17" @ £149. Get one! (Samsung Syncmaster 750S)

Member Name: Nibelung

Product:	Samsung Syncmaster 750S
Date:	21/01/01 (146 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good price. Works well.

Disadvantages: None at this price

I have now been using one of these for about a month, and see no reason to regret the purchase.

My original thought when replacing my NEC 15” monitor was to wait for flat-screen LCD monitors to come down in price, and whilst this has happened to a certain extent, it hasn’t to the extent that would entice me to part with my money yet. The latter are usually 15.1” monitors, which, because of the way they are measured have very little less viewable screen than a 17” CRT model, which has about 1” of its diagonal measurement masked off by plastic framework. So, a 17” CRT it had to be, if it’s going to seem any larger than what I’ve got.

PC World’s sale was looming large on the horizon, and although I have “slagged-off” their prices elsewhere, £149 for the Samsung SyncMaster 750s seemed to be a bargain, although it’s not something I’ve researched. It was certainly a lot less than I had budgeted.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that, weight-wise, it was also lighter than expected. My previous experience with monitors this size had forewarned me to take all the usual precautions when lifting, (benzerneez) but I needn’t have worried.

It was easy to install being Plug-and-Pray* and having only one floppy disk of drivers, and even then, you don’t HAVE to use it. However, you won’t be able to take full advantage of its range of refresh rates if your PC only logs it on as a generic SVGA monitor.

* Yes, you did read that right!

Its refresh rates go high enough to avoid visible flicker at all definition settings – how high you go depends partly on your graphics card’s RAM capacity, e.g. you can only have “Full Colour”, 1024*768 AND a high refresh rate if there is enough RAM – if not, something needing “down-adjusting”. If you insist on the latter two, specify a lower colour quality. Don
217;t forget, JPEG files are a good example of what can be achieved with only 256 colours anyway, and they always seem OK to me.

It also has the usual rash of power-saving facilities, utilising your PC’s standby, sleep and shut-down signals.

It’s very difficult to get very excited about something in regulation beige that simply does “what it says on the packet” but the Samsung seems a good combination of quality and price.

Verdict – a good entry-level 17” screen with no obvious vices (yet)

Tip – By a Samsung 17” and a pair of reading glasses to save the expense of an upgrade to 21”!

Summary: