Samsung 244T

Samsung’s 244T toes the line with the same high-degree of ergonomic adjustability that these others offer. And like Dell, Samsung throws in the full complement of connections—albeit just two, rather than four, USB ports—and PiP, but no media reader.

Samy also throws in its signature Magic Tune software for color tuning and calibrating. And its OSD offers the greatest degree of color adjustment, with slider controls for both hue and saturation.
Samsung’s monitors almost always stand out with incredibly vibrant, vivid colors.

And sure enough, the 244T’s picture looks brighter and more intense than the other monitors here. It’s especially noticeable in a visually rich game like Far Cry, or when viewing colorful high-res digital pictures. But in DisplayMate we noticed that the 244T compresses the dark end of the grayscale range, with little distinction between the darker grays and black. It could be that by increasing the intensity at the light end—to achieve its eye-popping picture—Samsung is sacrificing its darks. We lowered the gamma—it’s nice that Samsung lets you do this—and it seemed to help, as do the presets for different content. Set to Entertainment mode, the dark scenes in Batman Begins weren’t troublesome.

We must note that Samsung’s monitor revealed a flaw similar to the one in HP’s screen in Pixel Persistence Analyzer. We saw hitches in the 244T’s picture, but they were only sporadic, and we couldn’t detect a problem in any real-world tests, so we’re not dinging it severely.

Month Reviewed: September 2006

+ SWIMSUIT: Brilliant colors, ergo options, and lots of inputs.

- LAWSUIT: Weak at the dark end of grayscale; curious intermittent picture hitch.

VERDICT: 8

URL: www.samsung.com