Market of 22" monitors is an interesting one. Arguably, this is the most popular monitor size in the market right now. It is big enough for most users for gaming and movie needs, small enough to fit on office/work desks and is relatively easy on graphics requirements. No wonder, it's becoming the mainstream size and replacing 19" monitors.
But despite the popularity of 22" monitors, it is difficult to find a few good monitors of this size. The market is full of TN panels, specially in India where we don't have companies like Eizo, and most 22" monitors in India which are not based on TN panels are provided by HP (through corporate orders) and Lenovo.
TN panel need not necessarily be bad and if the execution is right, it is quite enough for average users. But unfortunately when it comes to 22" monitors, most companies believe in putting style over the substance.
Samsung, being the self-professed leader in display technology, has set out to change this with Syncmaster T220. With 226BW, the company had shown that TN panel can also be a base for excellent monitors for general use and gaming. But with "lottery fiasco" resulting in premature death of that monitor and the failure of subsequent Samsung 22" monitors to match 226BW, the company's reputation took a heavy beating. T220 is Samsung's attempt to provide mainstream 22" market with a monitor that can couple substance and style to decimate the opposition the way 226BW did it.
I will be putting T220 through it's paces to check how much Samsung succeeds in its lofty aim. Though, it's not a professional review and may not be perfect, I will try to do justice to T220. I don't have Display Mate or other software suit to test the monitor and my observations will be purely subjective.
[BREAK=Specifications]
Screen Size 55.88cm (22) Wide
Resolution 1680 x 1050 (WSXGA+)
Brightness 300cd/㎡
Contrast Ratio DC 20,000:1(1000:1)(Typ.)
Response time 2ms(GTG)
Viewing Angle 170Ëš/160Ëš (CR>10)
Colors 16.7Mil.
Signal Input Analog RGB, DVI
Sync. Signal Separate H/V, Composite, SOG
Connector 15pin D-SUB, DVI-D
Power Con 45 Watts
Stand By Power <1W
Speakers No
Accessories N/A
For detailed specs please checkout Samsung website.
[BREAK=Box and Accesories]
Packing was good with lots of padding with thermocol to save the monitor from damage during shipping or transportation.
As far as accessories are concerned, it was the usual affair. Power cord was there and so was a driver CD along with Magic Tune software to be used for calibrating monitor. However, the biggest surprise was lack of DVD-D cable in the bundle. Now, that can easily be a deal breaker for many. At least it would have been a deal breaker for me if I would have known it earlier. The specification sticker on product box says DVD-D cable is inside the packet but the manual accompanying the monitor inside the box noted that DVI-D cable is optional and has to be bought from Samsung. Call to Samsung representative confirmed that manual is accurate.
The interesting thing is that the same monitor sells with a DVD-D cable in Europe and USA and this missing cable is specific to India. Samsung's competitor's like Dell and Viewsonic bundles DVI-D cable with even 19" monitors. I have written to Samsung support team with the snap of the box sticker and have asked them clarify what is the company's actual position on the issue. On Saturday I got a call from Samsung people saying that there seems to be some mistake and the DVI-D cable will be sent to me on Monday. So I am keeping fingers crossed.
T220 sells for above Rs 16,000 and still lacks DVD-D cable in bundle. It's a premium 22" monitor from Samusung and yet its bundle can't match the budget offerings from the company's competitors. These cheap cost-cutting measures mar the experience for consumers and Samsung will do well to address the issue as soon as it can.
[BREAK=Appearance and ergonomics]
This monitor has definitely got the style. With a matte screen embossed in black/rose glossy beezel made of soft plastic, the monitor has an expensive and premium look and feel to it. Finishing of the product is good and a few centimeters of white soft plastic which extends beyond the beezel on bottom and top adds to the visual appeal of the monitor.
Base of the monitor is made of glossy plastic that complements the screen well. Add to this the red led underneath the touch sensitive power button. When the monitor is in use, this red led subtly illuminates the bottom panel. This red led, if it distracts you (though I doubt it will), can be switched off from OSD.
Design of T220 is not without its faults. First and foremost among them is the monitor's base. It's true that very few 22" monitors in the market have anything other than tilt as far as screen adjustment goes, given the premium feel of the T220 it would have been great to get the swivel and height adjustments. Even bigger concern is the wobbly base. This glaring oversight is simply inexcusable on the part of Samsung. Even my lowly 17" basic model from Viewsonic had better and sturdier base. The problem is not really with the base that rests on the table but with the thin stand on which the monitor stands. Though it's quite sturdy, if your desk is prone to bumps and shoves, be ready to deal with a monitor that wobbles a bit.
Second shortcoming as far as design is concerned is subjective. With its design, the monitor belongs to drawing room rather than in office. So, people who like rugged or industrial no-nonsense designs of HP or Dell monitors will not like this monitor. If you need a monitor for office, I would say stay away from T220. But it's not really Samsung's fault because design always involves some tradeoffs and, of course, it's difficult to please everyone.
[BREAK=OSD and features]
Either you will hate the location of buttons or love it. Samsung has placed them on the right side of the screen away from a user's sight. Only the touch sensitive power on/off button is in front. If you are someone who like to tweak your monitor settings frequently, you won't like the placement of buttons but for others it won't be an issue.
OSD menu is has run of the mill stuff along with a few extras from Samsung. Everyone knows about Contrast, Brightness, Gamma, Screen Position and all, so I will talk about the extras.
Magic Bright: It contains a predefined set of brightness/contrast profiles but I found most of them unusable. Text Mode was too dull. Internet Mode was OK. Games was Contrast on Full Blast, Sports was very cool and Movies was a little warmer than average.
Dynamic contrast kept on changing a little too aggressively and that did not suit my tastes.
Magic colour: I must say that I liked the vibrancy provided by the Magic Colour though some may find it too bright. There was a demo option to test Magic Colour which bifurcates the screen in two with the left part applied with Magic Colour. It was a nice little trick to show you what you might be missing without Magic Colour.
Magic Colour Demo. Note the difference between left and right halfs of the picture.
One important thing to note: with Magic Colour on you can't adjust RGB in monitor OSD.
Colour effect: This one is akin to what to get in the digi-cams. That is ability to give a colour effect image. All the usual suspects are there like Sepia, Saturated Colours and Blue effect.
RTA: At Digital Versus They talked about this feature. According to them, Response Time Accelerator has three modes, but I can't find it in OSD of my monitor. I think it is probably related to lack of DVI-D connection, though I am not too sure because Google search failed to return any relevent result on the matter. Honestly, I don't think I am missing this feature.
[BREAK=Performance]
There were initial hiccups but after calibrated the monitor gave a strong performance. Text and pictures were crisp and the very slight smudge that I used to see around text on my 17" Viewsonic TFT was absent from this screen.
Subjective colour quality
Colour output with factory setting is a joke. The screen is too bright and contrast is at 100. Also, with Dynamic Contrast and Magic Bright in full flow, the result is a screen that is producing unnatural colours which are too saturated and vibrant.
But the poor factory settings are not unheard of as far as LCD monitors are concerned. Things improved a bit after an hour or so as the screen warmed up, but the monitor was still almost unusable. First, I tried a few changes through the OSD of the monitor. Under factory settings, most of the controls are on auto so you need to turn off Magic Bright and Dynamic Contrast before you can change Brightness, Contrast and RGB in OSD.
With the brightness at 55, contrast at 75, Gamma level 2 and a little bit of tinkering with the RGB resulted in a screen that was decent enough. But it still lacked the colour depth of my old 17" Viewsonic. Text and pictures were crisp and sharp on T220, but my old monitor was still putting Samsung's flagship 22" incher to shame as far as rendering of colour is concerned.
So I popped in the CD containing Magic Tune and installed the program to further calibrate the monitor. Unfortunately the Magic Tune refused to work on my system. Whether it was 64-bit OS or something else, despite repeated attempts it would not run on the monitor.
Fortunately, ATI's catalyst centre (running 4850 Sonic) had quite a few options to calibrate monitors. Working with catalyst center was easy and tweaking settings in its colour tab produced some very nice results. After a few hours of tinkering with various settings I finally settled on...
[BREAK=Performance continued...]
OSD
Brightness: 50
Contrast: 50
Magic Bright: off
Magic Colour: off
Colour Tone: Custom
Colour Control
Red: 50
Blue: 43
Green: 48
Colour Effect: none
Gamma: 2
Monitor Calibration (Catalyst Centre)
Red
Gamma = .75
Brightness = -20
Contrast = 47
Green
Gamma = .80
Brightness = -7
Contrast = 50
Blue
Gamma = .90
Brightness = -7
Contrast = 50
These settings were suitable for me as far as Internet and office work is concerned. For a little more crisper and cool picture, turning the Magic Color "Full" or "Intelligent" did the trick.
Colours on screen
After the calibration, the monitor produced rich colours with quite OK grays and blacks. Of course, my calibration wasn't a professional job so it can't be perfect. Testing the monitor subjectively with following pic, I was satisfied with the results though Lagom Test wasn't so kind on my monitor. It still failed to match Viewsonic 1703WB's colour depth or the display that I get on 20" inch CRT at my office, but it was definitely a lot sharper than the 17" monitor. Overall, picture and output was slightly better on T220 and I was quite satisfied with it.
Tested with this pic after calibration
Full Resolution: http://tomyeah.com/images/Monitor calibration chart.jpg
[BREAK=Movies and Gaming]
To get an idea about movies playback on this monitor, I ran two clips: Trailer of Madagascar (720p) and trailer of Quantum of Solace (1080p)
Coming from a 17" monitor, watching movies on a 22" monitor in their full glory was a nice experience. Picture was sharp and I did not notice any ghosting. Colours were also pretty rich and the monitor rendered even very fast scenes of Quantum Of Solace with ease. Of course, viewing angles were typical TN, that is to say very poor.
But there was one jarring note in T220's good performance and that was backlight bleeding. As evident from the Quantum of Solace photograph (see below), the monitor suffered backlight bleeding on top and bottom bands of the screen, specially during dark scenes. It wasn't as bad as it seems in this picture but it was noticeable, at least in the bottom part of screen. Strangely it wasn't that noticeable with Madagascar clip.
Gaming
With a supposed 2ms gray-to-gray response time, T220 had no trouble with Call of Duty 4. The output was good and I enjoyed running through the fast-paced action scenes of COD4. I turned on Gaming mode while playing CoD4 and it produced a sharp picture even though contrast was a little too much for me. Sports mode on the otherhand gave a very nice output. The colours were a lot cooler than normal but CoD4 seemed really nice with this mode.
[BREAK=Few words about the panel]
I was curious to know about the Panel maker of my T220. When the details began to emerge on the "Panel Lottery"
after 226BW, it was revealed that most of the Samsung LCD monitors in Asia use CMO panels. Monitors with Samsung panels go to Europe and AU panels are sent to the USA.
But after that fiasco, Samsung removed the panel details from the back label and after sometime even hid the panel makers name from the so called "Service Menu" (the option to call up this menu on Syncmasters is: set brightness and contrast to zero, press Source button for five seconds.)
What you get is this:
Panel makers' code is no longer there, but version is there and consensus on the Web is that the code to decipher Version is:
* X-xxxxxxxAx-xxxx: Samsung panel
* X-xxxxxxxLx-xxxx: AU Optronics panel
* X-xxxxxxxDx-xxxx: CMO panel
* X-xxxxxxxIx-xxxx: CPT panel
So by this yardstick, it seems that either we have started to get Samsung panel LCD's in India or the monitor that I picked up is an exception.
[BREAK=Conclusion]
For me, T220 was a mixed bag. Moving from a 17" VA 1703 monitor, I lost a few points on colour depth, gained a few points on text sharpness and overall contrast and vibrancy. Of course, I also gained a lot of screen space and reactivity and thus got a monitor which can provide me with better gaming and movie viewing experience.
So, back to our first question: How far Samsung succeeds in its lofty aims with T220? While I can't give an answer in black and white - folks, its colour monitor I am reviewing - here is my take.
Syncmaster T220 is not a bad monitor and it may be comparable to 226BW (though I heard blacks were great on 226BW and here I found them only good) but it is not going to flatten the competitors the way 226BW did because market has changed since then. Performance of T220 is decent enough but that is not in tune with its price. T220 sells for around Rs 16,000 (I got it for Rs 15,000 through a dealer friend) and that's just a tad pricey for the kind of performance it provides.
A few days back, I wrote in a forum post here that Dell 2208WFP does not deserve more than 14K. That same statement is true for this monitor as well. Then, there is the issue of missing DVI-D cable. HDCP features of T220 can be used only if you connect it with PC using a DVD-D cable. So, the kind of bundle that Samsung is providing in India limits the functionality of this monitor for people here. And that's just plain sad because I feel this monitor with digital input can improve upon its performance a bit more.
For now, I can only say that if you are smitten by design of T220 and will be putting it in your drawing room, get it and you won't be disappointed. Only design puts T220 above the bevy of monitors like VX 2235 and VX2255 from Viewsonic and Dell 2208WFP. While its performance is comparable to these monitors and in some cases even better, its price and Samsung's bundle does not justify it buying over them.
Score:
Performance: 8/10
Features: 7/10
Design: 9/10
Bundle: 4/10 (slightly better score because of Magic Tune, even though it failed to work on my PC. Otherwise lack of DVI-D cable is pretty bad))
Value for money: 6/10
Overall: 7/10
