Samsung CHG90 49-Inch Curved Ultrawide Monitor Review

Even among gaming monitors, most of which throw staid, conservative designs to the wind, the Samsung CHG90 49-Inch Curved Ultrawide Monitor ($1,099.99) stands out. Its gigantic curved screen, the equivalent of two 1080p monitors placed side by side, provides a deeply immersive gaming experience. The wide screen is also handy for editing super-wide spreadsheets or displaying multiple documents side by side, although a low pixel density means that your documents may not look particularly sharp. Helped by the inclusion of AMD FreeSync 2, the monitor displays HDR content in vivid color with excellent contrast, but its unusually wide aspect ratio means that a standard widescreen movie will fill only half the screen. As stunning as this monitor may look at first glance, you'll want to be sure you can leverage the wide aspect effectively before diving in.

One Ostentatious Display

The CHG90 is a large, bulky monitor, best handled by two people when moving it around. When affixed on its stand, it measures 20.7 by 47.7 by 15 inches (HWD) and weighs 33.1 pounds. You'll need a table or desk with at least four feet of horizontal space to fit the monitor's width. On top and to the sides, it effectively has no bezel; a mere 0.6-inch strip rides across the bottom.

The stand rests on a sturdy, V-shaped base that is unusually wide (32 inches), befitting the panel's own extreme width. It provides height, swivel, and tilt adjustment. For obvious reasons related to the size and curvature, pivot adjustment—which would let you rotate a panel from landscape to portrait mode and back—is not remotely an option.

This ultra-wide 49-inch panel has a native resolution of 3,840 by 1,080 pixels. The screen itself is a vertical alignment (VA) display that uses Quantum Dot (aka "QLED") technology. It has a 32:9 aspect ratio—functionally the same as two 27-inch 1080p monitors placed side by side.

Although the panel's width is impressive, its pixel density—81 pixels per inch (ppi)—is low, making the screen not particularly sharp. This was borne out in ad-hoc testing using text and photos. It's less apparent in the heat of gaming, or in video, though a close look at the screen may reveal traces of a hatched graininess.

As points of comparison, the Acer Predator X27 ($2,049.99 at Amazon) and the Asus ROG Strix XG32VQ ($557.40 at Amazon) , both Editors' Choice gaming monitors, have pixel densities of 163ppi and 91ppi, respectively. The CHG90's low pixel density does have one upside for gamers: Unlike with the Acer Predator X27 and its 4K UHD resolution, you shouldn't have to invest in a top-of-the-line graphics card to run games on it at decent frame rates.

The panel is highly curved, with an 1800R curvature rating, which means that if you were to place enough CHG90 monitors side by side to form a circle, it would have a radius of just 1,800mm, or 1.8 meters. This is among the tightest curvatures we've seen; among monitors we've tested, only the Samsung 34-Inch CF791 Curved Widescreen Monitor boasts a tighter (1500R) curvature rating. The pronounced curvature makes for a more immersive, enveloping gaming experience than you would get with a flat panel.

The CHG90 is rated at a native brightness of 350 nits, and it tested even better than that (383.6 nits) in sRGB mode in our quantitative testing using a Klein K10-A colorimeter and SpectraCal CalMAN 5 software. I measured its contrast ratio at 2950:1, a near-match to its 3000:1 rated contrast ratio.

The monitor's viewing angles were less than spectacular; I noticed some dimming at extreme angles. But considering the width of this panel and the immersive effect of gaming with it, you may well not even notice. It's not the kind of display you'll be sitting offsides when viewing; indeed, it's so big that it's hard to get offsides.

Controls, Menus, and Ports

Physical controls comprise four tiny buttons located on the bottom right edge. The on/off button, which doubles as a mini joystick for manipulating the monitor settings menus, is situated well to the right of the other three, which let you access the onscreen display (OSD) settings. You can change the mode (sRGB plus FPS, RTS, RPG, and AOS gaming modes), brightness, contrast, color, and a wealth of other settings through the OSD.

The CHG90's input port selection includes two HDMI ports, one full-size and one mini DisplayPort connector, one upstream and two downstream USB ports, one audio-in jack and one headphone jack. I would have liked to see a USB Type-C port, but that standard is still relatively rare on monitors. The CHG90 lacks built-in speakers.

Gray-to-gray pixel response is an excellent 1 millisecond, and input lag—as measured with a Leo Bodnar Lag Tester—came in at a good 11.5 milliseconds (ms), not too much longer than the BenQ SW2700PT, which remains our leader with a 9.5ms input lag.

Adaptive Sync and High Refresh

The monitor also supports FreeSync 2, AMD's latest iteration of its adaptive sync technology. Its main improvement over the original FreeSync is its improved HDR support—it essentially offloads some of the HDR functions otherwise handled by Windows, improving both latency and overall HDR performance. This makes FreeSync 2 a more credible alternative than the original FreeSync to Nvidia's G-Sync, which raises the price of its supported monitors by a couple hundred dollars.

The CHG90's speedy 144Hz native refresh rate, achievable only over a DisplayPort connection, can be reduced to 120Hz or 60Hz in the menus. FreeSync 2 allows for variable refresh rate support between 48Hz and 144Hz over DisplayPort, and 48Hz to 100Hz over HDMI. The CHG90 also supports AMD's Low Framerate Compensation technology to provide a smooth experience even below 48Hz.

Samsung covers the CHG90 with a three-year parts-and-labor warranty.

Performance Testing

Color accuracy for the CHG90 was very good in our testing. As shown on the chromaticity chart below, when the panel was tested in sRGB mode, the red, yellow, and green color measurements (represented by the colored dots), though fairly evenly spaced, are all well outside the triangle depicting the normal bounds of the CIE RGB color space (represented by the boxes).

The area bounded by the triangle represents all the colors that can be made by mixing the three primary colors, so any points outside of the triangle represent an expansion of the normal RGB color gamut. When I switched to first-person shooter mode, I generated a chromaticity chart that was very similar to the sRGB chart, although the color gamut was slightly wider yet.

See How We Test Monitors

For multitasking, Samsung offers a downloadable utility program called Easy Setting Box. With it, you can not only easily create windows for office documents, but you could run, say, a game in one window and a Web browser in another.

I put the CHG90 through its paces displaying HDR videos (selected from the YouTube HDR channel). The monitor did well in rendering a brilliant image while preserving shading in both very bright and very dark areas. The CHG90's HDR performance, for both video and games, is above average for a gaming or entertainment monitor, and was doubtless bettered by the addition of AMD FreeSync 2 with its HDR enhancements.

The main drawback, video-wise, is that the CHG90 is twice as wide as a normal widescreen monitor. The standard aspect ratio for DVDs is 16:9, so although DVD content could fill the screen vertically, the image will fill only half the screen's width, with huge black bars to either side. You could enlarge a video to fit the width, but that would cut off much of the top and bottom of the video image. Some nature and travel videos looked nice when displayed this way (if the context allowed for ignoring the lost image area), but it wouldn't work at all for movies.

Fortunately, most recent games seem to support the CHG90's extreme aspect ratio, though sometimes only after a little coaxing. Project Cars, the 2016 version of Hitman, and Rise of the Tomb Raider all displayed well on the first try, taking advantage of the full span of screen. Far Cry 5, on the other hand, had to be rebooted before it would display full-screen.

All-Around Immersive

The Samsung CHG90 will appeal to gamers who fancy an ultra-wide monitor. The large screen area also lets you open several windows at once to display different kinds of content. Its relatively low pixel density makes content a little less sharp than we'd like, and a widescreen movie will only fill half the screen. But for providing an immersive, wraparound gaming experience, the CHG90 is currently without peer. Dell has also come out with a 49-inch curved monitor, the Dell UltraSharp 49 Curved (U4919DW), but it is geared to business (with a 60Hz refresh rate and lacking gaming features like adaptive sync), and it has a higher (5,120-by-1,440-pixel) native resolution. At the moment, the Samsung model is in a league of its own.

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