The SyncMaster 2494HM stands out first of all for its build and connectivity. It has a vertically adjustable base, a pivot mode and VGA, DVI and HDMI connectors. It also comes with a 2 port USB hub, a pair of 2 x 3 watt speakers and a headphones out.

As usual Samsung has gone for a design with a glossy black bezel. Finger marks do tend to show up on it. They are particularly visible around the menu buttons that are also touch activated. Difficult not to leave your prints on the bezel then.

If you use the HDMI socket to link your screen up, you will need to disactivat the AV function that will adversely affect the display otherwise.


Colours
On the test model, default colours were faithfull. Going into the OSD and fiddling with the settings a little, eliminates the remaining faults. Setting colour temp to “warm” and the gamma to "mode 2", gives you an average difference between colours requested by the graphics card and those displayed by the 2494HM, or deltaE, of only 1.5 (as against a default of 2.8). Much better than average, with the competition often being well above 3.

The contrast ratio is just as good at over 1000 : 1 when the average is around 750 : 1. The 2494HM has scored faultlessly so far then.


Gaming

Announced as a 5 ms, we were hardly expecting anything spectacular in terms of responsiveness. As well as confirming this, the tests highlighted some slight reverse ghosting. This is astonishing because this phenomenon is usually only seen on more responsive screens (quoted at 2 ms). Reverse ghosting gives images not of the same but the opposite colour. For example a black object will be followed by a white cloud, a blue object by red etc.


This screen is therefore much better adapted to office documents than rapid games such as FPS (Quake, Unreal…).