Samsung SyncMaster T240HD review

Kill Bil Vol. 1 on DVD was a different story, though. With the same settings, we found that the movie had very accurate flesh tones and a sharper overall picture. Yellows and reds didn't pop like on the Dell, but thanks to its sharper image and less saturated colour, we preferred the look of the Samsung to the Dell and HP.

Compared with the True Color Widescreen, the Samsung performed better in most of our individual tests. Unlike the HP, the Samsung did not have the problem of unwanted colour creeping into the grayscale. The Samsung did have the same problem as the HP of not being able to distinguish very dark grays from black, though. Font sharpness on the Samsung was impressive and looked much thinner and less blurry than the HP's.

According to Samsung, the SyncMaster T240HD uses half the power of other displays by reducing the number of backlights and keeping them confined along the edges. Samsung says they compensate for the reduced backlights by focusing the light that's there and increasing the overall efficiency of the display. Samsung may not have compensated enough. The company claims a maximum brightness of 300 candelas per square meter (cd/M2).

The maximum brightness of the display, according to our tests, was 217cd/M2. This is a lot lower than the 434cd/M2 tested brightness of the True Color Widescreen and 452cd/M2 of the Dell UltraSharp. One of the benefits of the Samsung's lower brightness is that the screen showed less backlight bleed-through than either the Dell or the HP. If you're in a room that gets tonnes of sunlight, however, you may consider the low brightness a potential deal breaker.

We hooked the display directly to cable, bypassing the box to try out the QAM tuner. After a channel setup that took a few minutes, we were able to watch cable without any problems.

The Dolby Digital Surround speakers provide decent sound quality. When viewing a movie from about 2 metres away, we found that some dialogue was still hard to hear even when turned to its maximum volume. The speakers have a better bass-to-treble balance than the True Color Widescreen, so music sounded clear without being stark or tinny.

Conclusion
The display has a low brightness, and its colour reproduction in games proved to be lackluster, but it produced accurate flesh tones and sharp clarity in DVDs. It also reproduced text sharply, making it good for normal office use. With its TV tuner, many connections options and great performance in movies, the Samsung SyncMaster T240HD is a steal. While it doesn't have quite the overall performance of the £400 Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP, its lower price, connection options and features make up for that.

Edited by Marian Smith