Thank you all again for the feedback!
Update: I spent several more days researching and comparing, and ended up buying a super-ultrawide Samsung Odyssey G9 OLED. It has a 5120x1440 resolution, which is what I wanted for work.
It’s the wide red box in this diagram:
It has one fewer megapixel than a true 4K monitor (wider but shorter, essentially the equivalent of two QHD monitors side-by-side). That made more sense for work since it can comfortably display multiple windows at once:
I have really mixed feelings about it…
On the plus side, it’s the perfect setup on paper. The superultrawide is what I really wanted in order be able to work with multiple windows & browers open at once without having to use multiple monitors (which is really problematic on Macs, like in this other thread: Technical: Splashtop, multi monitors, recurrent Thunderbolt shutdown on MBPro). The OLED absolutely blows the Dell’s display out of the water. The contrast is incredible — I’d never seen blacks like that before — and more than offsets the limited peak brightness, even in a bright room. I no longer have to blast the monitor at full brightness just to make out the contrasts, like I did on the Dell’s IPS panel. The colors are awesome. While I didn’t buy this for gaming, of course I had to try it once I got it, and I don’t think I could go back to a regular 16:9 screen ever again. You see so much more of the game world (to the point where some games now ban this aspect ratio because it gives you an unfair field-of-view advantage). If everything worked as it should, this would be a keeper for sure… if.
But, sadly, it doesn’t.
This is by far the most unreliable monitor I’ve ever had — and I’ve had a lot of unreliable ones. To be fair, probably a lot of this is due to me trying to use it with a Mac. But whereas the Dell was 100% reliable and dead-simple plug-and-play from the first minute till the last, never giving any issues ever… this Samsung has been a nightmare from the beginning. (The Dell was a true Thunderbolt monitor, though. This one is just DP alt mode & HDMI).
Out of the box, the VESA mounting hardware (to connect it to my desktop stand) had misaligned mounting holes and the screws wouldn’t go in right, requiring some manual forceful boring of the holes. It was a common enough manufacturing defect to have its own reddit thread with workarounds, thankfully.
The software is the most obnoxious I’d ever seen in a monitor, more like a smart TV, full of ads and nonstop popups. It wouldn’t let me update the firmware without signing up for a Samsung account. The settings I need to get to are buried many layers in, and the UI is extremely laggy, with the remote prone to jumping across too many menu items since the screen lags 300-400ms behind the button pushes. The Dell’s UI was a simple overlay and lag-free. Samsung tried to squeeze in some sort of half-baked shitty smart TV UI into this thing, and it’s a worse product for it.
The QD-OLED has noticeable color fringing around text, especially white on black text. It was very bad on Windows with ClearType on. Macs use a different subpixel rendering algorithm so it’s not quite so bad, but it’s definitely there. Altogether doesn’t bother me a whole lot, thankfully.
Once I finally got everything connected, then the real problems started. Over USB-C and DisplayPort, the monitor would randomly crash — as in the entire screen would become a garbled, flickering rainbow, multiple times within several minutes. It would work fine for a few minutes at a stretch, but then become garbled again any time the mode switches or seemingly any time it has to adjust refresh rate or resolution. Variable refresh rate is particularly crash-prone. HDR doesn’t work at all, despite me trying every permutation of monitor x OS settings I could find. I tried connecting it both via a dock and directly to my computer. Game mode would randomly reset. The resolution would randomly change. Out of desperation, I turned off all the extra features and locked it to 120 Hz (half of what it should support). That improved stability somewhat, but it would still crash on sleep & wake and require a restart and manual reconfiguration of the resolution. The screen would randomly get vertical banding, as in alternating interwoven mosaics of light and dark vertical stripes. Some of this may be a DisplayPort cable/bandwidth issue; I’ll see if I can find a USB-C to DP 2.1 cable (they’re not common).
I also tried with a new HDMI cable, and that was somewhat more stable, but it had its own share of issues, like a permanent green 1-pixel line across the bottom of the screen — another common issue, apparently. And my other computer doesn’t have a HDMI port at all.
It’s too bad. I suspect Samsung, like most manufacturers, don’t really care about Mac users and never did much testing with them. Too bad Apple itself doesn’t make anything superultrawide or even ultrawide.
This setup was good in theory, but in practice it’s been a nightmare. In the 3 hours I’ve had it, I spent 2 of those troubleshooting and rebooting and updating and configuring… all to no avail. Too bad. If a new DP cable doesn’t help the situation, I’ll probably have to return and exchange this for a LG 3440x1440 WOLED, which should have fewer issues (since it’s a much more common and less demanding resolution). The WOLED might help with the text clarity too. This was my first, and probably last, Samsung product… good idea but just terrible execution all around =/