Samsung M8 Smart Monitor review: the good enough of both worlds - The Verge

The Samsung M8 Smart Monitor is one of those products that dazzle you with its abundance of features to overshadow the fact that most of them are gimmicks. But gimmicks aside, it's a stylish 32-inch 4K monitor-slash-smart-TV for people who don't have the space, money, or desire for two large, expensive displays. Plenty of people already use their monitors as TVs, and if you're buying one big 4K HDR screen anyway, why not have it pull double duty?

The $699.99 M8 has a USB-C port with DisplayPort and 65W charging, so you can connect a laptop with a single cable and use that enormous screen to get work done. You can stream TV shows and movies from Apple TV Plus, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and many others on the built-in Tizen Smart TV interface. It has a rechargeable remote. It has Bluetooth and AirPlay (though no Google Cast). It has speakers and a microphone, a webcam, and even a SmartThings hub. You can make a Google Duo video call, edit Microsoft Office docs without a computer, or use your Samsung phone as a computer with DeX. Soon, you'll even be able to play Xbox games on it without an Xbox.

The M8 isn't great at everything it tries to do, and it only makes sense if you really do plan to use it as both a monitor and a TV. If you just want one or the other, there are better options for the money. But if you do need both and maybe one or two of the (many) other features, the low-profile, lighthearted design and kitchen-sink approach give the M8 a unique appeal.

The M8 is a good monitor and a decent TV for less than it would cost to buy each separately, but outside of that, things start to get messy. The built-in stand isn't very adjustable, and you can't swap it out for a better one. Its detachable webcam has a clever design but mediocre image quality, and the Tizen interface is confusing to navigate. The browser it uses for loading web apps like Microsoft 365 is dreadfully slow, and it's incompatible with Google Docs and Gmail. In its current state, it just isn't ready to handle even a basic workload without having a machine attached to it. I'd love to see Samsung improve on these things in the next iteration.

Let's zoom out for a moment. The Samsung M8 comes in four fun colors — green, pink, white, or blue — which appear on the monitor's stand and front bezel (all models have a white rear casing). It's thin, easy on the eyes, and surely owes some inspiration to Apple's latest iMac design.

The M8 makes a good first impression, with its expansive 32-inch 4K display surrounded by thin bezels. It's big enough to dominate a small desk. If you only stand (or sit) a couple of feet away from your monitor, like me, it may take a while to adapt to having so much screen real estate.

The VA LCD panel is a reasonable compromise for something that's a monitor first and a TV second. It's bright and vivid, with great contrast and detail. The all-white background of Google Docs looked white rather than gray. When I used MacOS Monterey in dark mode, the blacks, though not the perfect black of an OLED panel, weren't washed out, at least when viewed head-on. Samsung claims that the M8 covers 99 percent of the sRGB color gamut (I measured 100 percent, actually, with a SpyderX Pro colorimeter), which is helpful for content creators, though the display isn't factory calibrated.

At 400 nits of peak brightness (I measured 406), the M8 is more than bright enough as a monitor, though it picked up glare from windows and overhead lights and even reflected the white desk in our office. It also peaks at 400 nits in HDR mode (it supports HDR10 Plus), lacks local dimming, and its refresh rate caps out at 60Hz — more tallies in the monitor-first column.

Like other TVs and monitors with VA panels, the M8's display washes out when viewed from an angle. That's kind of what I expected, but don't expect to entertain a room full of people unless they're all crammed together on the couch (or bed, or futon — this 32-inch screen really does seem targeted at people in relatively tight quarters).

The M8's ports are all around the back, beneath where its stand connects. There you'll find two USB-C ports. One is USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 and can handle DP 1.4 video and data passthrough with 65W charging. The other is downstream, with USB 2.0 data speeds and up to 15W power delivery, perfect for charging its remote or a phone or connecting low-bandwidth peripherals like input devices. I had no problem connecting a keyboard or an external webcam. Plugging in a USB-C SSD worked, too (incredibly slowly — it took six minutes to transfer a 13GB file), but only if I removed the snap-on webcam first. There's also a micro HDMI 2.0 port (a micro HDMI to HDMI cable is included) and a DC barrel input for power. It'd be great to have a full-sized HDMI port instead, as well as an Ethernet jack for better streaming quality and a couple more USB ports while we're at it.

Now, let's talk about the M8 as a TV. Tizen supports almost every streaming app that you can think of, and they're easy to access with the bundled remote. Like Samsung's TVs, the M8 supports HDR 10 Plus but not Dolby Vision HDR. As mentioned above, it also supports AirPlay 1.0, letting you beam content wirelessly from iOS and macOS devices or mirror your screen. The M8 offers similar wireless screen mirroring functionality for Windows computers and Samsung phones or tablets but omits Google Cast.

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