Samsung 244T

A new challenger has stepped into the 24" monitor arena. Let the battle begin.

We like Samsung’s way of doing things. All smiling, quiet and unsuspecting, it nods like an old man who’s seen it all, among the brash young men showing off their strength in front of an awed audience. One of the young men shows off an impressive display to ‘Oohs’ and ‘Ahs’ from the crowd, then turns around and challenges the old master. Silence.

The wrinkly face smiles as the weathered arm puts down the walking cane, and that’s the last thing the young man sees before his face hits the ground, dust flying up, wondering how the hell it happened. The old man nods, picks up his cane and shuffles away, smiling to himself.

This master is the Samsung 244T. It uses the same panel as the Dell 2407 (Samsung’s own 8-bit LTM240M2), yet avoids the greyscale vertical gradient issues. The component works fantastically with the Xbox 360, the image noticeably sharper. The menu is easier to use. In fact the only substantial beef we can think anyone would have with the monitor is, next to Dell’s aggressive styling, aesthetically it’s a bit old hat. Not a ‘wanderlust-destitute-hobo-with-bin-recovered-Maccas-in-one-hand’ old hat, more of a ‘Star-Trek-The-Next-Generation-was-once-futuristic-but-is-now-seemingly-out-of-place’ style of old hat, yet still oddly cool.

Yes cool. Yes, even Wesley Crusher. ‘Stop looking at me swan.’

The monitor can tilt, pivot, rotate and is height-adjustable, although it seems to sit a bit high at its default height. PIP is there for component, composite and S-Video, although it lacks the ‘swap’ feature found on the Dell, which allowed you to keep a handy eye on your Windows desktop while you played Xbox fullscreen.

Also missing is a hardware way to access 1:1, aspect ratio or fullscreen stretch scaling functions, leaving you to rely on your graphics card’s control panel. This means if you hook up through component/composite/
S-Video that you’ll not be able to set the scale of the image, and will have to deal with it at fullscreen stretch.

Similarly absent is the card reader, which photographers would find handy. Apart from this, the screens are functionally identical.

The 244T happily ripped through the DisplayMate tests, coping with all 255 shades, and provide immaculate colour ramps. Blacks were lovely, and as mentioned the green/purple streaking found in some vertical gradients on the 2407 simply wasn’t present, much like panties in a swinger’s bar.

While the 2407 takes on a slightly brown cast with its factory settings, the Samsung arrived slightly blue – so be sure to fiddle with the colour settings to find a more neutral cast.

Games and movies are superb, as to be expected from the lower response time and vibrant colours – naturally you’ll need some decent graphics grunt to run the latest and greatest at native 1920x1200, however if you’ve read this far, chances are this won’t be a problem for you.

So between two identical panels, there’s only three major points on which the Dell sets itself apart from the Samsung – it’s a couple of hundred dollars cheaper, has a card reader and features a 14-day no questions asked return policy. The Samsung has better image quality, great component input and a promise of no dead pixels, ever.

With that in mind, we’ll put a couple of hundred bucks on smiling old man Samsung for this round, and will wait to see what headstrong young Dell can come back with in the next.