Samsung SyncMaster™ 710MP 17 inch LCD Monitor

The Samsung 710MP is a 17-inch LCD computer monitor that also doubles as an LCD TV by virtue of a built-in TV tuner, multimedia connectors and speakers.

Physical characteristics:
- silver color
- 17" screen
- fairly thin bezel, except for the stereo speakers placed below the screen
- tilt base (no swivel)
- control buttons in a row along the bottom edge of the panel
- computer connections (and TV RF connector) in a recessed panel on the back
- AV connections on the lower left edge of the panel
- detachable power and analog VGA cables included
- small remote control included

The depth is about 2 inches, and the base can tilt back flat against the rear of the panel. None of the connectors stick out to the rear, so it could definitely be mounted flat on a wall.

As a computer monitor:
- native resolution is 1280 x 1024
- standard analog VGA connector (no DVI)
- typical On-Screen-Display with all the usual range of adjustments
- computer audio input (3-pin stereo jack) on the back (cable included)

As a TV:
- analog TV tuner included, supports the usual range of cable channels
- TV RF input on the back (can plug in cable outlet or antenna directly)
- Channel Up/Down, Volume /-, and Source Select controls on the panel and on the remote
- AV connectors on the side for S-Video in, Composite Video in, Left and Right stereo audio in, and stereo headphones out (no component video though)
- on-screen TV menu (separate from the computer monitor OSD menu) to control picture, channel tuning options, source connector selection etc.

There's a CDROM, but no paper manual. There's a User Manual on the CD in both HTML and PDF format, but the PDF document needs Korean fonts downloaded from Adobe to display properly.

The remote control is small and flat, powered by a single button battery (included), but it has all the expected functions: channel tuning, volume control, toggle channel display on/off, toggle captions on/off, and access to the on-screen menu. From the on-screen menu you can adjust picture (brightness, contrast, color, sharpness), source selection (cable, video in, S-video in, computer), channel tuning (antenna or cable, auto-scan or add/delete channels manually, display text captions etc. After-market remotes do work with this unit when you find the right setting for the control codes.

Unfortunately you can't use the computer and TV inputs simultaneously to do Picture-In-Picture.

As a computer monitor, the display is fine - on par with Samsung's other fine LCD monitors. Good resolution, good brightness and contrast, no noticeable response-time problems, wide viewing angle. One might wish for a digital connector, but it works well enough with the analog VGA connector.

The sound from the speakers isn't great - they seem tinny and underpowered, and of course the stereo separation is non-existent - but if you consider them a useful addition to the monitor at virtually no extra cost, there's not much to complain about.

You can use this monitor as a standalone LCD TV, but the picture is not on par with most dedicated LCD TVs. The maximum usable brightness, contrast, and color saturation are not as good. The picture often looks a little bit fuzzy and noisy, and the color tint is difficult to get right. Smooth color graduations are lost, with lighter tones looking dull, and others like strong reds and greens looking over-saturated. It looks ok when you are watching it from across the room without any standard of comparison, but compared side-by-side to a CRT TV or a better LCD TV, it's just not as good.

Compared to a dedicated LCD TV, you will see that this monitor has a much finer dot pitch. That might translate to higher resolution, if the Samsung had a high-resolution component video input, which it doesn't. But there seems to be design trade-off between optimizing the LCD for high-resolution computer use or high-brightness TV use, causing the TV picture to be sub-standard by comparison.

Also, while the picture is clean through the composite or S-Video inputs, I would say that the TV tuner has a noise problem. Particularly on the upper channels, the picture was noticeably noisier than it should be, suffering from some sort of interference. Another TV set plugged into the same cable for comparison showed a clean signal. I see that other users have complained about this in reviews, so I don't think the fault is unique to our unit.

One other little example of the difference from a dedicated TV: the channel number is displayed on the screen in faint light blue on a black background. It's perfectly legible if you are sitting in front of the monitor, but difficult to read from across the room, unlike the bold and bright channel numbers typically displayed by dedicated TVs.

So in summary, if you consider the TV function to be an added bonus on a competent computer LCD monitor, then the Samsung is a bargain. If you are buying it primarily as an LCD TV that can double as a computer monitor, you might want to do some side-by-side comparison with other dedicated LCD TVs first.