Introduction:

I purchased the 226BW from Newegg for $278 after rebate as a replacement for an 8 year old Optiquest V95 19 inch CRT. I was reluctant to change to an LCD panel after doing a bit of research as many felt LCDs were inferior to CRTs. Time marches on and whether to change or not wasn’t a realistic option as CRTs are getting quite difficult to find. So I chose a medium priced panel in a wide format based on a recommendation from another user and online reviews.

Samsung 226BW TN panel

Specs:

Monitor Size: 22in.

Viewable Size (inches): 22.0

Horizontal Viewing Angle (degrees): 160

Vertical Viewing Angle (degrees): 160

Maximum Resolution: 1680 x 1050 75Hz

Brightness/Luminance: (cd/m2)300

Contrast Ratio: 3000:1

Response Time: 2ms

Energy Star Compliant

16.7 million display colors

Horizontal Frequency Range: 30kHZ – 81kHZ

Vertical Frequency Range: 56Hz – 75Hz

15-pin mini d-sub VGA connector

DVI-D (DVI Digital) connector

Case Color: Black

Weight (lbs): 10.8

Width (inches): 20.3

Height (inches): 16.6

Depth (inches): 8.6

Power Consumption: 55W

DVI(HDCP)

Contents: Monitor & Simple Stand, Quick Setup Guide, Warranty Card, User’s Guide, Monitor Driver, Power cord, D-sub Cable, DVI Cable

Parts Warranty: 3 years

Labor Warranty: 3 years

Setup:

The 226BW was a breeze to set up. I was happy to discover that my package came with both the DVI and d-sub VGA connectors. I chose the DVI to connect to an ATI graphics card in a PC running Windows XP Pro. I powered the computer down, switched monitors and rebooted. When prompted I loaded the cdrom and installed just the 226BW driver. At the desktop I navigated to the properties window and changed the screen resolution to 1680×1050 pixels, 32 bit. I never installed the included software, Natural Color and Magic Tune, as I felt they wouldn’t be needed in an image processing environment.

Pros:

• The onscreen Menu is easily accessible from buttons located at the bottom of the display.

• The 226BW is easily profiled. I used an inexpensive ColorVision Spyder 2 with the contrast set to 50 and the brightness set to 89. With the Spyder 2 one has to set the contrast and brightness manually and I was confused as to what settings to start with as the default settings of 75 and 100 seemed a bit extreme. The settings I used came as recommendations from the this website. Using the LCD tests found here, I discovered I achieved very good results with those settings.

• Using the Ilford profile for Ilford Galerie Classic Paper I found that my screen image and print have a very close match.

• I liked the quality of the colors and the deepness of the blacks.

• No dead pixels.

• The horizontal viewing angle for image editing is quite acceptable in my opinion.

• The 226BW takes up far less desk space than my 19” CRT while offering the same visual height (11 ¾”) and a wide view with a true width of 18 3/4”.

Cons:

• The height of the monitor cannot be adjusted. One can only tilt it up or down or swivel from right to left. Being tall, I found this to be a small problem at my work desk. I solved it by building a small wooden base 6 inches in height. This places the middle of the screen at eye level while sitting comfortably and keeps the screen face at a 90 degree angle to my line of sight.

• The 226BW is a TN type panel and because of this, the vertical viewing angle is very small, much smaller than advertised in my opinion. I get an area one third the height of the screen in the middle with a gamma of 2.2. The top third is darker and the bottom third brighter. This means if you view an image spanning the full height of the screen you will get a variance in contrast and brightness across the image. Because of this I try to minimize the effect by doing a final check of an image at a reduced scale (around 25% in CS2) before I send it to the printer. I’ve read that S-IPS or S-PVA panels have wider vertical viewing angles though I’ve never compared them to know how big the improvement is. The small vertical viewing angle was the biggest disappointment.

• There is a very small amount of backlight bleed along the edges. I haven’t found this to be much of a problem though some complained about it when viewing DVDs.

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