I began shopping for a new monitor by going to several electronics retailers and simply looking, and I highly recommend you do the same - don't rely exclusively on individual's opinions or magazine/web reviews, monitor appearance is way too individually subjective, and the magazine/web reviewers may not be as objective as they pretend. If you've been shopping for one for more than 5 minutes you've come across the problem of a rave review by one magazine and pan by another. Enough said?

I simply was not going to pay for a top-of-the-line $1000 or so 19" monitor, so in my price range I was most impressed with monitors featuring the Sony FD Trinitron (ie. Sony, Viewsonic, KDS, etc.), but I was none too impressed with the prices ($500 and much higher). But then I came across the Samsung SyncMaster 955DF which offers a very competitive picture at a very substantial discount. Some, including me, actually feel the picture is superior to the FD Trinitrons.

While some have lamented the lower refresh rate(75Hz at 1280 x 1024), it seems more than adequate to me. I've used the monitor for a full day at 1280x1024 and have not noticed the refresh being "slow", or any other problem. That includes about 2 hours of "Unreal Tournament" at the same resolution - lovely graphics. I've also tried resolutions as low as 1024x768 and text, graphics, and video are all excellent. The screen is totally flat and the picture appears totally flat and there is no distortion whatsoever at the edges or anywhere. The picture is simply fabulous. I am using a Viper II AGP card with 32 meg on an Athlon Thunderbird 800 Mhz with 256 meg, by the way.

All the MS Office 2000 apps look great. So do web pages in Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Acrobat files, everything. If there are any developers out there I highly recommend trying Visual Studio (.Net beta 1) at 1280x1024. I don't know how I got by with my 17" at 1024x768 for so long!

The controls are convenient and easy to use. The manual is clear and succinct. The drivers were a snap to load: Win98 SE recognized the monitor and asked for the disk, and on Win2k Pro I just ran the setup program.

The only gripe I might have is that the RGB values should have a different default other than 50-50-50 (subjective, I know). I copied the defaults from a Viewsonic FD Trinitron that was next to the Samsung at Best Buy, and one could scarcely tell any difference except that the Viewsonic was $150 more!

The best price I found was at computers4sure.com for $312.56 ($319.99 + $22.57 UPS ground - $30 mail-in rebate). I ordered on a Sunday and the monitor shipped Monday and arrived Thursday.

I really could not be happier about this monitor. I'm convinced it would take at least $150 more (50%) to get an equal one, and the ones $250-$700 more may only be slightly better.

(As an aside, I had a positive experience with computers4sure.com. This was my first purchase with them, but before purchasing I checked their phone lines to see how fast they answer, etc. and they picked up faster than any web company ever has, in less than a minute, a real person too! They don't inflate shipping charges like many, either. However, you will be responsible for shipping charges if you return. My one experience was great, so take that for whatever it's worth.)



Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 312.56
Operating System: Windows