The more bang you get for your hard-earned buck the better - after all not everyone wants the most expensive and most luxurious hardware out there at any cost. Most of the time value and return on investment that drives decisions to buy, and if you can manage to get equipment that looks really nice, and performs well, then all the better.

With an eye towards making life a little easier for the IT department, today we will be looking at a 15" TFT LCD multimedia display from Samsung.

The Syncmaster 150T comes packaged with a multimedia stand an swivel mount. Naturally the sound quality is not going to convince any audiophile into trading in their Grado's but it will suffice for listening to internet radio, the dancinghampster.com website, or some personal MP3's from that bootlegged concert at the Royal Albert. An integrated headphone and microphone jack also further the usefulness of the stand which houses the monitors power pack.

This is all well and good, but what if you want to view a legal document as it was meant to be seen? With a simple twist of the display the 150T transforms from the standard landscape view to a portrait screen. Special software is included with the display that lets you do this without having to turn your neck 90 degrees as well. It does look really neat, especially if you spend most or your working day rummaging around the internet, or typing long documents.

Technically proficient, the Syncmaster also features dual input video connectors for analog and DVI support. Flat panel LCD displays are natively digital, but as most of us still use video cards with analog outputs so the dual support is rather necessary. On a visual level there really is not perceptible difference to the naked eye.

As one of the hallmarks of a good quality LCD display is wide viewing angle, with the best possible being 80/80/80/80, we were interested to see that the Syncmaster 150T only supports 60/60/55/55 (up/down/left/right).

The numbers represent degrees, and work like this. Say you are sitting with a coworker off to one side looking at something on their LCD display. If you happen to be sitting at 80 degrees to the face of the display you will notice that the picture is not quite the same as to the person sitting 0-55 degrees to the display. If you picture in your mind the old laptop screens, or a bank machine display you'll get the idea without me having to go into too much detail on angles of incidence, refractance and whatnot.

Two other aspects help to define the quality of an LCD display, and they are Luminance and Contrast Ratio's. Luminance describes how bright the display is. The higher the number the better. The 150T has a Luminance rating of 200cd/m2, which is about standard in the industry. There are a few displays that have recently been released with ratings as high as 800 cd/m2, but the norm is currently 200-300cd/m2.

Contrast ratings relate to the capability of the display to differentiate between black and white. Again, larger numbers represent more adaptable displays. At 300:1 the 150T has a very good contrast ratio. This is the upper level of current TFT technology, so you would be hard pressed to find many displays above 350:1 or even 400:1. The LCD panel carries itself well with a 0.297mm dot pitch (best we've seen is 0.264mm) LCD panel.

Image is everything with a display, and the 150T has several features designed to ensure a first rate picture. With dual inputs (DVI and Analog) the display is capable of connecting to two independent computers. Switching between A or B brings the feed in from either the Analog or DVI hookup after a momentary refresh.

Samsung SyncMaster 150T Display: 15" Diagonal Viewable Size (a-si TFT active matrix display) Dot pitch of 0.297mm Contrast Ratio: 300:1 Luminance: 200cd/m2 Viewing Angles: 60/60/55/55 (up/down/left/right) Consumes 25Watts power 1024x768 pixel resolution, analog and DVI connection Weighs approx. 6.3Kg External universal power supply (100-240 Volt AC) Comes with: CD-ROM, 6 foot power cord, 15-pin D-sub analog video cable, DVI video cable, manual, power cord. Manufacturer: Samsung