob that provides your only way of making adjustments to the monitor’s settings is rather fiddly.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been too much to ask for Samsung to include a remote control for the S27FG810S’s £1099 / $1299 price.

Image Quality

• Stunning contrast and colour
• Fantastic sharpness and responsiveness
• Moderate HDR brightness – though impressive local intensity

As I’d hoped, the S27FG810S’s QD OLED panel kicks off an all-round phenomenal image performance with an incredible display of local – pixel level, in fact – light control that results in the sort of contrast most monitors can only dream of.

With the S27FG810S a full white pixel can exist right next to a full black pixel without the slightest hint of blooming/haloing/general light pollution in the dark pixel or any dimming of the bright pixel.

It’s not just at the extremes where you appreciate the screen’s self-emissive nature; it also fills in every intensity of light you could want between its ultra deep blackest and pristine whitest points, contributing to a sense of precision, detail, texture and accuracy in the rendering of every gaming environment that never feels anything less than perfect.

Contrast is so good it’s almost distracting at first – but rest assured our eyes and brain eventually get used to being spoiled by the S27FG810S’s talents, and settle down to just getting maximum enjoyment of the game worlds the screen is rendering.

The S27FG810S’s detail and sharpness also owes no small debt to the fact that Samsung has managed to squeeze a full 3840 x 2160 4K pixel resolution into the 27-inch screen. The incredibly high pixel density and low pixel pitch contributes to an image from a typical monitor viewing distance that feels so real, three-dimensional and free of pixel structure and jaggies that there’s essentially nothing standing between you and the onscreen action.

This is a good point to bring in the impact of the S27FG810S’s remarkable anti-glare screen. This really does manage to reject essentially all reflections – even if you’re gaming in a pretty bright room. And it does so with hardly such unwanted potential side effects as a general brightness reduction, colour shift from different viewing angles or ‘rainbowing’ across the screen.

In really quite extreme brightness or very direct artificial light the screen’s usually immaculate black colours can slip into a slightly purple-grey hue, but you won’t experience this in any normal room situation.

This remarkably successful rejection of reflections joins with the immaculate contrast and natural sharpness to remove even further any sense of a barrier between you and the images on screen.

I’d been a little worried before testing the S27FG810S that I might see a few focus issues or localised red/green colour fringing issues around small details given QD OLED panels use an unusual triangular sub-pixel structure. But actually the incredibly fine pixel pitch of this 27-inch 4K screen makes this even less of an issue than on bigger QD OLED screens. Even small text remains supremely readable and clear.

The S27FG810S’s exceptional contrast also helps the monitor get great value out of the high dynamic range graphics deployed by pretty much all triple A games (and increasingly many indie titles too). The dark end of the massively expanded HDR light spectrum is rendered essentially perfectly, with no hint of greyness or instability, while the light end of the spectrum always looks pure and gleams with intensity.

The range and precision of the S27FG810S’s light joins forces with the pure RGB Quantum Dot OLED system to produce a stunning range of colours that covers both the razzle dazzle and the subtle blends and nuances of today’s wide colour gamuts with supreme authority and precision.

It’s hard to think of another monitor that so immaculately brings out every last nuance of the best graphics around without the results feeling overly forensic or clinical, while also hitting such vibrant saturations and immaculate levels of purity. This is a colour performance you actually FEEL, just as you should.

It’s worth adding the S27FG810S retains strong colour saturations even if viewed from very wide angles (unlike most LCD screens), as well as avoiding the colour desaturation and coarseness in very dark shots that can appear with such content on less talented OLED displays.

Measuring the S27FG810S’s colour range using our Portrait Displays test equipment and Calman Ultimate software shows it delivering 137% of the Rec 709 range, 132.4% of the sRGB spectrum, 96.8% of the Adobe RGB gamut, and 98.25% of the DCI-P3 HDR spectrum.

Rounding out a consistently fantastic gaming experience on the S27FG810S is its excellent responsiveness. It handles high frame rates immaculately, delivering an ultra-smooth, ultra crisp experience at 120Hz and higher (it supports 240Hz) that’s completely free of blur, judder, smearing, stuttering and, with VRR in play, tearing.

Couple this with the excellent input lag control (I measured 9.2ms of input lag with 60Hz content, which more or less halves with 120Hz content, with a grey to grey response time of just 0.03ms) and using this monitor gives you a palpable gaming advantage over most monitors. As well as just looking supremely gorgeous.

While the S27FG810S is quite overtly a gaming monitor compared with Samsung’s crossover smart monitors, if you have plans to watch the occasional TV show or film on it you also get an image that actually puts many dedicated high-end TVs to shame. The contrast and colour remain exemplary, and the combination of self-emitting pixels and incredibly dense pixel pitch achieve a sense of detail and clarity that frequently takes your breath away.

The monitor even handles 24p films without judder looking too pronounced, despite not carrying any of the motion processing options available to Samsung’s TVs, as well as managing to hit brighter peaks in its Movie picture setting than it does in Game mode.

Tests using Calman Ultimate analysis software with Portrait Displays’ G1 signal generator and C6 HDR5000 colorimeter revealed video highlights as bright as 1000 nits on a 2% of screen area HDR test window, in fact – and even the 430 nits this drops to with a 10% area is still very good for an OLED monitor.

The S27FG810S also does a slightly more effective job of dynamically mapping HDR tones with video than it does with games. Though I guess this also leads me into the first of a (very) small run of niggles with Samsung’s latest Odyssey monitor: namely that while its dynamic tone mapping system works well with relatively slow-paced ‘exploration’ or adventure games, it can cause some

instability with fast paced titles where you move at speed between different environments.

In some Call Of Duty maps where you run fast in and out of buildings or areas of brightness and shade, you can clearly see delayed and over-aggressive adjustments to the overall brightness, hurting the immersion the screen otherwise creates so immaculately.

Fortunately there’s an easy solution to this; use your console or PC’s HDR set up tools to optimise the way HDR is fed to the display, and turn the screen’s Dynamic Tone Mapping feature off.

Another small issue is that in both the monitor’s Game AV and Game PC modes the VESA DisplayHDR TrueBlack 400-rated screen’s HDR peaks drop to around 450 nits even on a 2% window, and 240 or 265 nits on a full-screen HDR window. So there is a limit to the intensity of the HDR experience.

Though the screen’s ability to play a white pixel right alongside a perfectly black one does make the screen’s highlights, at least, appear brighter than they actually measure. Its use of the latest QD OLED panels means that the S27FG810S is actually slightly brighter than last year’s G80SD OLED Odyssey monitors.

One final niggle is that the ‘Entertain’ picture preset you might think would deliver the best results for video viewing when the monitor’s HDMI mode is set to PC actually looks quite strange, injecting an excessive blue infusion into everything. But the simple solution to this is to just not choose that preset in PC HDMI mode!

I should conclude this section, though, by saying I can’t stress enough how little the S27FG810S’s graphics and video niggles undermine an image that is really, at all times and with all sources, nothing short of imperious.

Software and features

• HDR10 and HDR10+ HDR support – but no Dolby Vision
• Premium screen cooling technology
• No built-in speakers

Aside from its extreme anti-glare screen filter and use of a premium Quantum Dot OLED panel that squeezes a 4K picture count into a 27-inch screen, the biggest hardware feature of the S27FG810S is its OLED Safeguard+ technology.

This combines an advanced coolant piping system with high-end image analysis so that the brightest parts of the image can have more cooling applied to them locally, rather than the whole image receiving the same amount of cooling. This makes for both a more economical and more effective way of combatting OLED’s potential issues with permanent image ‘burn in’.

The S27FG810S doesn’t carry any built-in speakers, meaning you’ll need to rely on your gaming headphones for audio. Not including speakers does help the S27FG810S to be a little more affordable than previous Samsung QD OLED monitors, though.

The S27FG810S’s VRR support extends to the AMD FreeSync Premium Pro and NVidia G-Sync formats as well as the core HDMI system, while its HDR support extends to HDR10+ – including for gaming – whereby HDR streams provide the screen with more scene-specific video information. There’s no support for Dolby Vision, though.

The S27FG810S’s menus contain a pretty fulsome collection of options, including specific game genre presets and ‘proper’ options for switching between AV and game playback that for the most part make very sensible changes to the display’s presentation characteristics.

One little quirk of the S27FG810S’s mostly excellent source compatibility is that it won’t play 24Hz or 50Hz Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray frame rates from a disc drive-carrying PS5 or Xbox Series X.

If you want to watch films at their original frame rate, you’ll have to attach a separate dedicated disc player. This likely won’t bother many people, given the S27FG810S is more gaming-focused than Samsung’s similarly limited smart Odyssey monitors.

Should you buy it?