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Darth Vader would be rolling over in his space grave if he knew his glossy black trademark look had been appropriated by Samsung for a recent line LCD monitors... not to mention countless cellphones. What have the Imperial Forces come to?!
80% Rating: 
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Samsung Syncmaster 971P |
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Magic Tune Software LCD Properties Control
 The MagicTune software is supposed to make adjusting all the visual properties
of the LCD display easy from your PC desktop. Newbies
love quick wizards and user friendly controls the saying goes...
In spite of the hassle of installing software to adjust the LCD properties, MagicTune
can assist even the most novice achieve a properly adjusted screen, when
it works. Should a users' PC only have an analog videocard connection, the MagicTune
software is an annoying necessity. With a DVI video connection, just forget about it.
The
MagicTune software has more options for PCs running with an analog video connection as this
signal is not digital and requires more configuration. These include geometry, colour temperature,
primary colours, and a few others.
Since the native setting is 1280x1024 pixels, the
visual quality will be best when the resolution matches.
MagicBright Function Key
The "S" function button on the display stand loads up
MagicBright, which allows quick brightness changes between the current
brightness level and several pre-programmed modes for text, web surfing games,
video, etc. This is moderately useful, brightness and contrast buttons
would have been welcome...
Evaluating the Syncmaster 971P's Display
Quality
Brightness and Contrast: The Samsung 971P
LCD has great shading under the gray scale test. The white scale bars
are bright and the black background dark. Overall, the 971P's 1500:1 contrast ratio translates into non-illuminated
jet-black backgrounds, and very bright whites. Newer versions of the 971P now have a 4000:1 contrast ratio. There was not light leakage along the
sides of the display either.
 Colour Vibrancy:
The three primary
colour test screens were vibrant and uniform from corner to corner. Colour saturation was excellent,
and there were zero dull or broken pixels visible.
Colour Shading: In this test there's a bit of banding
due to LCD monitors being limited to displaying 16.7 million colours.
Otherwise the 971P performed as expected.
Non-native Resolution: The native resolution of the Syncmaster 971P is 1280x1024
pixels. Image dithering at a non-native 1024x768 resolution was excellent, large
text was very legible and distortion not visible. The 19" 971P handles text
dithering gracefully.
Moire:
There were no noticeable
background noise in the moire test pattern in when using a DVI signal.
Gaming Tests: We put the
Samsung 971P LCD display through a couple rounds of a FPS shooter, and the
results were good. The colours were crisp, and the black areas of the screen
nice and dark. I didn't really notice any ghosting (thanks perhaps to a 6ms
G-to-G pixel response rate). Still, ghosting is a subjective thing, so unless
you're looking for it you should be happy with the Samsung 971P.
So where does all this leave us?
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