Samsung SyncMaster 245BW Black 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor

Hitting the Quality/Price Sweet Spot

Posted Sep 20, 2007 - Haven't seen that many professional reviews on this unit. But there was an excellent review Samsung 275T. Took the chance and bought the unit. I was pleasantly surprised how well the unit performed. Ergonomics: The unit tills front and back, raises up and down and swivels from side to side. It has both digital and analog input. Switching between the two is accomplished with a touch of a button. That makes migrating from the old pc to the new a snap. Images: Played video games (FPS type), watched DVD movies, live TV, at 1900x1200 resolution with 32bit color, the unit performed remarkably. I don't do any of the high end graphics editing, but the standard photo viewing and editing has excellent results using this monitor. Dislikes: The unit itself looks a little beefy. The panel itself is relatively thick. But your eyes are usually drawn to the image on the screen, not the external appearance. Conclusion: If you don't have a high end graphics need, this will be an excellent choice. It's $170 less that Dell 2407WFP. With 3 years of warranty, it can't go too wrong at this price.

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Serious real estate, serious lumens!

Posted Jan 18, 2008 - Had to turn the brightness down to 40% because it was giving me a full frontal sunburn. I think my contacts were melted to my eyes before I realized what happened. ONSALE.com was awesome with delivery and price. $50 rebate from Samsung sealed the deal; now to see if I can actually get the rebate back from Samsung.

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Excellent Picture – No Regrets

Posted Oct 31, 2007 - The primary use for my monitor is home. It has been a great asset for working at home on spreadsheets. The characters are sharp and contrast/brightness settings make it quick to change between preprogrammed and customs settings. Over the 3 months have been using the monitor I have been very pleased. I also do some gaming playing World of Warcraft BC. It is always a disappointment when I have to play on any other monitor. You wont find a better monitor that provides this much value.

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A great 24' LCD for its price

Posted Jul 13, 2007 - I used 3 LCD before, Sony's, Samsung 915N and the Apple's(for a short time). First, it's outlook. I would say this monitor's finish is great as when I took it out of the box, my girlfriend screamed out "woo, it looks so beautiful!". And besides its finish, I think the layout of this LCD is pretty good: clear and responsive buttons, not many extra connections and no USB/Fireware ports. Simple and "elegant". Second, picture quality. So far it's doing a great job on text-reading and video playback, though it's not as good as my old Sony when it comes to digital image editing(well, maybe the Apple is even better), but far more better then the 915N. I have yet to see its strength(?) on games because I rarely play games, I only tried the Shin.Sangokumusou 4 on it and it's working fine. Last, I don't complain about the lack of portrait mode and I don't feel like it's stable. And the rotating base of this 245BW is great on my corner table, super convenient. I would give a solid 4+ stars on this LCD, it's a good buy for anyone concerns about the quality/price ratio.

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Excellent Value

Posted Jul 30, 2007 - I got my screen to use for my work and occasional FPS game play. The screen real estate makes multitasking much easier. The base is easy to work with to get the right height, swivel and tilt (to fight off the afternoon glare). It even comes with a special cloth to wipe the fingerprints off of the bezel. Technically, this monitor has what any baseline 24" monitor should have, a 1920 x 1200 5ms screen with VGA and DVI (w/ HDCP) inputs. All the other frivolous stuff like s-video, composite and component inputs make for a TV/monitor, not a monitor. The OSD is very functional, but very small on a 1920x1200 screen. The buttons on the lower right side do not overwhelm the styling of the monitor, and the power button has an emerald blue glow when it is on. The thickness of the bezel is not too big, and the glossy finish is very stylish but can be a bit distracting in a brightly lit room. I would think that it would scratch very easily, but then again how many (responsible) people have sharp objects near their monitors. Unless you really have to have USB ports on your monitor, this one is a very good deal.

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Must be adjusted for Macs

Posted Sep 2, 2007 - Have used this monitor for 2 weeks and really enjoy the "eye relief" - easy viewing and greatly aids detailed photo & video editing. I've enjoyed viewinig movies and slideshows - better than my old 19" television by far. List price is a lot more than for 22-inch but the advantages, both needed and "for fun" are worth the discounted price of around $499. My biggest gripe is that, if connected to a Mac, it is really hard for those new to separate monitors to work around Samsung's intentional set-up for Windows machines. On the other hand, those experienced with Macs will figure out the best way is to go to the "Displays" panel in Preferences and use ALL the Apple monitor adjusting software. This includes re-setting the Gamma (basically, brightness) from Windows to Mac. Windows monitors are ALL set to "220" - very bright. I see complaints in other reviews about brightness. Mac Gamma is "180" - which darkens and "enriches" color noticably. Also: Apple has great calibration software, easy to use and it works just as well as those separately sold calibration packages people are pursuaded to buy. The other thing about Samsung's emphasis on having this monitor set for Windows is that their manual and other documentation is basically useless if you're connecting it to a Mac. Internet Explorer is needed to read the manual (which comes on CD) - ridiculous when they could have made the manual in (univerally readable) PDF format. This also makes it hard to print out a page or two for setting by while working on set up - Adobed Reader is excellent for this "isolated printing" of a few pages (or an entire manual if needed). What were they thinking when they did this??!! Okay - at a $150 savings from retail and a whopping $400 savings compared to the Apple 23-inch Display, this amount of "grief" is worth the trouble! Lack of speakers and manual which can be used by all buyers just brings my rating down to 4 stars.

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A wide view

Posted Jul 17, 2007 - great monitor for a great price will provide with many hours of enjoyable view; just by looking at the size of the screen you ask yourself how we were able to live before without monitors of this size; it can easily accommodate 3 full pages in Word; great monitor

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Very nice

Posted Oct 20, 2007 - Nice "basic" 24" monitor. Picture is excellent with very good response time and wide horizontal viewing angle. Vertical viewing angle not as great -- colors get washed out more than 60 or 90 degrees out.

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Best buy for the buck!

Posted Sep 26, 2007 - I received this monitor with no dead pixels, what a plus. Quality product. This is the largest and most featured monitor I have ever bought. I found the best price at Sam's Club. An absolute 10! Enjoy!

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Samsung 245BW 24 inch Widescreen LCD Monitor

Posted Aug 17, 2007 - Nice large 24" widescreen put my old 17" to shame. I really miss the built-in speakers. You would think that for the price it cost, that it would come with 20 watts of Dolby stereo sound. The high resolution makes the screen not fill up until 800X600 is selected. This might be due to my cheap video card, so I plan to change it next. If it doesn't do the trick, then I would wonder why anyone would want to pay for the bigger screen if you can't use it. I guess it may be for gamers and movie buffs? For the 2 inches gained and the $200 extra paid over the 22" model, that comes with speakers, I would not reccomend this monitor.

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Decent when it worked

Posted 1 year ago - It's great monitor when it works. Nice fast refresh rate, I never had probems with it playing fast paced FPS games. Videos were crisp and contrast was fine. However after a week I noticed when the monitor would wake up from sleep mode some of the pixels that should have been black were replaced with bright blue pixels. More and more blue pixels would replace the black ones till the monitor would blink on and off till it fixed itself and the screen turned back to normal. This didn't happen often but it was annoying. Also I could "fix" the blue pixels by turning the monitor off then on, monitor worked fine if it started from on off state (not sleep mode). This problem was just an annoyance but it would fix itself, not a big deal, then one day in the middle of playing a game it flashed a white screen and didn't turn on again. I tried it with different computers and different video cables (DVI and analog) I sent it off to Samsung and they repaired it within a week (no complaints there). Right now i'm using it it works fine, but the annoying blue pixels are still there when the monitor wakes from sleep mode.

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Great for the price

Posted Jan 16, 2008 - Overall, a great purchase if your on a budget. I only hope it continues to impress... Samsung is a name you can trust, and evidently this is no exception. I hooked it up to my iMac (which the screen has gotten worse over time) and it makes it look like garbage. I use my 20-inch iMac for windows I won't be looking at and I use this screen for games, movies, and websites. 5MS response time is great, but I would have liked the 2MS response time that was included with the 22-inch version. But this is a higher resolution.

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Super-Size Me! Samsung 245BW 24

Posted Sep 25, 2007 - This is my first experience with a 24" widescreen LCD, the monitor this baby replaced was a 19" CRT so I've had to adjust to the, at first, overwhelming size of this monitor. It feels as though I could crawl right into this thing. Screen text has never been clearer even on my laptop lcd the text isn't as sharp and crisp as it is on this monitor. Widescreen movies show very minimal black-bars at top and bottom; truly your own personal movie theatre. 3D games have never looked better. The controls for contrast, color, etc are fairly easy to use and there are more options than expected which allows for a truly personal customization of the monitor. View from side can appear slightly lighter or faded and from top looks darker, but that's expected from an LCD. In fact, the range of view from either side is very impressive. I have light sensitive eyes and won't even dare going out in the sun without sunglasses so I had to tone down the brightness quite a bit for my own sake, however, even with my optimized settings this monitor passed 90% of the black & white contrast tests I threw at it. Although I've only had this monitor a few days I can say I'm satisfied with my choice. Plus, with the extra added bonus of Samsung's Mail-In-Rebate and Pricegrabbers Bonus Rebate the price was well within my range at under $400.00. I've included a photo, but unfortunately my camera doesn't do it justice. I included the sunglasses to give everyone a general idea how big this monster is.

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A must have buy for designer

Posted Aug 25, 2007 - This Samsung product is a product from a very high quality. The price quality ratio is also very good. I have not read any serious negative report about the Syncmaster and once again i would like to say: Buy one and you will love it.

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awesome monitor

Posted Aug 18, 2007 - This monitor is a great buy for the price. It basically doubles the size of my old crappy monitor. Nice design, seems very sturdy. Compares very favorably to the competition with 3000:1 contrast ratio and 5ms. The Acer AL2416WBsd comes close but only has 1000:1.

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