After two years of loyal service, the Samsung SyncMaster W240D--which we gave five stars--has made way for the new W243D.  The two monitors look very similar but appearances can sometimes be deceptive ...

Handling: A very complete offering

The glossy frame is black at the front and white at the back.  It has a 1920 x 1200 2 ms TN panel sitting on a very smart stand.  The mount for this monitor allows you to slide it up and down, turn it from side to side and pivot the monitor to portrait orientation.  There are a lot of connectivity options, including VGA, HDMI, DVI and component video inputs, and audio jack for inputting sound to the 2 x 3 W speakers.  There's also an audio output if the built-in speakers aren't up to the job.  That leaves it with four stars in this section.

Colours: Change some settings

Default Colours

Ideal Colours

Using the default colour settings, you can't expect to use this screen to edit your photos--unless, of course, you don't care how accurate the colours are.  That's because they suffer from a strong violet tinge, but that's not all: the brightness across different greys isn't quite right, either.  As a result, the W243D's deltaE score climbs to 4.4.   If this is the first time you've read our tests, then you might like to know that deltaE is the average discrepancy between the colours sent by your graphics card and those displayed by your monitor.  The larger the difference, the less accurate the colours.  As a general rule, a non-specialist will be able to notice the problem once deltaE is above 3.0.

Fortunately, though, you can adjust the monitor using the onscreen menu to make it more accurate.  It's very easily done: all you need to do is reduce the brightness to 85, which brings deltaE down to 3.2, which is an improvement--although other screens, like the P2370 are below 1.8 with their default settings.

Like the colours, the contrast ratio on this monitor is satisfactory but nothing better.  At 800:1, the W243D is average, but still a long way behind the best products which go beyond 2800:1.

Responsiveness: A 5 ms by default, so you'll need to use the OSD


Strangely, the monitor's default configuration is as a 5 ms screen.  To get it to 2 ms, you need to activate the 'RTC' option.  As soon as you've done that, you end up with a good, responsive, 2 ms screen.

Coloured    Transparent
Average ghosting over ten frames

Looking at the images from our ghosting testing in the Product Face-Off, you might have noticed some traces of reverse ghosting.  But don't worry, though, it's so light that you wouldn't be able to tell if it wasn't for our test photos.

As well as being responsive, the W243D has a low enough input lag for it to go unnoticed.  With less than one frame lagging behind, you would need to be pretty cheeky to blame this monitor for any problems you have while gaming online.