Samsung LA26R7 LCD TV

It's not built to be plugged into your PC, but your consoles and your housemates will thank you for getting one.

The R7 was partnered with the Xbox 360 for launch, making sure that a lot of eyes were set on it. This is a good thing too, because the clarity, colour and vibrancy are quite amazing. There was still, unfortunately, a good deal of ghosting going on.

So how is this a gaming hardware review? Aside from being partnered with the 360 at launch, it’s being pitched as a gaming monitor, with a special ‘game mode’. This is a dynamically adjusted preset mode, which Samsung claims enhances dark areas, horizontal sharpness, response time and apparently sound. In practice, some of the jaggies disappeared and things got a little darker, while all the other presets got locked out. Nothing we saw that couldn’t be achieved through custom settings, although perhaps there’s something going on in the background we couldn’t perceive. Either way, whether GRAW on the 360 benefited from this is entirely up to end user taste. We turned it off.

The set is capable of displaying 1080i, but don’t let this fool you – the resolution is only 1366x768 like most sets seem to be these days, so it’s not exactly futureproof for 1080p. Considering the Xbox 360 is being upgraded to 1080p through software and the PS3 natively supports it, this may be an issue for a lot of purchasers, especially as a ‘gaming’ focused monitor. Still, 1080p is still a bit of a luxury as far as TV is concerned. Speaking of TV, like the kind you sit down and watch with mum, dad and your pet lice, the R7 has an inbuilt HDTV tuner and is certainly a nice addition.

What we found most impressive though were the viewing angles. Despite quoting a less degree than some PC monitors, it flat outperforms them, with comparative colour and contrast shift being minimal.

A PC can be hooked up, but only through 15-pin D-Sub, the manual recommending that you not hook up a PC through the HDMI port (the only form of digital video, a DVI port being absent), as you’ll only get a blank screen. So we did it anyway, using a nearby Sapphire X1600 HDMI edition, and surprise, surprise, it worked just fine, and even better once we spent some time in ATI’s control panel, hodge-podging together a bizarre resolution of 1216x668. Despite this, we couldn’t get text quite as sharp as we wanted it. Taking in mind the monitor wasn’t built for PC use, the quality was tolerable.

Smacking it through the DisplayMate tests, we were annoyed by DNIe, Samsung’s dynamic enhancement, or Digital Natural Image Engine as it calls it, with greys visibly shifting after it had analysed the screen. DNIe also seems to over sharpen and over contrast, as appears to be the trend these days. Fortunately we could turn it off by entering the engineering menu (on the remote – power off, info, menu, mute, power on) and turning all the crappery that started with ‘dynamic’ off.

Flat colours were somewhat grainy, but considering we couldn’t find an optimal resolution for the thing it was to be expected. The greyscale was successfully displayed from 4 to 254, an impressive range, while gradients exhibited some banding and degradation.

DVD quality as usual is made a mockery of due to the higher than native resolution of the screen – so unless you’ve got some decent upscaling hardware, expect artifacting and pixelisation.

The remote and menu are easy to use, and you can pretty much find everything you need, short of those things that you need the engineering menu to access.

Sound is actually quite good – we wish those who insisted on building speakers into PC monitors would do as well. Well, that’s not true, we actually wish they’d bloody stop doing it, but seeing as they won’t we’ll go for the lesser of two evils. Considering the R7’s target market though, speakers here make perfect sense.

The R7 is decent at its main purpose as a gaming television, but with it not being able to support 1080p, a token Xbox 360 preset attempt involving annoying dynamics and a slightly too high response time, we’d prefer to wait for the next revision.