4 Huge Monitors That Might Be Too Extreme for You

Massive and extreme displays have always been a must-have at various exhibitions, like CES. Transparent screens, 3D televisions, rollable screens. They’re all waiting to trickle onto the shelves once costs have been determined. However, when it comes to creating “extreme” monitors, you’ll discover some truly bizarre quirks.

Monitors have a bit more of a requirements based system than a TV. With televisions, these are devices that sit a few feet from the viewer and, at the moment, often don’t rock the boat beyond their waistline. Monitors, however, should be usable and comfortable to look at when they’re on a desk, just inches from your face. So what will happen when Samsung or BenQ decide that 48- or 55-inch screens should be the new standard?

Well, that’s how you end up with the Samsung Odyssey Ark, or going back further, how you end up with a 43-inch projection screen in 2008. These monitors all seem like great ideas on paper, but none of them will be great if you lose your mouse on the screen or your PC just doesn’t have the juice to satisfy them at the recommended resolution.

Measuring 48 inches, the BenQ Mobiuz EX480UZ is actually one of BenQ’s first forays into the OLED world. It’s also one of the largest monitors the company produces, aimed at a desktop. Designed for gaming, this is a monitor that’s best used from a great distance away, rather than craning your neck just to find the mouse.

Launching in 2023, the BenQ Mobiuz EX480UZ sports a 120Hz refresh rate, 4K resolution and yes, a 48-inch screen. It’s really impressive, but it’s way too big for regular work, and you really have to sit further back to take it all in. Using it for productivity can be a major hassle, unless you decide to blow the UI past the 200% mark just to track the mouse properly. For gaming, there are now monitors that are cheaper, more available and, above all, offer a better image.

This monitor is “extreme” because you really have to have your head a little screwed up to think that it will be properly usable over short distances. For a while, the unit in our possession functioned as a “dumb TV”, as it has no built-in software outside of the usual settings, thus avoiding some horrible Smart TV operating systems. Here it’s less extreme, more useful, but as soon as it lands on a desk to serve as a PC monitor, it falls apart.

Part gadget, part massive gaming monitor. The 55-inch Samsung Odyssey Ark attracted a lot of attention when it was announced and launched due to its rotating design. Samsung even planned to use it vertically, with a split-screen mode that would divide the panel into three sections for various uses. The monitor was divisive when it launched in 2022, with poor scores from some media outlets and glowing praise from others. Then it received a second-generation refresh in 2024.

However, according to reviews, even the second generation’s multi-view mode still doesn’t work the way an end user would like, with some apps struggling to work in this format. It cannot provide sound for all four inputs, because it can only play one at a time. Priced at a whopping $2,699.99, the 4K, 165Hz monitor may be an impressive gadget, but it’s outclassed by smaller, more focused monitors in terms of performance.

55 inches in front of your face isn’t exactly the most pleasant experience either. Like the BenQ Mobiuz 48-inch, the Samsung Ark simply offers too much space to be used comfortably in a desktop or PC gaming environment. If you scale it all down via multiview, it becomes a bit more usable, but ultimately, do you really need this extravagance, or just a regular monitor?

At 57 inches and a resolution of 7680 x 2160, the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 is perhaps one of the largest ultrawide monitors on the market today. Its massive scale is effectively the equivalent of having two 32-inch screens side by side, and Samsung claims it’s the “first” ultra-HD dual monitor. Launching in 2023, it will completely engulf your desktop with its gargantuan size.

Online, some users actually recommend Microsoft’s PowerTools or other third-party applications on other operating systems to make desktop management much easier. With such a screen, it can make the Neo G9 a productivity machine, but you’ll have to manage it through software. For those using Windows 11, it might even be worth enabling the taskbar hide feature, to get the most out of it without one of the longest taskbars in history taking up space unnecessarily.

This is intended for real experienced users. While it may be aimed at gaming, the picture-in-picture options allow you to have these two 32-inch displays in 4K for two separate devices. It won’t have the same issues as the Samsung Ark or BenQ Mobiuz, where they’re just too big up close, but do you really need all that monitoring space? Can your PC even handle the maximum resolution? These are the questions you need to ask yourself if you have a few thousand dollars in your pocket.

A throwback, and an incredibly niche one at that. Information is scarce in the field on the Ostendo CRVD 43 and its lifespan, with the monitor being more of a side attraction than a highly sought after item. Launched in 2010, after a few years appearing at CES ’08 under Alienware and Macworld ’09 with NEC, before finally landing at Ostendo. It came with a maximum resolution of 2880 x 900 and a giant price tag of $6,499. Ostendo even proposed combining three of them to obtain a 180-degree cone of vision.

It’s actually four LED-lit screens connected together into one giant screen. It used digital light processing (DLP), so it operated closer to four projectors. Because of how DLP works, with a ton of tiny mirrors providing low input lag, the response time was 0.02ms. Because of this design, this meant the monitor weighed 45.5 pounds (20.7 kg) without the stand, and an additional 7 pounds (3.2 kg) with it.

A historic artifact now, the monitor gained more attention in 2020, thanks to tech content creator Linus Sebastian showing it off on his Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel. Linus mentions in the video that it makes a loud fan noise to keep rooms cool, and those who have had access to it said it would break all the time. Ostendo quietly abandoned the CRVD 43, with no real mention of the timing of its disappearance.

For this article, we looked at some historical information, including reviews and news about the monitors included in this list. We made our decisions based on initial feedback and subsequent reviews. Apart from that, the author has had some practical or other experiences with these monitors in the past and used his prior knowledge on the subject to draw conclusions.

The BenQ Mobiuz EX480UZ is the only monitor we have direct access to for this article. However, both the Samsung Ark and Neo G9 have been used in previous press events. Of course, Ostendo’s CRVD monitor is ultimately beyond our reach, and this relied on second-hand or third-hand information from web creators or users. Official first-hand information about the Ostendo CRVD monitor was collected from the Internet archives, as the company no longer exists in the same capacity as it did almost 20 years ago.