Karekiet 39

I’ve finally taken care of my screen. My current one, a Belinea 106095 had ended its life. It wasn’t broken, but the CRT had had its time, and from time to time it was like watching a stroboscope. If that doesn’t give you one of those massive headaches, nothing will. Not to mention that it’s bad for your eyesight. So I started looking around for the right combination, and I came up with the screen that has been installed some moments ago on my desk : the Samsung SyncMaster 2253BW.

It’s a screen without many extras, which is exactly what I need. I don’t need no USB hub, webcam or speakers in my screen. If I need it (USB hub and speakers) I already have it, and it is almost certainly of better quality than the bundled hardware that gets tossed in with a screen. And when I don’t have it, you can be fairly certain I simply don’t want it.

Number crunching

Technically, the figures are rather impressive:

• 2 ms refresh rate
• a dynamic contrast of 8000:1
• a special handling of square images
• Analog VGA and digital (DVI/DHCP) connectors for the best image quality possible
• 1680×1050 resolution

And I can say it doesn’t dissapoint. The image is very clear, totally stable and not hard on the eyes at all.

Dynamic contrast

The dynamic contrast is a functionality that adapts the lighting of the screen to the darkness of the image that is displayed. It can be interesting for the eyes when you are looking at many screens that have a dark background and highlighted letters. The feature isn’t as useful when watching movies. When all of a sudden there is a darker scene, you don’t see anything but a few dark blobs moving on the screen. Fortunately, the dynamic contrast can be adjusted quite easily before watching a movie.

No distortion

Widescreen monitors have been taking up since the last two years only.  That means that lots of software still have the idea everyone uses square screens. On the portable we have at home that means that everything is stretched and that playing a game entails that you are moving around little fatties with a stretched head. If you’re not playing a sci-fi game, who can blame you when you start seeing aliens all around?

I’m using the 2253BW with the DVI adapter, and the screen does the smart thing when a square resolution is chosen by the application  it adds two black bands to the left and right of the screen, in such a way that you keep a square screen, with no distortion at all. Very interesting.

Finally

The SyncMaster 2253BW is very good price/quality for a screen with its specs, and I expect that price to go down in the weeks/months to come. There are surely worse screens on the market, and I doubt that for that price (299€ at the moment in Belgium) you can find much better.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 15u27 and is filed under House. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.