Samsung's new LCD, the
SyncMaster 173P , announced in late September, finally started shipping last week.
I ordered one on Monday (2-day delivery, arrived late yesterday) having never seen the product, or read any reviews (as of writing, I still cannot find a single review of this display online).
Around here Samsung LCDs have great reputations, and my personal experiences with them have impressed me greatly.
a brief run-down of the advertised specs which made me order this monitor:
-16 ms pixel response time
-700:1 contrast ratio
-178-degree horizontal and vertical viewing angles
-portrait mode ("pivot technology" Samsung calls it)
-slim bezel on all 4 sides for multi-monitor setups in landscape or portrait
-analog and digital inputs, so can connect 2 to my graphics card
After reading the press release, I decided I would get one as soon as they were available, and a second if it lived up to it's promise.
First impression: it is a beautifully designed case. Where this really comes through is the smoothness of the rotation to portrait mode. Also, this display looks much better in real life than in the product photos. It's definitely the nicest-looking flat-panel Samsung has made so far. My one complaint is that the range of vertical motion is rather limited. It would also be nice if the display could be turned without turning the base.
Unfortunately, this display's beauty is only skin deep. The first problem is that even the most basic controls are not available to a Mac user. By "basic controls", I'm referring to brightness and contrast. That's right, you can't set them if you use a Mac. One of the big features Samsung is advertising with this monitor is supposedly its great software controls in the place of hardware controls. Someone at Samsung apparently got the idea that it is bad to have physical buttons that control brightness and contrast on a monitor, so instead they will do it through "software". One of the great benefits of this, they tell us, is that it allows for different settings for each user. What does software mean? There is a little daemon running which controls these properties of the monitor, and can load different configurations for different users. They also advertise a feature called "Macintosh support". I'm still not exactly sure what they mean by it, but they certainly don't mean the availability of software to set the brightness and contrast of the monitor. The b/c controls don't show up in the Displays prefpane in X.3 or in the Monitors control panel in 9.2. It does not respond to the F14/F15 keys.
How are the default settings? Apple's Display Calibration does work, and after setting the gamma to 2.6 and the white point to 9500 K, I can almost look at the screen in a very well-lit room without needing to squint. With the Computer Name screen saver, my old CRT emits almost no light. The 173P is on par with a 10-15 W incandescent light bulb. An absurdly bright black, from a display with an advertised 700:1 contrast ratio. I conclude that the factory setting has the contrast around 0 and the brightness around 100. So this limits how well I will be able to evaluate the hoped-for awesomeness of that contrast ratio.
How about the other cool features of the monitor? Surely everyone has seen those camcorders with the flip-out LCD, that automagically flips the image when you rotate it 180 degrees so you can fold it back in to the camera's body and watch the playback without flipping the camera upside down. And surely Samsung would have their monitors use the same principle when you rotate them for portrait mode, cause nobody wants to read all of the text on-screen sideways, right? right? nope, this too requires Windows-only software.
My inclinations are to view the configuration thing as a fun challenge, and I would enjoy trying to find ways to set this monitor. I haven't had the chance to spend much time with it yet; I welcome suggestions. Except suggestions to use VPC. I don't have it installed right now, and am not going to install it for this. The portrait mode thing is certainly not essential to my computing experience.
I do plan to call Samsung tech-support to see if they can tell me anything useful, even though I fully expect it to just be a waste of my time.
But the problems are not just with software. Software aside, this display is dismal. I was truly astounded to see how bad the picture was. Is this really a Samsung?? They advertise a 178-degree viewing angle. This thing has absolutely 0 color preservation more than about 30 degrees off of the perpendicular. I calculate that as a 60 degree viewing angle. It is a fact that the image doesn't disappear at larger angles the way images used to on old LCDs, but my standards are higher than that. The image on the other recent Samsung LCDs I have seen is beautiful anywhere in the room. The image on Apple Cinema Displays is beautiful anywhere in the room. I demand that level of quality of this monitor.
But it gets worse. Not only is the viewing angle miserable, but even when viewed straight on, the display's light field is very very uneven. There are light and dark patches all over the place, and particularly severe light leakage over the top of the pixel array. On the whole such a severe problem that it requires a leap of faith to even believe that the color is consistent.
I would like to be able to say something good about the image. But I even have to hesitate about complementing the clarity if the image, due to the fact that there is a severe horizontal red/blue convergence problem. The convergence is supposed to be software-controlled, but again the software is PC only, so I can't evaluate whether it is possible to adequately correct this problem. If this can be corrected, after setting brightness and contrast reasonably I would comfortably say that reading text on the 173P would be very comfortable. But that is not enough.
A quick side note for those who like to keep score: my display has 0 pixel anomalies.
Summary
This is a dismal display. I will call Samsung tech support first, but I will definitely be returning this monitor. I think I forgot to mention earlier, this is not a cheap monitor. List Price is $750. Even if I got it for much less than that, for such a price tag I demand a top-of-the-line performance.
If I were to describe how the 173P is for a Mac user in one word, I would have to say "unuseable".
Product score: 3/10
Taking price into consideration: 1/10
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