Still As Life

Since returning home, I've gotten one of my other Christmas presents setup, a new Samsung SyncMaster 940BW Plus 19" wide screen LCD to replace my old CRT and compliment my 9 month old Samsung SyncMaster 940BW.

There is just enough room on my desk to fit them next to each other, almost perfectly, the difference between the two of them is absolutely amazing though.

In case you aren't aware, the all black one is the older 940BW, the silver and black one is the 940BW Plus.

I'm not entirely sure what it is, but the older one pales in comparison to the new one.

I had previously had the old one connected to the video card (Radeon x800GTO) via DVI, with the older CRT connected via VGA. When setting up the new one, I decided to use DVI for it and relegate the old one to VGA (I had thought I had dual DVI outputs but I don't). So I don't know if it's just the difference between the analogue and digital displays, or if it's a combination of that and age (though 9 months doesn't seem like that long really), but the quality difference between the display on the new and old one is amazing, even down to colour clarity.

I have set each LCD to have identical settings in the menu and so on, yet there is still a big difference. This leaves me to believe, that the newer model, the Plus, is remarkably better than the LCD that I once said when I first got it was the best 19" wide screen LCD I had seen. It is marketed as having a 2000:1 contrast ratio while the older model wasn't, and it is also marketed as being a 5ms response rate. I'm not 100% sure on this, but from memory, the older one was 8ms. So this isn't a huge difference.

I suppose I won't really be sure just how much better it is until I do a system upgrade to a video card with dual DVI outputs. That'll be fun.

Excuse the shocking photo, I think the flash being reflected from both sides confused the camera.

Samsung have always made some of the best LCD's, in game and watching DVD's, this is an amazing LCD, as was it's predecessor. If you are deciding on a 19" wide screen LCD, I highly recommend the Samsung SyncMaster 940BW Plus!

Labels: hardware