Samsung SM2333SW Review
We never review hardware. A good reason for this is that we’re lowly students, and money is a rarity that when found is spent immediately on alcohol, morsels of food and anything that’ll make us pass our degrees with ease. So getting a new piece of hardware is like having gold landing in your fingers.
When exploring for information on this 23″ widescreen monitor I’m about to review today, I found a surprising lack of informative critique on the matter, mainly because Samsung’s newest outing in the LCD Widescreen Monitor market is so new. So I thought I’d fill in the void. I shall attempt to do this as most other places see fit; discussing packaging, design, calibration and my general feeling towards it. Read on!
Packaging and Construction
One of the big plusses for me with the Samsung SM2333SW was that it came with cables. Lots and lots of cables! Usually monitors can be somewhat stringent on the types of cables they supply in the box, but I was happy to find not just a DVI cable, but a VGA one as well, which is pretty nice of them. Along with the cables came a CD containing tuning, drivers, documentation and other software to improve your monitor. Sadly most of the content on the CD wasn’t designed for 64bit Windows 7, but I can hardly fault them for that. The monitor itself was well packaged along with its stand. One of the important aspects to buyers of Samsung monitors may be how the stand was constructed, given that there have been complaints that Samsung stands require heavy force in order to push the stand in and aren’t always great. I’m happy to report this stand was a simple screw in alignment feature that was placed onto it and constructed with ease. My only slight complaint with the stand is that it cannot be pushed up or down, and that at times the monitor appears to wobble. Whether this is a stand fault or I haven’t put it on properly remains to be seen.
Design
Samsung make extremely stylish looking screens, and the 2333 is no exception. The front face is similar to Samsung screens in having a curvature at the bottom, with a blue led horizontal stripe to represent power. The screen is polished piano black and makes the display stand out. The controls for the display options are at the side of the screen, and my only complaint about these is that they’re not particularly obvious, preferring to maintain the blackness of the entire screen than add anything that would make them stand out as an obvious control feature. Samsung tries to compensate for this by having a navigation bar on screen that tells you what button is where, but i’m still finding myself pressing the wrong button when controlling the menu interface. This is a small niggle, and I’d far rather have the controls on the side than the front, for aesthetic reasons.
Screen Options and Calibration
The Samsung SM2333SW runs at a screen resolution of 1920×1080 pixels on a 23″ widescreen monitor size. If you want non technical “market” jargon, the resolution is True HD. This means you’ll need a fairly powerful computer if you intend to use it for gaming. Games that aren’t able to support this resolution will be expanded to “best fit”. Luckily the monitor comes with an option called “Image Size” in its display options that allows you to determine whether you want to expand everything to widescreen, or to leave it at it’s native resolution. This means you’ll end up with black bars at the sides and possibly top, but it does stop games that are old from being overly expanded to ugly an degree.
The monitor is TN-Panel based. This can raise the ire of reviewers as Twisted Nematic is considered the weakest of the panel technologies. Sadly however most monitors on the market today use this technology due to it being cheap and the price war that it has created. To look for an alternative technology such as IPS you would need to spend a good amount and it may not be worth it. The good news is that TN has improved alot recently, and if you are using your monitor primarily for gaming or watching movies you’ll likely not notice the difference. You could even edit your photos and probably still not notice the difference. Professional experts however in photography may want to look for a more dedicated monitor. During our photo test the Samsung faired well but compared to the old Viewsonic VP930 it wasn’t as clear in colour clarity. The Samsung does have its advantages however over the old Viewsonic in that the monitors contrast, brightness and ability for colours to shine out was far better. Indeed in one photo the Samsung was able to point out blemishes the Viewsonic failed to notice.
Viewing angle also suffers though because of the TN based technology. This won’t affect you if you’re using the screen directly in front of you, but if you require the screen to be viewed at different angles similar to a television then you’ll find the colour and screen start to wash out beyond a 180 degree horizontal viewing angle, with similar results for vertical.
For testing of the monitor we put it through the LCD Monitor test images over at Lagom LCD Test. These images help to determine how an LCD monitor is performing and gives you a rough idea as to how to “calibrate” the options to improve it. Surprisingly the results of the image test found that the monitor was already calibrated out of the box, and by the end of the test no adjustments on how the monitor is set up occurred. This may change as usage continues and we’ll update this page if neccessary. During the colour test all colours displayed perfectly, but due to the technology the monitor uses the lilac/purple screen did show noticable differences in colour wash, with the top of the screen a pinkish lilac colour and the bottom of the screen becoming more deep purple.
The menu system is rather helpful and as mentioned earlier attempts to compensate for somewhat difficult to see buttons by offering an on screen interface that shows where the buttons are proportionally. The display options are fairly detailed, and give you good options in tuning the monitor as you like. They also include a magic tuning that will automatically tune the colours of the monitor depending on the scenario you are using the monitor for. At the moment these options are off for me as I prefer to control my colour and contrast options myself.
Testing
In order to test the SM2333SW we ran it through an assortment of every day applications we are likely to use. These include the internet, the game Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and the recent Tron Legacy trailer.
Our first port of call was internet usage and everything is HUGE! Even as I type this there is wide open space to type things and even though I might be on another line by now i’m still on the first line and wheeeeee!!! It’s actually fairly daunting for me since my old monitor was a 20″ standard TFT screen that ran at 1280×1024. Be warned if you’re making the leap into widescreen monitor usage that things appear LARGE and small all at the same time. Happily though everything displayed online is crisp and sharp without being to jaggedy. Text and images both appear bright without any loss of colour or saturation. Flicking through pages quickly results in no refresh rate jutter or ghosting of text.
Our next test was with gaming. Loading up Battlefield: Bad Company 2 I found the colours to be oddly richer than the screen is in normal use. As a comparison I shut it down and attempted another game (Rollercoaster Tycoon 3) and found the colours to be normal. I can only conclude therefore it was Bad Company 2′s fault! Continuing on, the screen suffered from no ghosting during hectic fighting in the desert, and thankfully my graphics card was able to cope with the new resolution push. My only complaint may be that the contrast is a bit too high in the game. Desert based maps for instance were extremely blinding, with objects in the distance becoming difficult to see. To investigate further I switched on Team Fortress 2, but didn’t notice the same problem.
Our last test was with a movie. For this we downloaded the recently released Tron Legacy trailer at 1080p. I was happy to find the monitor performed very well with the movie at full screen – the movie was rich in colour and was very sharp with HD quality goodness! Again no ghosting or artifacts occured and the movie played out excellently.
Conclusion
The Samsung SM2333SW is priced at around £160, and for that you get a very good bang for buck. The packaging, image quality and ability of the Samsung is brilliant. Like most Samsung monitors on the market it breathes style and looks well built. This monitor is definitely recommended if you’re thinking about going into the Widescreen future. The colour and clarity will wow you and despite a few niggling faults and that these monitors continue to use budget technology of TN, I would still highly recommend it.
Pros
-Excellent Colour, Contrast and Brightness
-Very good image quality all round
-Easy to construct compared to older Samsung monitor stands.
Cons
-Stand feels a bit wobbly
-TN panel may put off some people
-Photo quality will likely be better on more expensive monitors.
Score: 4.5/5
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