With its affordable new Odyssey Notebook series, Samsung hopes to win the hearts of gamers.
Samsung's Odyssey Laptop Lineup
According to The Verge, at this year's CES every PC maker has prioritized gaming laptops. Big brand names like Lenovo and now Samsung have decided to make an attempt to enter the gaming PC niche. In consequence, they are starting now their new sub-brands of gaming PCs.
The South Korean giant Samsung has made its first attempt to enter the gaming PC market with its newly launched Odyssey 15 laptop. This gaming laptop has been received with mixed reviews. While affordable, the price is not as low and its hardware may not be as balanced as it should be, according to tech experts.
The Odyssey laptop lineup is Samsung's answer to Lenovo's Legion. A 15-inch Odyssey gaming laptop will come on the market in February and a 17-inch model will come later in April. Both of them have their design inspired from Alienware's lineup design.
Like Lenovo, Samsung is also introducing to its lower-tier model a red-backlit keyboard and a multicolored keyboard on its higher-end laptop. In the beginning, both Odyssey gaming laptops will be shipping in black, but Samsung is also considering shipping a white version later on.
Odyssey Notebooks' Features & Specs
The Odyssey laptops' matte displays are exhibiting a muted color palette and so-so viewing angles, according to The Verge. The 15.6-inch model provides 280 nits of brightness and the 17-incher features 300 units. They both will com with 1080 pixels resolution. Samsung's smaller laptop will come equipped with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050s and will have a starting price at $1,199.
Among the positive aspects of Samsung's Odyssey computers is the HexaFlow Vent, a perforated panel at the bottom. According to Samsung, this feature is unlockable with just three screws and helps airflow around the innards of each machine. Gaming enthusiasts can easily add a bigger and better NVMe SSD or upgrade the RAM.
These gaming laptops are also reasonably light for their size, being made almost entirely out of plastic. The 15-inch weighs 5.6 lb (2.53 kg), while the 17-inch laptop weighs 8.4 lb (3.79kg). For the high specs, they promise, Samsung's new gaming laptops are somewhat affordable. They come with SSD storage, include lots of memory and are powered by quad-core seventh-generation Intel Core i7 Kaby Lake processors.
Samsung's Notebook Odyssey 17 features a USB-C with Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.0 port, while the 15-inch only includes USB 2.0 and 3.0. The 15-inch model comes with a 1 TB hard drive and has an additional maximum solid-state storage capacity of 256 GB. The 17-inch comes with the 1 TB hard drive unit and can hold a 512 GB SSD. The 15-inch model tops out at 32 GB RAM, while the larger model has a maximum of 64 GB of memory.
According to PCMag, the differences between the two Odyssey laptop models do not end here. The two laptop versions also use different keycaps. The 15-inch model features 0.3 mm crater keycaps while on the 17-inch model are fitted 0.5 mm volcano keycaps. The 15-inch is just backlight, while the 17-inch model's keys feature customizable RGB backlighting.
