Samsung SyncMaster 940UX review

Performance
The SyncMaster 940UX performed well in our tests. In anecdotal testing, text looked sharp down to 6.8-sized font, which is highly important for a productivity monitor. Not surprisingly, the LCD and its slow 5ms pixel response rate struggled with moving images. Using the DVD of Kill Bill Vol. 1, the image was blurry and showed lots of aliasing and dithering, and the picture only got worse when viewing the movie through USB. In contrast to our DVD test, we found no difference in quality when viewing screens in DisplayMate when connected via USB and DVI.

The Samsung did slightly worse on our colour and sharpness tests but turned in better results on our grayscale test, which evaluates how well a display is able to produce the shades between true black and true white. In the end, the Samsung was unable to keep pace with the LG unit, finishing with a lower composite score on our DisplayMate tests while also posting lower scores on brightness and contrast ratio benchmarks.

While the screen does darken noticeably at a low viewing angle, you'd have to be viewing from an unreasonable angle in order to see it, unlike the LG L206WU in which your viewing angle only had to be a few millimetres below centre before the screen darkened noticeably. World of Warcraft looked great on the display when using DVI. You can't play 3D games when connected via USB, however, because the games and DisplayLink are both vying for the same CPU resources.

To test for the possibility of a degradation of image quality when multiple monitors are daisy-chained together in clone mode, we connected three SyncMaster 940UX displays together via USB. We initially had trouble getting an image to show on one of the displays, which Samsung figured was because of the corruption of memory on the offending display. After unattaching all three and then reattaching them, everything worked fine. We did not see any degradation in quality across the displays.

Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday