ydal

Samsung Syn­c­Mas­ter T240HD

A good, usa­ble com­pu­ter dis­play with nice cable con­nec­tivity and a few chinks.

I recently recei­ved my new Samsung Syn­c­Mas­ter T240HD. It repla­ced my old Samsung Syn­c­Mas­ter 206BW as my main moni­tor, dele­ga­ting the other one to the sidelines.

Unpacking the Syn­c­Mas­ter gives the main screen, some cab­ling (D-Sub and HDMI, though no DVI cable was inclu­ded in my set), manu­als, dri­ver CD, remote con­trol (with bat­te­ries), and the moni­tor stand. There, the typi­cal Samsung stand design was evi­dent: a base plate that’ll be atta­ched to the neck of the stand with a hin­ged screw.

Dif­fe­ring from nor­mal stands, though, is that there is no way to com­ple­tely and secu­rely attach the neck to the screen. The screen is just plug­ged on top of the neck and left that way. The instruc­tion book­let even has a nice “don’t put it ups­ide down, or it will fall off” graphic.

From a dis­play view­point, there’s not really much to bicker about it: 1920×1200, 5ms reac­tion time. Works well with ever­y­thing; there’s lots of con­nec­tivity, fac­ing strai­ght back out (instead of down): DVI, D-Sub, Com­po­site, HDMI, SCART, coaxial input, 3.5mm audio input and opti­cal audio out­put. At the side, there’s an addi­tio­nal HDMI in, a Com­mon Inter­face slot, and a head­phone exit.

The MagicB­right set­tings (which allow you to adjust satu­ra­tion, bright­ness, etc.) are all quite intui­tive. The only fea­ture that –by design– just doesn’t really work for me is the Dyna­mic Con­trast set­ting. The only situa­tion where this might work is when purely using Office app­li­ca­ti­ons and brow­sers; if you ever watch a movie or play a game, it gets irri­ta­ting as hell when the screen chan­ges it set­tings as soon as the over­all bright­ness changes.

Also inclu­ded in the screen is a TV tuner; it comes wit­hout an antenna, so you’ll need to eit­her hook up an aerial (via Com­mon Inter­face) or a coaxial cable. After that, the auto­ma­tic chan­nel search works like a charm, and after that, you’ll have an alpha­be­ti­cally sor­ted list of channels.

Of course, the main pro­blem here in Ger­many is that most chan­nels don’t carry HD, so you end up having to sit quite a bit away from the screen as to not make the image look like some­thing from times past.

The other, much big­ger, pro­blem is the dimi­nui­tive and under­si­zed speakers. Fiddling with the equa­li­zer alle­via­tes the pro­blem slightly, but it still sounds rather tinny, espe­cially if you’re used to eit­her a 5.1 sys­tem or just a good tele­vi­sion set.

Ano­ther slight bug with the speaker out­put is that I pro­bably have some cable inter­fe­rence close to it which will make the speaker emit a buz­zing noise. Swit­ching to the exter­nal speakers (or to the TV and back to exter­nal if alre­ady on exter­nal) will cure the pro­blem, but it has to be done every time after the moni­tor was tur­ned off.

From a design view­point, thi moni­tor is quite nice: there’s the lac­que­red appearance with a tint of red, and a trans­pa­rent cover that stands out on the upper and lower edges. The active LED is a little fleck of colour at the bot­tom right hand side, and not as actively annoy­ing as most other sta­tus indi­ca­tors. The con­trol but­tons are pla­ced off the right hand side, which is a bit of a dredge to get used to. I ended up using the remote for everything.

In regard to the moun­ting and foot opti­ons, it’s a bit low on fea­tures. The only thing it allows is to swi­vel the dis­play on the base. There is also no inte­gra­ted VESA wall moun­ting, but there is an adap­ter plate to create VESA compatability.

Over­all, it has a few kinks, but con­side­ring the price, it is a very good set.

My rating:4.0 stars