Samsung’s new OLED gaming monitor is 500Hz and crazy expensive

OLED gaming monitors are fantastic (I’m typing this up on one right now), but they aren’t perfect. Aside from the higher prices, they still have lower brightness than older, less colorful panels, and they’re nowhere near as fast as gaming LCDs. Samsung is closing that gap with its latest OLED monitor… but you’ll have to pay for it. And then pay some more. It’s expensive is what I’m saying.

The new Odyssey G60F is a 27-inch, 1440p display, which is arguably the standard for PC gaming at the moment. But Samsung claims that this is the “world’s first 500Hz OLED gaming monitor,” a claim I’m not going to dispute. Indeed, 360Hz was the highest OLED value I’d seen before today. 500Hz puts Samsung neck-and-neck with some of the fastest conventional LCDs out there, which are just now hitting 600Hz.

But you can probably predict the other shoe that’s going to drop here. Samsung’s press release links to the Singapore version of its online store, where the G60F is up for pre-order at $1,488 Singapore dollars. At the current exchange rate, that would make the new monitor $1,140 in USD, without accounting for any wild fluctuations in import taxes and tariffs.

For the sake of comparison, Samsung’s current 27-inch, QHD OLED gaming monitor, which can go up to 360Hz, is going for $700 on Amazon right now. And you can find panels of the same size and resolution with “just” 240Hz for $400 or so with a little deal hunting. So yes, you’re paying a lot more for that extra speed.

I’m sure plenty of competitive gamers are willing to pony up that kind of cash — my editor Brad, for one, who was a lot more excited about this in our PCWorld Slack than I was. But consider that you can also get a 49-inch OLED, with exactly double the resolution and a still very respectable 240Hz refresh rate, for considerably less than that $1,140 prospective price.

Samsung’s press release says the monitor will launch in Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia at first, “followed by a phased rollout to additional global markets later this year.” Samsung is a major OEM supplier of OLED display panels, so it’s possible that this 500Hz speed demon will show up from other brands, but it’ll probably take quite a while.