Customer Reviews

Samsung 240T 24-Inch LCD Flat-Panel TV

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Until I put the Samsung 240T on my desk, I had thought I could never have a monitor that was too large. Now I'm not so sure. This monitor's physically wide enough that if I position it as close to me as I'd position other LCDs, I actually have to swivel my head to view the whole screen. And the pixel pitch (size of pixels) is wider than I was used to on my IBM A21P Thinkpad notebook (1600x1200 resolution on 15" diagonal) and on my SGI 1600SW (1600x1024 resolution on 17" diagonal). All in all, the monitor looks better viewed from a little further away than these monitors. The brightness, contrast and viewing angle on this monitor blows away anything else I've ever seen. The panel is absolutely uniformly lit and mine arrived with no dead or stuck pixels. The 1920x1200 resolution is large enough for the highest resolution HDTV (1080, which is 1920x1080 pixels).

Contrary to both Samsung's manual and Radeon's manuals, but in agreement with comments on countless mailing lists, both the Radeon 9000 and 9700 Pro models with 128MB memory were able to drive this monitor at full 1920x1200 resolution with DVI. The difference between DVI inputs and VGA inputs is night and day, with DVI being far superior in terms of sharpness. The S-video inputs are quite reasonable, and TV images look as good on this monitor as on other analog TVs, and provide a means to play VHS from from VCR without needing S-video inputs on my computer. But DVDs look much much better when played on the computer's DVD player through a decent progressive software decoder like WinDVD coupled with the graphics card's built-in rescaler. In fact, it's one of the best DVD images I've ever seen. To get the best sound, I take the computer's S/PDIF digital output directly into my AV receiver, thus bypassing my computer's sound card entirely.

All in all, this is a great monitor for home theater and one of only a handful of monitors that run 1920x1200 resolution. Others include Sony's PremierePro P232 23"; Samsung's replacement for this model, the 241MP 24", which also has component video input; and the Apple Cinema HD 23", which requires a connector dongle for DVI input and has no hardware control or S-video input. The Samsung 210T is an identical monitor feature-wise, and uses the same panel technology and same size pixels, but provides a conventional 1600x1200 aspect ratio. Note that it does not come with the speakers, but then I wanted to use my serious home theater speakers anyway.

I have had the 240T for over a year now. It is flat out the best monitor one the market today. 1920x1200 over DVI gives razor sharp text, the backlight is super bright and completely even and the colors are stunning. It has such a high pixel frequency that there is never any streaking when playing games. HDTV is awesome on it. Hook up a MyHD card with DVI and enjoy full resolution HDTV.
Everyone who comes over to my house cannot believe how nice it is (and most of my friends are computer geeks).
Trust me, 5 minutes after you pull the 240T out of the box you will forget how much you paid for it.