Product Description

Imagine having more room to spread out. The Samsung 245BW combines a 24? screen with a 16:10 widescreen aspect ratio to give you a bigger window on your world. Whether you use that power to work more efficiently or to watch a bigger blockbuster, you get shart text and crisp motion through a fast 5 ms response time, 1,000:1 contrast ratio and exclusive technologies like MagicColor and MagicBright2. And it's all topped off by a height-adjustable stand and optional integrated speakers. With the Samsung 245BW, it's not hard to imagine. Viewing Angle (H/V, Typical) - 160 Degrees Native Resolution - 1920 x 1200 Interface - Analog/Digital Displays up to 16.7 million colors Stand Type Three-way adjustable - height, swivel, tilt Optional Wall Mount Compatability - VESA 200x100

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26 in Personal Computers
• Color: High-gloss black
• Brand: Samsung
• Model: 245BW
• Dimensions: 11.50" h x 20.50" w x 25.25" l, 25.00 pounds
• Native resolution: 24
• Display size: 24

Features

• Viewable area - 24? wide
• Approximate 16 - 10 perspective
• Pixel Pitch - 0.270 mm
• Brightness (Typical) - 400 cd/m2
• Response Time (Typical) - 5ms (GTG)

Customer Reviews

Good value, some shortcomings
I rely heavily on Amazon reviews to make purchasing decisions. I gave up my Consumer Reports subscription because they only review a smattering of products, and never ones that seem to be actually for sale, so you have to infer and hope and put a lot of faith into the brand. On Amazon, people review the thing you can then add to your cart. Except people seem to have lost track of the stars between one and five. There is a tendency from reviewers to give one star if the product in anyway fails to live up to expectations. Or five in what sometimes seems to be an effort to stave off buyers remorse. I always gravitate towards the negative reviews as they will find the pitfalls, and I can decide weather or not I can live with the shortcomings. This monitor is not perfect, but the price is right, and it works well for my purposes.

Many of the things mentioned in the one star reviews are indeed valid. Out of the box, the brightness is cranked up to 100%. The "color magic" features are about useless. It's taken me a couple hours to dial in an acceptable color profile, and it's still too saturated. The shiny black bezel is a problem. I'm using the monitor with a MacBook Pro. On a Mac, the menus are always at the very top of the screen, of course, and the menu titles get reflected in the shiny plastic! The shiny plastic picks up reflections from the window behind me. When my desk wiggles, the reflection in the monitor wiggles and the motion in my periphery has made me think it is one of the icons jumping in the Mac's dock. Note to Samsung: shiny black bezel = bad idea.

My monitor was made in Mexico. Some of the reviews seem to imply this is a bad thing, but I haven't had any of the problems described. Perhaps by 2008 any quality control issues coming out of the Mexico factory have been resolved?

The viewing angle is indeed very narrow, but that seems exacerbated in zero ambient light situations (i.e. a darkened room). In ordinary office lighting the color shift from side to side seems to recede to practically unnoticeable. The color shift has also diminished over time, so maybe burn-in is a factor, or I've just gotten used to it in a week and a half.

The manual, if you can call it that, that came with this is absolutely the worst I have ever seen. It's in about 10 different languages with one line in each section in given to a particular language. The images are shared and labeled with numbers. It gave me a headache trying to parse out just the English from the jumble. There is no documentation on the magic features, so my bad luck with them may be because I wasn't using them properly.

That said, I love this monitor. I love having 1920 x 1200 bright, sharp pixels to lay out multiple windows side by side by side in. It hooked up to my MacBook's DVI port without fuss and it was recognized immediately. It also works fine with the MacBook under Boot Camp running Windows XP. I bought this monitor because I needed a lot of affordable, decent quality screen real estate. It fits the bill.

Really Bad Flickering after 3 months
When I first got the monitor, it was really good.
The colors were bright and the resolution was amazing.
I play games like Call of Duty 4 on this monitor and didn't notice anything bad at all.


I couldn't be happier with my purchase at the beginning.
No dead pixels, no lagging while playing games.
Everything was pleasant and there was nothing to complain about.


However, the monitor started flickering in "Game" mode big time just a couple days ago.
It is so bad that it will make you dizzy.


So I left it on in "Game" mode and and waited for a while to see what happens.
The flickering stopped after about 30 minutes. It seems like it needs some warm up exercise.


Currently, I am thinking about sending it to the SamSung service center.
But it is probably going to take at least 2 weeks to ship it and get it back.


I spent like around $500 for this monitor and it doesn't even last 3 months?
I wish I could find a 24" CRT monitor instead of this.
Sure, the CRT monitor's size would be a bad thing, but it is something I can live with and
I am sure it will be reliable for long term use.


I have owned a 19" ViewSonic CRT monitor before and it was really good and reliable.
I might go back to CRT monitors after all.



Anyone know a good reliable monitor?

Big and Bright
I have had this monitor for about 1 month and I am using it with my MacBook Pro. The monitor came out in good shape, looks nice and set up in a few minutes. The adjustments for height and tilt were easy to set up and it hooked up to the Mac nicely allowing me to use 2 monitors. I would still like to spend some more time calibrating the color because occasionally black text appears a little pink but the images are crisp and colors bright. I would recommend this monitor.