If there’s one thing I really like about Samsung, it’s that they’ve been daring on all fours lately. It’s not always good when they release prototyping tech at more or less full price, and the stuff doesn’t always stick (e.g. noticeable screen bends in their foldable phones, and issues in the Odyssey G9 haunted curved edge panels), but I love that they push the boat out and in many ways make the most innovative gadget in each product segment. That’s a well-deserved accolade from Samsung, and the Ark 55″ is one of those products. Pure quality, perhaps more belonging to a Las Vegas trade show floor than my desk, haha.
So what is an ark? Well, it’s a 55-inch hyper-curved QLED display based on a VA panel with a 165Hz refresh rate, 16:9 aspect ratio, full backlight and 420 nits of maximum brightness. It’s a TV with a built-in tuner and all, optimized for gaming. It has a giant 35kg desktop stand that allows you to rotate the screen from landscape to portrait with one hand, allows Ark itself to change image modes in just a second, and it has a very smooth picture-in-picture mode As well as a dedicated Bluetooth control box to handle control and functionality, called the “Ark Controller”, and has built-in support for Freesync and G-Sync. On paper, this screen is a beast, and it would be odd if it weren’t, since it costs £2,599. Yes, you’re not mistaken.
Samsung’s idea is that you’re going to set it up on a desktop and use it for PC and console gaming, but honestly there aren’t many desktop or room solutions for this behemoth monitor, and given the size, stick it in It’s more useful on a TV stand and use it as a gaming TV. The crux of the matter is that if you’re going to use the 55-inch as a gaming TV in your living room, it’s a little too big, which means I’m having a hard time seeing where the Ark really belongs. I don’t really understand what the flip mode does, as the extreme curvature means it’s not suitable for running vertical games or office work in vertical apps like Skype or Telegram.
Here is an ad:
The screen itself is really nice. Images are very sharp and bright, with good contrast and blacks, though never close to OLED. 420 nits is a bit dim compared to the maximum brightness of “true HDR,” but I still like the punch of the image and think it’s more than enough, and HDR looks good here. The response time was 1ms, and the amount of input lag we measured was a whopping 3.6ms, which is clearly outstanding. For the past few days, I’ve been sitting with my PS5 plugged into the Ark, playing games like The Last of Us: Part I, and it’s a pretty impressive display of gaming. The fact that I can only use one HDMI source at a time, the picture lacks an OLED screen (it’s a VA panel for obvious reasons), and the display itself is a little too curved for my tastes, which does degrade the rating slightly , but the Ark is impressive in many ways. I’d rather it be based on IPS and built with a 21:9 ratio, which would make it great for flight simulators and racing simulators etc, but it’s a very interesting product for it, compared to pretty much everything else on the market differentiate.
However, there’s no way to justify the £2,600 price tag, not by any means. For that much, you can buy an LG OLED C2 55″ and a new computer and still have money available.