Samsung SyncMaster 226CW > Reviews > A brilliant 22" widescreen monitor from Samsung.

Author's product rating:   

Picture quality	Excellent
Colour sensitivity	Excellent
Design	Excellent
Ease of use	Easy
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Bright, colourful, well defined image .  Easy to use .  Superb build quality .
Disadvantages:	None  -  except the gloss finish could get fingerprinty .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

If there was a beauty contest for 22" TFT monitors, the competition may as well go home, as this monitor looks the business with its black glossy surround, brushed metal strip along the bottom and the silver power button with its blue ON light. The LCD panel also looks smart when off, a nice matt-black colour and last but by no means least, a few adjustment buttons are hidden under the bottom right-hand edge of the screen

The screen boasts a native resolution of 1680x1050 pixels, a 3000:1 contrast ratio and a 2millisecond response time, which keeps any motion ghosting to an absolute minimum, which should keep video and gaming enthuiasts happy.

Samsung certainly are no Scrooges when it comes to providing goodies in the box. They very kindly give you both a VGA (standard analogue) monitor cable and a DVI (digital) cable for enhanced picture quality with compatible graphics cards. Included also is a driver CD which unfortunately is XP only, though you can download Vista drivers from the Samsung website and a nice blue polishing cloth. A basic tilt-only stand completes the package.

Connection ports are hidden under a plastic flap that isn't too difficult to remove. On connecting to my Dell desktop via the DVI cable, the picture appeared nice and vibrant, with well-defined colours, sharp text and only a little backlight leakage on the bottom edge. In my opinion, the picture looks fine as it is. No tweaking was required, though if you want to adjust the picture, you get the usual brightness, contrast and colour control modes which are accessed using the hidden buttons mentioned above. An auto-adjust option is present, though this works on VGA only.

I couldn't really find anything wrong with this monitor. At a push, I'd say my only gripe is that the glossy finish could attract fingerprints, but thats it.

Overall a quality monitor that will satisfy all of your PC needs and look the busines in your office/study.