Samsung SyncMaster 970P Review

We usually hit a couple of online resellers to check the real-world or street price of a review product against its suggested retail. Samsung lists its SyncMaster 970P monitor at $549, and as usual we found a few modest discounts -- $538 at Amazon.com, $520 at J&R Electronics. But we also found several markups, with PC Connection selling the 19-inch LCD for $616 and CDW asking $640. It seems Samsung's not kidding when it calls the 970P a premium flat-panel display.

Even at list price, the 970P is at least a C-note above the going rate for a 19-inch desktop LCD. But the Samsung has more going for it than the usual 1,280 by 1,024 resolution and lower-than-CRT power consumption (36 watts).

For one thing, the monitor has both VGA analog and DVI digital inputs, with both cables supplied in the box. Either one, along with the notebook-style external AC adapter cable, plugs into a compact dongle -- much easier than the usual hard-to-reach or awkward-angle connectors -- at the rear of the display.

The Samsung is also strikingly attractive, in an inevitable-allusions-to-Apple way: Besides a bezel just under an inch thin, it sports a handsome silver-gray and white color scheme, with a square white base accented by a glowing blue (when switched on) power button front and center.

And that's the only button on the monitor. All other controls such as screen brightness, contrast, and centering are handled by Samsung's MagicTune software (for Windows or Mac, not for Linux), which pops up from a Windows Taskbar icon to present several menus of point-and-click settings, as well as a detailed calibration utility with test-pattern and color-matching screens for fussy desktop publishers.

The software includes a MagicBright menu that lets you choose among preset levels of brightness intended for Web surfing, gaming, and so on. We found the Text and Internet modes much too dim (30 and 45 percent brightness, respectively) and the Sport mode oddly bluish, but had no trouble setting our own brightness and contrast preferences.

Shoppers focused on specifications may think the SyncMaster's advertised 250 nits of brightness a trifle low, but the monitor makes up for it with a formidable 1,000:1 contrast ratio. Not only does it make text and images superbly sharp, it let us leave brightness at 75 or 80 percent and tweak the contrast setting to achieve the washday-white background we like for word processing.

Loading DisplayMate's solid-color screens, we were unable to spot any bad pixels in our test unit's LCD. We also found faultless contrast, except maybe for distinguishing the blackest from next-to-blackest hue at the extreme edge of the color-gradient palette. Ditto for extra-wide viewing angles, though as usual we chuckle a bit as monitor vendors push ever closer to boasting perfect readability at an impossible 180 degrees from head-on (Samsung's specs claim 178 degrees both horizontally and vertically).

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