Samsung ViewFinity 40S85TH Review

Design

• 21:9 screen with 1000R curvature
• Adjustable screen positioning
• Good connectivity

Thanks to its 40-inch, ultra-wide screen and heavy degree of curvature, the 40S85TH takes up a fair chunk of desk space. There’s not much else it could do in its big-screened, ultra-curvy circumstances, though, so provided your desk is big enough to accommodate the monitor as well as all the other things essential to a productive working environment (you know, fidget spinners, stress balls, USB mug warmers and the like), you’ll soon learn to live with and even appreciate its unapologetic bulk.

For such a big screen, the 40S85TH is impressively flexible. It can easily be slid up and down on its robust neck mount to adjust its height, rotates a decent degree left or right, and can tilt up and down to accommodate a wide variety of seating – or worker! – heights.

Also impressive for such a big monitor is how easy it is to build. You just slide the monitor’s neck at right angles on to the base’s mounting post and rotate it through 90 degrees to lock it on, while grooves on the monitor’s rear simply slide into slots on the neck’s top before a firm push down of the screen locks it into place with a satisfying click.

After that, the only thing left to do if you can be bothered is to clip a couple of smooth plastic semicircular covers onto the back of the screen mounting point to give it a cleaner look. That’s it. No screws required, and you’ll be up and running in just a minute or two.

The 40S85TH’s connections are plentiful, and reflect its work environment focus. Highlights include a Thunderbolt 5 slot capable of supporting 80Gbps data transfers, plus daisy chaining with high resolutions and high refresh rates maintained on both screens.

The Thunderbolt port can also handle up to 140W charging, while a LAN port offers seamless Ethernet connectivity with laptops.

There are also USB-C, USB A, Display Port 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 options, with USB A, USB-C and headphone ports helpfully placed alongside the monitor’s menu navigation buttons under the screen’s bottom edge for easy access.

The control buttons I just mentioned don’t make for a particularly easy interface, though. You have to find the right button by touch with no significant touch-sensitive features to help you achieve this, and the connection between the buttons and some onscreen menu options isn’t always obvious.

I marginally prefer the 40S85TH’s approach to the rear-mounted joystick-style navigators found on Samsung’s Odyssey monitors, but I couldn’t help but feel that it might have been nice for Samsung to provide a remote control with a £1,999 workspace monitor. Though it’s also true, of course, that most 40S85TH users won’t poke around in the menus as much as I did as part of the reviewing process.

Image Quality

• Sharp, detailed but also soothing screen environment
• Strikingly smooth gaming
• Impressive black levels and natural contrast

While the 40S85TH isn’t without its gaming and video charms, as we’ll see, it’s impressive how fulsomely Samsung has leant into this ViewFinity monitor’s main raison d’être: making long working days fly by without becoming fatiguing or generating many of the frustrations associated with so many ‘normal’ desktop displays.

For starters, the 21:9 aspect ratio makes it easy to populate the screen with multiple windows and documents at once without anything feeling cluttered. Also, when sat a typical desktop working distance from the 40S85TH’s screen, its 1000R curvature is strong enough to have the image wrapping round into your peripheral vision with perfect clarity.

It’s actually quite hard to explain how much more empowered and efficient this set up helps you feel – especially as the 21:9 ratio and large screen size join the monitor’s curvature in creating a much more natural and engaging fit for your field of view than the usual flat screen.

There’s even an effective Intelligent Eye Care feature (certified by independent tech laboratory TUV) that can automatically optimise the brightness and colour temperature of the monitor’s images so that they’re always optimised for your environment, even if you’re burning the midnight oil, to prevent eye strain.

Eye Saver Mode for combatting blue light and a Less Screen Flickering option are also on hand to protect you from two common issues that can make long-term screen use uncomfortable.

It’s also worth gong back here to the screen’s flexibility in terms of tilting, height and rotation flexibility, as these all further contribute to the genuinely remarkable comfort of the 40S85TH’s user experience.

The 40S85TH’s 5K/2K resolution plays its part in the monitor’s usability, too. Whether you’re doing graphic design, working with spreadsheets or typing text, everything looks beautifully crisp, clean and ‘fuzz free’. This holds true right into the monitor’s corners, and even holds up if you’ve ‘stretched’/rescaled a window to fill the screen.

The sense of clarity is enhanced by the 40S85TH’s outstanding colour range and subtlety, as it achieves a range of colours beyond the reach of most desktop monitors while also leaving no trace of the sort of colour banding problems or plasticky, cartoonish skin tones and backdrops you might see with many regular monitors. The depth and texturing such colour subtlety produces is beautifully exaggerated by the screen’s curvature, too.

The 40S85TH’s contrast is immaculately judged for long work sessions, too. Anyone who chooses a curved screen for work is looking for a very personalised experience where they’ll be sat both close to and opposite the centre of the screen – facts which have allowed Samsung to use a contrast-rich VA type of LCD panel rather than the lower contrast, wider viewing angle IPS ones many monitors use.

This means that dark backgrounds look deep, rich and compelling, while classic black text against bright backdrops looks ultra legible and crisp.

The screen isn’t very bright, but the longer I spent with the 40S85TH the more well-judged this seemed for a predominantly work monitor. It’s bright enough to make text and subtle colour details clear, even in dark areas, but no so bright that long working sessions are affected by the sort of screen glare or exaggerated contrast issues that can cause fatigue.

The Intelligent Eye Care feature leans into this carefully controlled contrast very thoughtfully, too, adapting the image at every ambient light level I tried – even a near dark room – without ever leaving the image feeling either too light or too dark for comfort.

While the ViewFinity 40S85TH really is first and foremost a working display, it’s not without its gaming and AV charms, too. In particular, it delivers a remarkably fluid and crisp gaming experience with 120-144Hz titles, especially with PC titles that can be set to correctly fill the 21:9 WUHD screen.

I experienced a more consistently strong adrenaline rush while charging around FPS maps than I have on some dedicated gaming monitors, in fact. Presumably the immersive qualities of the screen curvature (which brings your peripheral vision into play) and ultra-wide aspect ratio are somehow amplifying the experience, since even with a screen that delivers such a remarkably crisp, fluid 144Hz refresh rate while maintaining 4K resolution I wouldn’t normally expect to experience quite such a visceral rush.

Having said all this, my actual performance with the likes of Call Of Duty actually dipped while using the 40S85TH. This is down, I think, to two factors.

First, the 4ms GtG response time delivered by the 40S85TH is obviously (albeit understandably) higher than that of dedicated gaming monitors like Samsung’s own 32G80HS, many of which target 1ms GtG these days.

Second, I found the monitor’s limited brightness occasionally making it hard to pick out enemies that might be lurking in relatively dark image areas.

This latter problem isn’t a reflection of the 40S85TH’s black level capabilities, though. On the contrary, its VA panel and clever light control mechanisms (despite not having any local dimming system to work with) deliver some of the best black levels in the premium workspace monitor world. There are faint traces of light ‘jetting’ coming in from the edge of the screen’s top right and left quadrants, but for the vast majority of time you’ll never notice this minor backlight flaw.

Meaning that for 99/9% of the time, the 40S85TH is a strong monitor for watching video sources on if that matters to you. Provided, anyway, that you’re working in a dark enough room to stop you becoming too aware of the screen’s limited brightness.

It’s time to put some measured numbers on the 40S85TH’s performance – starting with the brightness I’ve just been discussing. Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate evaluation and calibration software, G1 signal generator and C6 HDR5000 colour meter recorded a peak light output of just over 250 nits. That’s down on the 350 nits Samsung claims the monitor is capable of, but none of the really usable presets I tried got close to the that claimed figure.

Less than 300 nits isn’t a huge amount of brightness to have available for delivering compelling high dynamic range gaming or video. So while there is a palpable difference between HDR and SDR images on the 40S85TH, for sure, with the former enjoying slight brightness, contrast and colour expansion over the latter, the difference is limited compared with some of the monitor world’s brighter models.

Getting back to the good news, the 40S85TH proves capable of getting as dark as 0.02 nits, unlocking the oft-forgotten dark end of the expanded HDR light spectrum better than most LCD monitors. And while the brightness limitation may occasionally let enemies hiding in dark areas get a slight jump on you, it also, as noted earlier, contributes to the screen’s relatively relaxing working experience.

Samsung’s monitor can impressively cover 99.56% of the Rec 709 colour spectrum, as well as 74.68% of the ultra-wide BT.2020 colour spectrum, or an extremely impressive 94.21% of the P3 spectrum used for most HDR game and, especially, video mastering. Adobe RGB coverage extends to 89.53%.

While the 40S85TH hits a pretty wide range of colours, the best all-round presets don’t deliver particularly accurate colour measurements from Calman Ultimate’s tests with either graphics or video content. The monitor’s default SDR Graphics mode delivered Delta E 2000 average errors of 8.65 and 12.28 with multipoint greyscale and ColorChecker tests respectively – some way above the 3.0 average error level considered to be imperceptible to the human eye. These numbers expand to 16.91 and 31.57 in the monitor’s HDR Graphics mode, too.

With video sources in the monitor’s AV Mode with the Entertain preset chosen, the Multipoint Greyscale Delta E 2000 average error is 13.99, while the ColorChecker result is 22.89. These sorts of error level won’t be a major problem for most day to day use; when it comes to the sort of long term relaxing, immersive working display set up that’s obviously the 40S85TH’s focus.

But they’re worth bearing mind if accurate HDR colours for graphic design are important to you. Though if they are, then fully calibrating the display can deliver improvements on the default presets.

The 40S85TH deserves to finish on a measurement high note, though, so let’s do that by saying that it delivers an impressive sequential contrast ratio measurements of 4,300-4,500:1 with its SDR Graphics/Standard presets, rising to 9,760:1 in the SDR Entertain AV setting, while the HDR presets settle on contrast in the 7,300-7,600:1 range. These are all good numbers for the monitor world.

Sound Quality

• 5W speaker
• Sounds powerful for such limited speaker support

While the 5W of audio power the 40S85TH offers doesn’t sound a lot on paper, Samsung gets the most out of it. It’s capable of getting more than loud enough to build on the immersive quality of the large, curved screen, as well as pushing forth impact sounds like gun-fire and explosions with enough aggression and bite to give games a suitably hard, gritty edge.

While such sounds are hard, though, they don’t sound harsh or thin. In fact, the tone of the sound is generally well-rounded and engaging.

The sound doesn’t project far to left or right, though, leaving it feeling a touch mono and focused on the centre of the screen. This isn’t a massive problem, though, given how much the monitor’s is designed around a specific central seating sweet spot.

Software and features

• Plenty of features to support long working hours and eye safety
• Benefits from Samsung’s Display Manager software

With the 40S85TH’s practical features, such as its ratio, resolution and screen curvature, being pretty intrinsically connected to its work-based performance, I’ve actually already covered most of the key features already.

The 40S85TH does give more than just give cursory nods in the direction of gaming and even video uses, making it an accomplished all-rounder if you fancy a monitor capable of occupying your down times as well as your ‘on’ time.

While the 40S85TH works very well right out of the box with any PC or Mac set up, I’d strongly recommend installing Samsung’s Display Manager software to take the screen’s usefulness to the next level.

Available for PCs (Windows 10 or later) or Macs (macOS 12 or later), the Display Manager software proves a very handy assistant with split screen setups, as well as offering simple ‘floating’ brightness and colour calibration controls.

Should you buy it?