Samsung SyncMaster 226cw Comments

I read this review after sending two of these back and I can't believe we saw the same product.

OK, first the good points...colours were vivid, very fast panel response and it does look very good on the desktop. It functions well although the out-of-the-box settings were, to be frank, awful.

Now the bad. Both my samples had horrendous light leakage and my test game, Doom 3 (old but great for showing up black level problems!) was ruined by a red 'sunset glow' at the bottom of the display. I also found the viewing angles to be very poor, especially in the vertical plane. Backlighting was very uneven and the panel suffered with quite excessive mura. I found the perimeter backlight method to be a major distraction as well, which I felt was a major contributor to the poor black levels I experienced on both samples. Using powerpoint I displayed a background of 20% white and the lack of uniformity from bottom to top of the display was staggering. I can't believe a company like Samsung would allow this past QC.

From the samples that I had I am suspecting we have another 226BW instalment here? Your thoughts would be appreciated.

I decided to spend a lot more money in the end after looking at several 22" monitors and being thoroughly underwhelmed by what was on offer, and now have a LaCie 324, which I am very pleased with. Fabulous colour, excellent, uniform black level, viewing angles are very good with moderate colour shift off angle but nothing like as bad as a TN. More importantly it passed the Doom 3 test :) This shows that you do indeed get what you pay for. It is a worthy replacement for my old IIyama Vision Master Pro 454, which finally gave up the ghost this week but was a stunning CRT monitor... RIP