13 out of 13 people found this review helpful.
Almost perfect
Date of Review: Dec 19, 2006
The Bottom Line: Great monitor, great price, just stay away from the "calibration" stuff.
I bought this monitor at CompUSA. It's almost perfect, but I have three gripes about it:
1. The stand on my monitor isn't quite straight, making the monitor unlevel. That is, it's rotated slightly counter-clockwise. I couldn't see any way to adjust the stand or take it apart, so I just put some paper underneath the left side of the stand....
2. As others have mentioned, there is some backlight bleed-through at the top and bottom of the screen when the screen is very dark. I don't know if this is a common problem for all LCD monitors, or just this one. For normal usage you won't notice it at all.
3. My main complaint is that there are too many confusing and competing color controls, and little explanation in the manual about what they do, why they do it, and how the interact with each other.
Most monitors have three color controls: Brightness, Contrast, and Color Tone (Temperature). This monitor has those 3 basic controls, plus a Gamma control, 2 global and independent color "tweaks," and 1 meta-control!
The basic controls are: Brightness, Contrast, Color Tone, and Gamma. Brightness and Contrast you already know about. Color Tone sets the color temperature (Warm, Normal, Cool, or Custom). And there are three Gamma modes, none of them explained anywhere: Mode 1, Mode 2, and Mode 3. The default Gamma is Mode 1. Mode 2 is a little brighter than Mode 1. Mode 3 is almost the same as Mode 1, but blues are much richer, which is strange for a "gamma" control. So even if you set your Color Tone to Normal, using Gamma Mode 3 will still give you a slightly "cool" color temperature. Nevertheless, I typically use the Normal Color Tone along with Gamma Mode 3 because it looks nice.
The "meta-control" is called MagicBright, which automatically sets the Brightness, Contrast, Color Tone, and Gamma, depending on which MagicBright mode you choose: Text, Internet, Game, Sports, or Movie, or Custom (Off). You can switch MagicBright modes with a touch of a single button, which is nice.
The two global tweaks are MagicColor and color Calibration:
MagicColor automatically enhances the color saturation of whatever is on the screen. It doesn't affect any of the other settings.
Inside the MagicTune Windows software there is another program called Calibration. This program apparently sets the internal color ramps, sort of like Gamma and Color Tone do, but the Calibration tweaks are totally independent of these settings. And you can only change the Calibration through the MagicTune Windows software, not through the monitor buttons. Because Calibration tweaks all the colors, but without changing any of the other settings, and because it s only accessible through a Windows program, many problems are created: (1) There's no way to go back to the default color calibration without using the MagicTune software. No matter what you do with the buttons on the monitor, there's no way to reverse the internal color tweaking that the Calibration program has set! (2) Yes you can "calibrate" your monitor, but what does this actually mean? Calibrate it to what? sRGB? A linear map? Who knows! (3) Since Calibration is independent of the other settings, it makes a big difference what those settings were BEFORE you run Calibration, and AFTER. If you Calibrate with MagicBright or MagicColor turned on, for example, and then after Calibration you turn these off, your monitor will no longer be calibrated. But worse than this, it won't even be in a well-defined state, because those global tweaks that Calibration made are still in effect! And you can't reverse them by using the standard color controls. So in effect, there is a separate, mysterious, inaccessible color tweak called Calibration that is only available through the MagicTune software, and you can never really know how it is affecting your colors unless you set it to the Default Calibration and leave it there permanently. That's what I recommend. It's stupid to have a separate and independent color tweak that is not adjustable or reflected in the other color settings. You re just asking for trouble. So I recommend staying away from the Calibration program altogether.
Also, there's yet another calibration program on the Setup CD called Natural Color. It doesn't immediately affect any settings on your monitor, but it does allow you to associate a custom color profile with your monitor in Windows. This in turn can affect the colors that are displayed when you are running an application that cares about monitor profiles (programs such as Adobe Photoshop). But I recommend staying away from Natural Color as well. It s poorly written and I don't trust it. Photoshop has its own monitor profile generator/calibration tool that's much better and easier to use. And there are professional products you can buy if you really need a very accurately calibrated monitor.
So, in summary, Samsung needs to get their act together and have a simpler, less confusing way of setting colors on the monitor. I'm a computer scientist who programs computers for a living, and I still don't quite understand what Samsung intended with all its conflicting color modes and tweaks. How is the normal user supposed to make sense out of it? But luckily the normal controls work fine. Just stay away from the calibration stuff!
