Hello,

I got a new monitor, which is a Samsung SyncMaster S24A450BW.

I thought it was going to be awesome, it's large, has a high resolution to have extra much space for windows on your screen, is marketed as "professional business" etc...

But immediately when I connected it, I got unhappy and concerned, because the colors look very bland, as if the gamma setting is way too high (washed out gradients, etc...).

After trying all OSD menu settings of the monitor, as well as checking my Linux Xorg settings that it was using normal gamma (value 1 for red, green and blue), I found almost no setting that made me happy.

And then I discovered what the problem is: it's not the settings, but the viewing angle. If you're looking at the center of the screen, then of course the bottom of the screen has a different angle compared to your eyes. And it's exactly at the bottom that the colors look so bad. And when lowering your head and looking directly at the bottom, it looks fine.

I've NEVER before seen a computer screen, where the difference in viewing angle between the part of the screen you're looking at, and other parts of the screen made a difference. And I'm not talking about HUGE angles here! Just sitting in front of the screen.

This screen has settings called "MagicAngle" which is supposed to optimize the screen for looking from above, from below, etc...

I've NEVER before seen a computer screen that had such a MagicAngle setting, because IT IS NOT NEEDED! Every other LCD computer screen I've seen, even not very expensive ones, looked fine from ANY angle except EXTREME ones and wouldn't need a setting to optimize it for bottom or top.

So anyway, if I set this "MagicAngle" setting to "Group", then actually the screen works pretty decent for my single-user usage. Using that setting kind of solves my problem. But every other single MagicAngle setting, including "Off", looks just bad. And this worries me.

In the past, always, when connecting a computer screen for the first time, it looks just "normal" and workable with its default settings. This one not.

Another thing: The "Contrast" setting of this screen works different than normal. For some reason, making contrast lower, actually makes it BETTER. With most screens, setting contrast to the minimum either makes everything grey, or everything black. Not so with this one!

Do you think this is normal?
Why does the contrast setting behave differently than other screens?
Shouldn't screens look good for normal desktop usage with the factory default color settings?
What could the purpose behind this MagicAngle be?
Could the screen be broken?
How can a screen optimize itself for a certain viewing angle anyway, wouldn't that require physically altering the liquid crystals?

Thanks!

It's normal. I was also surprised when I bought new screens and the viewing angle matterered a lot.. as the cheaper (but smaller) monitors I had before didn't suffer from that problem at all. I believe for example IPS helps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPS_panel
If you do some research and spend 3-4x more money you can probably get rid of the problem, but for cheap monitors there will always be something that isn't "right". The colors aren't that good either, and the 2^24 colors you think you see are actually way fewer but faked with patterns. Just try to draw a gradient from 0-255 over the screen, and compare on a cheap and an expensive monitor. Actually, don't do that if you want to remain reasonably happy with your new monitor. =)

Hmm, I found some other discussion topic on the internet where someone also says that only "group view" of the magicangle of a samsung monitor (not the same as mine but...) looks good and all the others are unusable:

http://www.ebuyer.co...-ls24a300hsz-en

So I guess it's indeed normal for this screen then...

I wish I had known this before buying this! Only now I know about "TN" being bad and this one using that.

And if Group View is the only setting that looks good, why don't they use that as the factory default instead of off??? The bad look of the default setting is really noticable, the developers of this monitor aren't blind right??

If you do some research and spend 3-4x more money you can probably get rid of the problem

Yeah, sure, after just buying this one, which wasn't cheap at all (however looking at the other thread in the Lounge about sub-$500 monitor, I guess this one is considered cheap after all)...

Shouldn't screens look good for normal desktop usage with the factory default color settings?

For some reason, these samsung series come with fairly borked default settings.

I have almost identical model and default settings were off, but all the reviews said as much. No problems using on screen menus to tweak them.

Angle deteriorates slightly faster than other monitors, but I've yet to find it an issue at all.

For this price range, I don't consider quality to be a problem, but for someone working on color-proofed materials it might be a bit of an issue.