Flash back almost exactly a year to the day. I was sitting in a half-built demo area playing on a Samsung prototype gaming monitor. The company had loaded up Lies of P — one of my favorite games of last year — and I was proceeding through a midgame Mad Clown Puppet mini-boss. It wasn’t just standard gameplay, though. It was glasses-free 3D, and it worked well enough that I was able to play a game as difficult as Lies of P amid construction noise and blinding lights without breaking a sweat. At CES 2025, Samsung is turning that prototype into a real product with the Odyssey 3D.
Glasses-free 3D monitors have been around for a couple of years, but the Odyssey 3D separates itself from monitors like the Acer Predator SpatialLabs View 27 with how it handles the 3D image. Most glasses-free 3D tech requires some sort of integration. In the case of SpatialLabs, you can only use the 3D effect on supported games.
Samsung’s Odyssey 3D, on the other hand, uses light field display (LFD) tech to create 3D images from 2D content. Samsung is able to pull this off with a lenticular lens on the front panel of the monitor. This splits the image going to each eye, allowing them to receive slightly different perspectives to simulate that 3D effect. There’s a built-in stereo camera and constant view mapping, too, tracking your eyes as they move around to keep the 3D illusion from breaking.
The prototype I tried last year was already very impressive — so impressive that I was forgot I was sitting at a CES demo at all. Hopefully an extra year to cook has made the tech even better.
Originally, Samsung had called this the 2D/3D monitor, and that’s not a mistake. Not only can it simulate 3D on 2D content but the monitor also works in standard 2D mode. It comes with some respectable specs, too. It’s a 27-inch monitor packing a super-sharp 4K resolution, and it comes with a 165Hz refresh rate and 1ms gray-to-gray response time.
For now, Samsung is keeping some details under wraps. We don’t know what ports the monitor has, nor when it will release. Critically, Samsung also hasn’t revealed how much the Odyssey 3D will cost. I suspect it’ll run a pretty penny, but we’ll just have to wait until Samsung has more to share.
Wow, what a difference a year makes. Last year at CES, Samsung debuted its first 3D gaming monitor as a prototype. It worked, completely glasses-free, and it certainly impressed me at the time. But it was far from perfect, and you could tell it was still early in development.
As if a 500Hz OLED wasn’t enough, Samsung has two other monitors it’s showing at CES 2025, both of which are fairly unique. The headliner is a 4K display that clocks in at 37 inches, which, even after putting my eyes on literally hundreds of gaming monitors, I’ve never encountered before. That might not sound like a big deal, but if you look at gaming monitors above 32 inches, you start to realize that it is. When looking at a typical 16:9 display, the vast majority of monitors top out at 32 inches. Above that, you jump straight to 40 or 42 inches, with TV panels repurposed into gaming monitors — that’s the case with my own KTC G42P5.
