A screen like this isn’t meant for people who game every other weekend. It’s not even really suitable for hardcore/pro gamers. It fulfils an unusual little niche of older, but still dedicated, gamers who are well into their careers as insurance professionals, programmers for international banks, and cyber security specialists. Gamers who still spend as much time as they can playing, but can also afford the finer things in life and want to treat themselves.
So why isn’t it for super hardcore gamers? It has a high refresh rate at 240Hz, is Nvidia G-Sync compatible, has incredible image quality from the QLED screen (one of the main reasons for its high price point), and has a 1ms response rate – all perfect for gaming. But it’s just a bit too big. It takes a lot of graphics card power to drive 240Hz at 4k resolution across an extra wide screen. For most people where having 240fps at 240Hz isn’t absolutely essential, they’ll be blown away by this screen, but hardcore gamers aren’t most people. Having spoken to one of Ireland’s top 'Quake Live' and 'Diabotical' players, they said they just didn’t feel they would have the competitive edge needed in such fast-paced games if they were to play on such a huge screen. At the top level of gaming form is almost always sacrificed for function. Graphics are turned to low, config files with extra options are loaded to give more access than the in-game menu, and everything they can do to achieve a few extra FPS is done, so a screen like this doesn’t make sense for a gamer like that.
And budget gamers can forget about it too. For the price of this screen, you could build a fairly decent mid-range PC, but the screen deserves better than mid-range. It’s top-of-the-line, cutting-edge technology from Samsung, showing off the current pinnacle of what they can do with their technology. As mentioned above, anything less than a beefy GPU won’t be able to make use of this screen anyway.
So maybe that’s why they made it then, not actually to fulfil the niche that it has, but instead as a kind of operational tech demo? Like Apple’s Vision Pro, which will be for sale but isn’t intended for mass market then. Or in the same vein but less extreme than Sennheiser’s roughly €50,000 HE 1 headphone and amp combo.
The 5120 x 1440 (basically two 4k screen stuck side by side) resolution, 1000R curvature which matches the natural curve of your eye, high dynamic range, futuristic white shroud with LED backlight, quick response times and high refresh rates, having all of that in one package isn’t supposed to be consumed by everyone. It’s supposed to be one of those mythical products that the rest of us all wish we had. Like a Ferrari versus a Volkswagen, the VW will get you where you want to go in comfort, efficiently (ignoring Diesel-gate), but it’ll never be as cool as a Ferrari. Even though the Ferrari is impractical for most people and the VW actually suits us better, the Ferrari has the best technology, and a lot of what makes it so cool is that we can’t have it.
Ironically, editing Excel files and preparing PowerPoint presentations on the Ferrari of PC screens is an experience like no other. If you do happen to buy this screen and use it for work and play, and you don’t put yourself into financial turmoil to do it, you won’t regret it.
Just get a friend over to help you set it up, it really is very heavy.
