Samsung Enters Gaming Monitor Market In Style

Samsung has just introduced two series of monitors aimed at the highly competitive Gaming market. It’s a bit strange to think that the company wasn’t already in, but it’s never late to join the party, especially since things are still moving fast in that world. The CFG70 series has a 24” and a 27” monitor, but the true highlight (for me) is the 34-inch curved Samsung CF791 model (above photo). Both monitors will be shown during the IFA tradeshow in Berlin this week.

The Samsung CF791 ($999) is designed with a 1500R. “R” stands for Radius and basically a smaller “R” means that the monitor is curvier.  It has a resolution of 3440×1440 which looks very nice across the 34 inches of diagonal – that is the only available size for this model. The CF791 has two 7W speakers as well if that can help you save some space.

I like the industrial very much. It looks sleek with its glossy white surface in the back. I’m a bit surprised that there isn’t a fast-charger in the monitor’s base, but I’m sure that it’s being considered at Samsung. It’s just that all available resources should be spent in making the image quality and the specs as good as possible.

The Samsung CFG70 ($399+) looks a bit plainer because it has a more common size, black bezels, and an 1800R curvature. To be fair, the silver bezels can be distracting to some people, so this is a design feature to think about before purchasing if you’re picky with the sense of immersion. That said, the stand has an articulated arm that makes it very easy to position with one hand, thanks to the ball & joint arm design.

Most of my monitors require two hands to be positioned properly. I was also surprised by the height at which you can elevate the monitor. I didn’t measure it, unfortunately, but many monitors are a bit low, so this is the kind of things that I notice. The thing to keep in mind is that the complete monitor – with arm – does extend a bit in the depth axis, so keep this in mind as you build your setup. The CF791 does not require as much depth.

In this CFG70 series, Samsung has included an “Area Lighting” function, which is a LED light just above the base of the monitor. It can cast a light that matches your LED accessories (keyboard, mice). It’d be very cool if Samsung could a bit more hardware to match the lighting with what’s on-screen (or even the bottom of the screen) to have a real-time ambient lighting of sorts.

With gamers in mind, Samsung also integrated the Gaming UX OSD display user interface that lets gamers tweak settings much faster than on classic menus where a ton of clicks are required.

Both series of monitors are compatible with AMD’s Freesync. At the moment, there isn’t an NVIDIA GSync version, but as you all know, this is just a matter of licensing and not a technical hurdle. I wouldn’t be surprised to see such a version in the future if there’s traction with this launch. On paper, the CFG70-series has a 1ms response time and 144Hz refresh, versus 4ms and 100Hz for the CF791.

Out of the two, and although both have similar specs (Quantum dot 125% sRGB, LCD panel), I found the CF791 model to have noticeably better picture quality. The CFG70 looked quite good, but the CF791 just had that extra bump in quality that could be spotted.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Gaming
Tags: IFA, IFA 2016, monitors, Samsung