A rendering of Samsung’s 3D monitor
Glasses-free 3D monitors remain a niche, no matter how hard Acer tries, but manufacturers do seem to be taking baby steps, mostly for laptop screens (like last year’s Asus announcement). Samsung previewed its own take on it at CES 2024, along with a small teaser for The Link — continuing its tradition of “The” awkward product names — a new general-purpose (aka “lifestyle”) monitor designed specifically to be used with multiple siblings.
The 32-inch, 4K The Link prioritizes aesthetics and easy setup, going for the ultraslim desktop video wall effect. According to Samsung, the monitors connect to each other via POGO pins, letting you daisy chain them off the main connection.
The Link
The 3D monitor does sound like it’s for gaming: Samsung says it has eye and head tracking, it’s compatible with existing VR games and content as well as Steam VR, and the company’s working on partnerships with game publishers. Samsung says it can also create 3D effects (presumably for 2D content), but no matter how smart the AI processing is for effects like this, I always find them either underwhelming or annoying.
Samsung will have more information about both monitors later this year.
In addition to the high-refresh gaming monitors and panels it announced earlier, the company also launched the successor to its 32-inch 4K Smart Monitor M70D, the Smart Monitor M80D. As far as I can tell, only a couple of things have changed: The stand has been redesigned with a new base and it now supports HDR10 Plus (up from HDR10). Hopefully, that also means it uses a new panel and that Samsung just failed to specifically mention it.