Samsung SyncMaster 2232BW 22 inch Monitor

Samsung SyncMaster 2232BW Plus

The business of picture quality remains as subjective as ever, but this product seems pretty nice from any perspective.

What s natural-looking to one person is washed-out to another. One person s bright and colorful is someone else s garish and exaggerated. Then you have to take into account that almost any LCD display s chroma saturation, gray scale, etc., can be adjusted to match that of any other unit. Nowadays, since most computer displays are digital from input cable to screen, there s no bottomless wellspring of potential for signal-processing enhancements as used to be the case with analog equipment.

Apart from optical improvements and subtle trickery with the space between pixels, that seems to leave only one apparent quality upon which to base an assessment: good old dot pitch. But even this seems to have become irrelevant since LCD displays, including cheap ones, have become quite refined. Case in point: my new, fancy (albeit bought on clearance at Best Buy) Samsung 2232BW, which resides below the secondary display connected to the VGA output of the same video card, a two-year-old cheapo Polaroid 20-inch widescreen.

The 8000:1 dynamic contrast (ratio?) touted on the exterior plastic seems, at first look, to be the reason for a razor-sharp desktop and extremely accurate-looking graphics, including photographs and video. However, the aforementioned secondary monitor is two years old, and the color temperature of its fluorescent backlight has shifted a good bit toward the yellow, as the slick new Samsung will probably eventually also do. This leaves me to suspect that most of what a manufacturer claims to be a technological breakthrough is really just an improvement over your old worn-out device because the damn thing is new, for crying out loud.

However, this Samsung is really, really pretty, especially considering the paltry $220 I paid for it. Even the on-off button is pretty. Ansel Adams wallpaper looks better than ever, which may have as much to do with cabinet aesthetics (that round-cornered, piano-lacquer-look Samsung Pebble thing) as it does with performance. The look comes with a liability, however. The tiniest bit of dust and/or dirt is hugely conspicuous against the glossy plastic, and any cleaning effort more aggressive than a gentle Kleenex-wipe results in permanent, visible scratches. Fortunately, I don t give a rat s patootie about looking fashionable, so this is a minor issue for me.

Using my trusty 2.25 diopter reading glasses, I looked very closely at the individual pixels in the exit buttons of open windows on both monitors, and was unable to discern any difference in dot pitch. That doesn t necessarily mean there isn t a small difference that s beyond the scope of my middle-aged eyeballs, but I can tell with you some certainty that the number of screen pixels in the X button on both monitors added up to exactly the same.

And while we re on pixels - specifically, dead ones my particular instance of the 2232BW has turned in a resounding Zero. Although this is a happy state of affairs, it s not the hugely pleasant surprise it once was, as LCD quality control seems to have improved a lot in recent years.

The bundled software, as has been my consistent experience with such things, was nonfunctional on my garden-variety AMD-based PC. I normally just toss the included CD when I buy new hardware, but this time I thought it might be different, so I ran the install package. Once again, I hadn t learned my lesson, and once again, I had to uninstall the stupid thing while cursing myself for not trusting my instincts. Of course this means I can t give any review on the software, ( Magic Tune ) because of its predictable uselessness. However, this may be partly due to the fact that I m running Vista 64, so I ll gladly concede that it may hose up your machine in an entirely different way than it did mine. Also, it bears noting that this color-brightness-grayscale-contrast-accuracy adjusting software may be more useful in VGA mode, but most people will plug their 2232BW into a DVI slot anyway.

Apart from the unknown-as-yet reliability factor which seems unlikely to be a future issue I like the Samsung and plan to keep it until it croaks.