You are free to spend $3,500 on a Samsung Odyssey Ark without anyone’s interference.

However, disobeying the rules of nature could have negative financial and ecological effects.

 

After a few weeks of preorders, Samsung’s massive Odyssey Ark, a $3,500 55-inch curved gaming display, is now officially available for purchase. And, perhaps surprisingly given how recent game releases have gone, you might actually be able to walk into a store and buy one. Several Verge employees checked the inventory at their neighbourhood Best Buys and discovered that there were one or two models available for pickup today.

 

To be clear, I’m not advocating casually dropping a couple of months’ worth of rent on a small LED gaming display the size of a respectable TV. There has been nine months of hype building over the Odyssey Ark since its CES 2022 premiere, and it’s such a ridiculous product that it feels like you should need permission from someone to obtain it. In fact, it feels a little bit wrong that it might even be that simple. A note from your chiropractor confirming that you are aware of the dangers of utilising a computer monitor that can entirely tower over you should be required at the very least.

 

Having said that, I completely understand if you find yourself wondering how much money you’d get for selling your car and then attempting to plan how you’d transport the Ark’s unquestionably large box home. Although Samsung’s similarly insane 49-inch Odyssey G9 has found a home on some editors’ desks, this pushes things to a possibly unforgivable level. Try to resist the pull of the void on this one, at least until we’re able to properly review it.

 

While my colleague Cameron Faulkner has spent some time with the Odyssey Ark, it will require much more testing to decide whether or not something this expensive and large is actually worthwhile compared to, say, simply purchasing an LG OLED TV and setting it on your desk. One of those, though, wouldn’t have Samsung’s Gaming Hub preinstalled, which enables you to connect to game streaming services like GeForce Now or Xbox Cloud Gaming without the need for anything more than your monitor and a gaming keyboard or mouse (though, let’s be honest, anyone purchasing the Ark probably already has a pretty robust gaming setup to go along with it).

 

There will be others who succumb to the lure; in fact, the Best Buy closest to me has informed me that I must wait until Saturday to pick up the Ark in-store, despite the fact that there was one available when I checked earlier today. This indicates that someone in Spokane spent $3,500 on the monitor in addition to the 8.9 percent sales tax. They might even be playing games on it right now. If that was you and you wind up reading this, get in touch with me and let me know what you were thinking and how your experience with the Ark has been thus far. Yes, I’m solely interested in seeing your monitor, but I’ll bring Pizza Pipeline or something to make it up to you. (Also, do you want to hang around.)