SyncMaster 910t: a pivoting LCD monitor that’s perfect for photo editing

I can remember buying my first 19-inch monitor. It was back in the early 1990s and it was a big event. In fact, everything about it was big. The price was big -- nearly $2,500. The size was big. In fact, the monitor was monstrously big. I had to move my desk about five inches out from the wall simply to be able to put fit the thing on my desk. And it weighed what seemed like a ton. I could barely lift it myself, and even with two people manhandling it, it was a project.

Fast forward to now. Today, I'm writing about an excellent 19-inch LCD monitor, shown in Figure A, that weighs all of 15 pounds and is less than six inches deep. What makes the Samsung SyncMaster 910t such a find is that it's also available for just over $500. This is an astounding price and is another example of how the price of technology is always dropping.

This is a kickin' monitor with excellent image quality. It's got a few negatives, which I'll tell you about in a few minutes. But first, let's talk about the pivot feature, shown in Figure B. This is what makes it so cool for photographers.

How often have you had a tall picture that you needed to edit? You can never seem to see the entire picture at once. But with a pivoting monitor, you can see the entire image the way it's meant to be seen. As you can see from my picture here of Karen's legs, a full image on a portrait display can make all the difference when working.

Spec city

Samsung's market research data shows that approximately 30% of all LCDs sold incorporate a digital interface. Samsung is capitalizing on this trend by offering the SyncMaster 910t, which provides both digital and analog interfaces. The "natural state" of a computer video card and an LCD monitor is digital. The video card converts the digital data signal to an analog signal then the analog signal travels through the video cable and interfaces to the LCD. The LCD converts the analog signal to a digital signal in order to display the image.

Because of these various technical conversions that take place, the image may be subject to data loss and may not portray a clean, clear and crisp image. With a digital input LCD monitor, the signal does not face this complex conversion process and provides the cleanest, most crisp image possible.

The SyncMaster 910t also has something called "resolution downscaling capability." This is the ability for a monitor to display a resolution that is higher than its native mode. Each monitor has a native resolution of 1280 x 1024 yet is capable of offering a displayable resolution of 1600 x 1200. With downscaling capability, each monitor is compatible with applications that require higher resolutions.

For example, if you need a display to support a higher resolution than the native mode, at different times depending on the application, the display would still function properly producing a workable image. Samsung claims this additional feature makes the SyncMaster 910t perfect for high-end industrial applications. In our experience, the image quality of this particular tweak is adequate, but not great. You're best off staying in the monitor's native resolution. The SyncMaster 910t also offers a 1280 x 1024 native resolution a super-high 800:1 contrast radio and a 260cd/m2 brightness rate.

So let's get to the really important question: how well does this sucker play games? After all, we've all heard that the refresh times on LCD monitors make game playing unpleasant. Not so with this monitor. It's fast and crisp and, in the interests of editorial completeness, I've tried it with many different first person shooters. It's sweet.

The negatives

There are a few minor negatives. The most visible (or, actually, the least visible) is how the buttons are arrayed. The buttons that control the monitor are located on the lower right side when the monitor's in landscape mode. They're very small, very black buttons with virtually invisible labels. You can see this in Figure C.

It's absolutely impossible to see what each button does without shining a flashlight on them. There's no reason Samsung had to make these so hard to see. For an otherwise exceptionally designed monitor, having buttons that are so indistinguishable from each other is just a shame. If the military needed to design a monitor with stealth-plane characteristics, it'd have buttons like this. But there's just no need for "stealth" buttons on a monitor.

Another problem with the placement of buttons is that when you rotate the monitor, your hand is almost always going to go over the buttons to grip the monitor for rotation. Without fail, whenever I've rotated the monitor, I've wound up pressing one or more of the stealth buttons.

As is often the case with software that comes with a monitor, we were distinctly unimpressed with the monitor's included software. The included pivot software was adequate, but we immediately replaced it with the onboard ATI software that drives the video card. We did have some minor video-card related resolution issues, but some tinkering fixed things nicely.

This brings us to support. I originally did a dumb thing -- yanked out an old monitor and plugged in the new one, without "normalizing" the video card settings first. Being lazy, I called Samsung to ask if there was a special menu item to hit to change the settings. Because the monitor's manual was on disk, and I couldn't read the disk because I couldn't read my desktop, well, I needed to either put back the old monitor or call for help.

Since we always like to get a feel for support, I called. The gentleman I spoke to asked me to describe the monitor, and when I asked what the menu settings might be, his answer was, and I quote, "We make a lot of stuff. I can't be expected to know how each works."

Yep, that was Samsung's first-level tech support. I finally forced him into giving me a call ticket and send me to the next level of support. After an hour on hold, the line got disconnected. I called back in, got another first-level to transfer me, spent another hour on hold (yes, I have a headset and yes, I can turn it down, ignore it and work on other stuff), and eventually had to make another phone call and decided to ignore the problem.

I put my old monitor back, reset the video card, and then connected up the SyncMaster 910t -- which now worked nicely.

I have to say that I was underwhelmed by "We make a lot of stuff. I can't be expected to know how each works." Hey, at least it sounded like he was in the U.S. and I could understand what he said!

Later, I had some resolution concerns, and via our very helpful Samsung public relations contact, I wound up talking to a product specialist. When I told him I was running an ATI Radeon 9800 card, which is just about the most common gamer card, he said that Samsung hadn't tested the monitors against the ATI boards. I was astounded. After all, if you're making a monitor that's meant for consumer use, I'd expect that the company would test the monitor against the most common board types.

Our final rating

Rating this monitor was something of a challenge. On one hand, we had a physical device that just simply rocks. It works exceptionally well and provides a huge amount of value for the money. On the other hand, you have completely moronic support and some minor annoyances like poor button design.

If this was a device that really required a lot of support or constant use of those buttons, we'd have to ding the rating points. But because the product is very much a set-it-and-forget-it device, those complaints will very rarely get in the way of the product's usage. Given the product itself is so damned fine, we have to give it a very vivid 4 out of 5 and rate it as our Product of the Month.

Since our Six Months Later series has proven so popular, we're likely to be back in six months to tell you how this monitor stands up to usage. Some LCDs fade over time. We'll let you know what we think of this one.

Product availability and resources

For more information on the Samsung SynMaster 910t, visit http://www.samsungusa.com/cgi-bin/nabc/product/b2c_product_detail.jsp?prod_id=MJ19BSABY.

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