X-bit labs

19" LCD Monitors Roundup. Part VIII. (page 4)

Category: Other

by Aleksey Meyev

[ 10/11/2007 | 09:24 AM ]

The monitor provides quick access to the sound volume and brightness settings, and to the Splendid feature whose modes differ in brightness, contrast and color reproduction settings. You can try it as the sticker suggests you do, but you should be aware that there are too many settings that are changed in the Splendid modes while the user-defined brightness and contrast are reset, so you cannot return to them quickly.

The monitor has a standard, not very user-friendly, menu from Samsung. Not remembering the last changed item, it always opens up on the Splendid window, which is somewhat odd as this feature can be accessed quickly by means of the appropriate button. The lack of a button to choose a video input is somewhat inconvenient – you have to go through a few menu items to access that option.

By default, the monitor has 90% brightness and 80% contrast. To achieve a 100nit white I reduced them both to 56%. Backlight modulation could not be observed, so this monitor seems to regulate its brightness by means of the matrix.

The average irregularity of backlight amounts to 21% on black and 11% on white, the respective maximums being 36% and 25%. This is an acceptable result for this test.

At the default settings color gradients are reproduced quite well. When the contrast setting is lower than 15%, darks merge into black. When it is increased to 85% and higher, lights are indistinguishable from white.

The gamma curves are not ideal, but do not deflect much from the theoretical curve and betray no serious problems.

At the reduced contrast the gamma curves become very close to the ideal one.

I wrote about image-enhancing technologies in the Introduction and I’ll show you now what happens to the gamma curves on this monitor when you switch between its Splendid modes leaving the other settings at their defaults.

The gamma curves look good at the default settings and do not provoke any color-related problems, but you have quite a different picture as soon as you enable the Theater mode: the red curve sags noticeably and the blue curves acquires an S-like section in the middle. The green curve betrays a too high contrast, and about 10% of light greens are displayed indistinguishably from each other. Of course, there is no talking about having accurate colors in such a mode.

The curves are shaped differently in the Game mode, yet without making color reproduction any better. The S-shaped section of the blue curve is smaller, and the green curve is not so high up (but some of light greens still merge into the same color as is indicated by the flat section in the right part of the curve), but the red curve sags even more, getting further away from the ideal position.