I received my new displays today. Finally I don’t use CRTs anymore, my Samsung Syncmaster 710N
and my Iiyama S900MT1 have been replaced by two Samsung 173P 17″ TFT displays. The colors
are very bright, the picture is crispy, and the design very stylish. The first thing I did was
setting all my fonts 2 points smaller. :> Another technical highlight of these screens is the great
contrast (1000:1). More pictures can be found somewhere in my gallery pages. Although
these displays are not designed for gamers (response time is around 25ms) they perform reasonably
well with respect to ghosting even with a fast first person shooter. (But then I’m not a gamer-type.)
The screens have one button to switch them on and off. Switching on and off is confirmed by a
subtle beep, the button reacts on a slight touch, nothing moving.
The rest of the functionality is supposed to be setup via software. Of course the software
Samsung distributes with the panels is non-free and Windows only, which is quite lame. (They could
at least support free software projects by releasing specification to make it easier to support all
the nifty features for Open Source software developers. *sigh*) Ddccontrol, however, can do most of the stuff (changing
settings) via DDC so it’s quite usable under Linux, which is my OS of choice. I didn’t find a way
yet to use the pivot feature (both screens can be rotated a full 360º) and XRandR’s rotation
stuff does not work in dualhead mode.
Not at least, these screens save a lot of enery compared to my old CRTs, which is one the one
hand good for global climate, and on the other hand for the local one. My room can get pretty hot
during the summer, burning a lot of energy with old monitors did definitely not help that.
I already love my new toys. :-)