Ease of use, 3 of 5. The buttons on the machine are at the bottom and an annoyance to get to or read which button does what. The Remote is simple enough to use.
Durability, so far 3 of 5 As long as it stays on the wall it should last okay. Outter case is a plastic of some sort as is the remote control.
Cost, for what you get it's okay but you'll have to spend the savings on speakers, and mounting hardware.
General history of my dealings with this unit
My branch bought several of the Samsung PPM50H3 50 in. Flat Panel Televisions a while back for $3750 each and my office ended up with one to display various information and such without having to resort to my prescription quality hand writing on a white board.
When they came in we discovered the FIRST shortcoming of these sets.
They came as a single piece and unit. NO WAY to mount them on the wall and no way to set them on a table and have them remain stable, secure or safe was included.
The search began only to discover that at the time, SAMSUNG did not MAKE a wall mount for the set even though there were brackets for some sort of mounting on the set.
Generic mountings were finally located that would work with the sets and they were mounted in the appropriate places.
My office has since taken on the additional duty of being the location of weekend and holiday 24 hour point of contact office so we managed to hook a DVD player up with minimal effort.
This is when the SECOND shortfall of this unit was made painfully obvious.
Namely, there is NO SPEAKERS in or on this unit. They may be bought SEPARATELY but are not included in any way, shape, or form with these units.
Rather than shelling out even more funds, we were able to scavenge a small surround sound system (sub woofer and 2 all purpose speakers at least) from the lounge down the hall since it still had a regular TV that included speakers and was rarely needed for louder or more exact sound than it could produce by its self.
After long arguments we finally recently managed to get the cable TV line moved to our office from the former 24 hour office area only to find that this "TV" does not have the standard plug and play cable socket.
There are slots or plugs for anything else you can think of it seem like for other devices but not for cable.
The DVD player that we had hooked up was a bottom of the line basic model that is also not cable ready so that was no help at all.
The "TV" is more of a monitor and is hooked up to one of our computers as well as the DVD player for the work related displays and to check on certain databases as well for easier multitasking with just one person.
The display is fine for most formats but for some reason, it is not cooperative with our office's EXCELL items or our schedule which is some form of MS DOS based program (I'm not good at computers so I can't identify the actual program) and for both, there is no adjustments that will make them display properly.
The Excel sheets are cut off in what almost looks like letter box format but rather than re-sizing, it just cuts parts off of both sides.
The color for our scheduling program is completely off making it near impossible to read. It resembles a monitor that is BADLY in need of a degauss.
For DVD play it works great, for plain Internet Explorer is seems fine.
An interesting feature that we discovered by accident on this system is an internal sensor of some sort that will power off the unit if it is tilted at more than a certain angle (rough guess about 20 degrees front or back) and will keep it off until the balance is restored.
Another thing that I have noticed about this set is that it throws off some heat from the front. I have been told by friends and other co-workers that ALL of them do this but since I have not dealt with others besides this model I can't vouch for that fact.
It will not get HOT but it could be used to replace a small space heater in a well insulated and sealed office or other room for a bit of extra heat.
Summary
This would be a good (but expensive) monitor for playing computer games or movies if you spring for the speakers or have a good sound system that you can hook up to it.
I would spring for the extra funds and get a set that's actually complete (wall mount or stand/feet and speakers as well as plug & play "traditional" cable ready hook up.
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