Samsung SyncMaster LD190G

The SyncMaster LD190G has something of an unusual history: it was born out of Samsung's desire to unify the design of its whole range of products, and, in particular, to provide a desktop monitor to complement its NC10 netbook.  The glossy black frame of this display coordinate perfectly with the black version of the netbook.

Hardware: designed with netbooks in mind


The stand looks like one you'd find on a digital photo frame, which means it can be at the same height and same angle as the display on your laptop.  There's a VGA input, but also USB (see inset).  It's a real shame that there's no HDMI or DVI digital input, because lots of laptops--especially ultra-portables--have abandoned VGA and moved over to HDMI.

Colours: dominated by blue

Default Colours

Ideal Colours

Using the default settings, the most obvious problem--apart from the fact it has a glossy screen,  unlike the NC10's matte display--is the very strong dominance of blue shades.  Our test results confirmed this first impression.  With different shades of grey for instance, the colour temperature, which shouldn't be above 6500 K, reaches 10 000 K; the higher the temperature, the more blue colours look.  Normally, we should have been able to correct this defect easily using the onscreen menu, or at least reduce its impact, but, unfortunately, all of our attempts to sort it out failed.  That leaves the LD190G with a deltaE score of 4.5, which rules it out if you need to edit photos or just prefer a display with accurate colours.

Contrast (xxx:1)	Black (cd/m²)
100 cd/m²  200 cd/m²	100 cd/m²  200 cd/m²

A contrast ratio of 800:1 is nothing special, and with the factory settings it's very much average.  Things improve gradually as you reduce brightness, but the problem is that you need a bright display to compensate for the reflections caused by the glossy finish.

Response Time: fast movements are blurry

Coloured    Transparent
Average ghosting over ten frames

There's not much chance of finding an incredibly responsive result on a screen that uses a 5 ms TN panel, though our tests didn't reveal any particular problems.  It's too slow to display the fast movements of an FPS game fluidly, but that doesn't mean that gaming is impossible.  If you're a fan of other genres--strategy, sports, fighting or RPG for instance--then there's no need for a faster screen.  What's more, the input lag won't hold it back when playing online or at a LAN party as it's less than one frame on average.