Samsung SyncMaster P2450H

You heard the announcements, you’ve been asking for it, and now here it is – the P2450H, a 24'' monitor with mouth-watering specs and a more than reasonable price.

Handling: VGA, DVI, HDMI and audio outputs

Samsung chose a glossy frame for this model, which is nothing new, but this time they’ve dropped the curves used for the Pxx70 series in favour of sharp corner on the sides and at the back. Video connectivity is fairly standard, with VGA, DVI, and HDMI inputs. On the audio side, there are no speakers, but a headphone jack and an optical audio out that lets you pick up the sound from the HDMI input.

Colours: accurate enough, but no better

if you use the HDMI input, be careful because the P2450H’s factory adjustments are optimized for a video source such as a Blu-ray player. For use as a monitor, you should set the PC/AV mode option in the onscreen menu to PC instead of AV.

Default Colours

Ideal Colours

Our colorimetry measurements show a DeltaE of 3.2. In other words, this monitor’s colours are accurate enough to use it for occasional photo editing, but nothing professional. But if you want to adjust them to be even more accurate, you’ll have to use an appropriate calibration profile, since you can’t do it via the monitor’s menus.

The contrast is also about average. At 820:1, it’s nowhere near the F2380M, with its ratio of over 2800:1.

Responsiveness: fluid action in games

Coloured    Transparent
Average ghosting over ten frames

The results of our responsiveness tests were conclusive – this is a true 2 ms panel. You can expect fluidity even in fast-moving action games. Office applications will be child’s play for the P2450H. In the OSD, you can boost the Overdrive even more to try to improve the response time. I’d advise against it, however, because it will cause strong reverse ghosting (if you’re not familiar with that term, take a look at the inset in our review of Philips 220CW9, which explains the phenomenon and its causes.)


If you’re a fan of multiplayer gaming, the P2450H is also well suited. Its average input lag of one frame is too slight to impact your session, regardless of the type of game you’re playing. 


Films: can't display 1080p

The existence of a choice between AV and PC modes had us hoping Samsung had made an effort in the video department. Unfortunately, aside from fairly good control of clouding, we didn’t see any evidence of image processing. So don’t expect good results with scaling. You’ll need to be a good 1.5 m away from the screen for the defects to become imperceptible.


Even more surprisingly, during our tests with a Blu-ray player, the P2450H wasn’t able to display anything better than 1080i.