Samsung CHG90

The monitor that throws a curveball at multi-screen gaming setups.

We’re not huge fans of curved TVs here at APC — we find that they generally sit too far away for the screencurvature to have any practical value. However, because of their closer proximity, curved monitors actually make a bit more sense to us, with the potential to make it easier to see the extremities of a screen, particularly for ultrawide displays.

Samsung’s CHG90 has taken this symbiotic curved ultrawide monitor concept to the next level by making a 1.2-metre-wide, 49-inch curved gaming screen that’s equivalent to two 27-inch 16:9 monitors sitting side by side. The key in this equation is an 1800R curvature (meaning the arc of a full circle would have a 1.8m radius) which, Samsung says, is designed to mimic the curvature of your eyeballs and create a more even distance between you and the entire screen. The result is an unprecedented amount of screen real estate that can be used as either a single continuous display (via the DisplayPort input) or as a dual screen by using multiple inputs — useful if, say, you want to game and still have other applications running simultaneously off to one side.

Samsung hasn’t cut any corners when it comes to screen quality in order to make this head-turning size happen, with a 32:9 aspect ratio and a resolution of 3,840 x 1,080 pixels. Underpinning this is Samsung’s QLED display technology which uses a quantum dot layer of nanocrystals to modulate LED backlighting into primary colours, reducing the light lost from RGB filtering.

This makes a significant difference in overall brightness and although the 600-nit peak brightness of the CHG90 doesn’t reach the same 1,000+ nit levels you get from Samsung’s best 4K TVs, it’s more than you need for a screen that you sit within a metre of. Given its mammoth size, it’s also surprisingly nimble, with a sub-1ms response time and a 144Hz refresh rate, meaning it’ll keep up with the fastest graphics cards around, making on-screen motion as smooth and slippery as a greased piglet.

The screen offers the full NTSC colour gamut, which is almost identical to Adobe RGB and allows for greater dynamic range than the narrower sRGB gamut seen on most other gaming screens.

It’s also got bells and whistles like inbuilt blue light dimming, a 20-step black equaliser to locally brighten dark areas in games, three custom preset buttons, four pre-calibrated game type optimisations, audio-synced backlighting and a handy directional toggle for the menu interface.

The only real misstep is Samsung’s choice of anti-screen-tearing technology. There’s only AMD Freesync support here, rather than Nvidia’s G-Sync. Adding the latter requires the inclusion of a dedicated chip, so omitting it is a handy way of saving costs on budget screens.

With the CHG90’s $2,500 price tag, however, it seems a little misguided for Samsung not to have gone with the green team.

If you can live with that shortcoming, though, this one’s a monster of a gaming monitor that otherwise doesn’t disappoint. Plus, it’s one hell of a talking point.