Samsung 210T 21" LCD Monitor (Silver)

Rating:
Summary: Big, Bright and Sharp in a Conventional Aspect Ratio
Review: This monitor is huge. And bright. The contrast is amazing, and the colors don't budge with your eye in one corner of the monitor looking across it, so I can almost believe the 170 degree viewing angle claim. I find it works better a little further back than most LCDs I've been used to due to the relatively large pixel pitch resulting from 1600x1200 at 21.3" diagonal. Larger monitors further back are easier on the eyes because they don't require close focusing which causes strain. This monitor is the smaller sibling of the 240T, which is an otherwise identical monitor, with identical height and pixel size, but with a 24" diagonal at 1920x1200 resolution. My wife and I are both computer professionals, and we have one of each at home. For working on the computer, the 240T is almost too large, and the extra width is all but unusable because windows at the sides of the screen seem far away.

This monitor, like the 240T, accepts S-Video and composite (not component) video input, and does a reasonable job of de-interlacing and scaling. The major difference is that the 240T is high enough resolution for full 1080 format HDTV (1920x1080 pixels, 16:9 letterbox aspect ratio), which can be input via either DVI or VGA. This monitor, the 210T, can only manage 1600x900 for letterbox; both run 1600x1200 for regular TV 4:3 aspect ratio.

DVDs played through the computer's DVD player and scaled by a decent graphics card look much better than those coming from S-video when there aren't too many motion artifacts (see my review of WinDVD 4); but many DVDs play so poorly on PC home theater DVD players that I fall back on the regular DVD player through S-video fairly regularly. For computer connections, DVI input is much much sharper than VGA input; if you get this monitor, it's worth upgrading to a graphics card with DVI output. Contrary to the manuals of the monitors and graphics cards, both the Radeon 9000 Pro 128MB and the Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB model had no problem driving the 240T and 210T at their full resolutions in DVI mode at the monitor's native 60Hz refresh rate.

I'd like to see Samsung's new DVD HD931 player that provides progressive format (de-interlaced) DVI output, which should be optimal for this monitor (and the 240T). The home theater review sites love the HD931 player and the whole concept of connecting via DVI. The only reason I don't have the DVD HD931 is that the monitor only has a single DVI input, and it's in an awkard, though space-saving, vertical arrangment. Turns out that DVI routers are expensive, so plugging in two DVI inputs to a single monitor doesn't seem practical yet.

The best part is that this is the second giant LCD I ordered by Samsung and both came with zero stuck or dead pixels, which is just amazing.

This is the silver one. There's also a black one.