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Getting back to the design, this SyncMaster's sleek looks aren't spoiled by any buttons, as the P2370 uses a touch-control system. When turned off the only indication is an inconspicuous power icon painted onto the bezel, which when pressed lights up in white. The rest of the 'buttons' are purely LED-based and can be either set to stay on or merely appear for a few seconds after pressing to the left of the icon.

Though this touch-based system and the OSD are both attractive and responsive, they're not always logically implemented. The first button calls up the OSD menu, while the second one acts as 'Down' and cleverly allows you to customize it for different functions including brightness and colour presets or aspect ratio settings. Next we have 'Up'/Brightness, and Enter/'Input selection'. No, that's not a mistake or a typo; for some reason beyond our understanding, the SyncMaster P2370 has a dedicated source-switching button despite only featuring a single input - very odd, indeed.

Also quite odd are the 'Colour Effect' settings introduced with the SyncMaster T-range, which allow you to turn the entire screen into greys, green, aqua or sepia. Someone might find a use for such things, but we're at a loss to think what those might be.

There's a large selection of other modes and presets, too. MagicBright includes fairly well-configured Text, Internet, Game, Sport, Movie and Dynamic Contrast presets and there's a Custom one to store your own settings.

Thankfully this monitor doesn't suffer from inbuilt speakers, so it's time to get onto the image quality. Unfortunately, this Samsung's TN panel doesn't live up to the chassis in which it's housed. Starting off with the greyscale performance, it put on one of the worst shows we've seen in a long time, utterly failing to distinguish between an alarmingly large number of darker shades. In fact, almost half of them were virtually indistinguishable, as opposed to the one or two usually blended on TNs these days.

There was also some minor backlight bleed from the bottom of the screen and very slight banding, both of which are common enough. Less common were noticeable signs of dithering and text wasn't particularly sharp either. Worst of all, though, are the P2370's viewing angles: horizontal ones are quite good for a TN, but vertical ones are so poor that there is only the narrowest angle from which colours remain remotely accurate.

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