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| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 38 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
135 of 137 found the following review helpful:
 great monitor, great price Mar 07, 2007
By B. Matteo
Overall I found this to be a very good monitor at a fantastic price. I am a picky buyer, and am contemplating buying another one! I use it for business, movies, and occasional photo editing. That said, I found the buying process to be horribly confusing and spent days trying to figure out exactly what the differences are between any two LCDs. Here are some thoughts to aid your search:
1) the 206BW is Samsung's most recent 20" wide screen monitor. the 205BW and 204BW are its predecessors, are inferior, and are still sold in stores. the 206BW appears to be a big improvement over the 205BW. 2206bw is the corresponding 22" monitor.
2) the 20" monitor appears to be the sweet spot of the line. the 19" has lower pixel count, the 22" has the same pixel count as 20". The .258 pixel pitch of this monitor is also among the best I have seen for a consumer grade monitor. the 19" and 22" both have worse pixel pitch
3) this monitor gives a very large work space. I can comfortably have two documents, spreadsheets, etc. side by side. At 1600+ / 1000+ it has 10-15% more pixels, and a ton more space than my laptop. I was initially considering a non-wide-screen monitor. I am pleased that I chose this instead.
4) movies look fantastic. dark scenes particularly look better than they did on both my old CRT display and on my laptop LCD
5) monitors appear to have similar specs across manufacturers for their generation. this monitor appears to have been just released (3/1/2007), and has industry leading specs- 2ms response rate, 3000:1 dynamic contrasts, etc. Samsung's competitors (Viewsonic, etc) did not have comparable products when I bought. If you are tempted to by a product with lesser specs that may be marketed as "better," find out if this is actually the case, or if it is just an old design. LCD lines seem to turn over every 6-12 months.
6) stay away from monitors with speakers. reviews consistently pan them as gimicky and non-functional, and they add size and cost
7) one drawback is that the monitor stand is not adjustable. If you care, buy a good stand. there are standard interconnects on the back. it should work with this or any future monitor you buy. for my money, I would rather have a product with better performance than a more functional stand.
I have no comments on life as I have had the product for under a week.
happy shopping!
55 of 65 found the following review helpful:
 A Little Less Than I Expected May 30, 2007
By John J. Robinson
"jjr"
I purchased the 206BW from Amazon and I have been using it for a couple of weeks now. I also bought an Ergotron desk clamp arm for the monitor which works really well with the product.
I was replacing a 15" NEC 1024x768 MultiSync 1530V. I view and work with a lot of photographs and needed much more screen real estate for Photoshop, along with other software that needs room for toolbars.
I use a 24" Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW at work and really like it. The only disappointing aspect about the Dell is the dot pitch. The contrast ratio is 1000:1 and the response time for the Dell is 12ms. This will give me a reference to describe my experiences with the Samsung 206BW.
I decided to purchase the 20" Samsung for three reasons. One, I like the smaller dot pitch of around .25 millimeter pixel pitch. The 22" version has the same resolution of 1680 x 1050 and I didn't want the larger pixels. The second reason was that the 206BW appeared to be marked down significantly more. It looks like it was originally sold for around $500. And third, the 3000:1 contrast ratio was very appealing to me. I love deep blacks. My Dell at work has a black level that looks like the monitor is off. If the screen consists of completely black pixels, I can't tell if it is off or on. I love that.
So I purchased the 206BW without ever seeing it in a showroom.
First of all, I'll get this out of the way... the noise this monitor makes at custom levels is an issue. I have a noisy computer in the first place, and I can clearly hear the buzzing this monitor makes when I lower the brightness. It's loud.
Which leads to the custom settings this monitor wants to use. You can cycle through these settings by pushing one of the front buttons. The settings are Text, Internet, Game, Sport, Movie, and Dynamic Contrast. I am not sure how they came up with the names of these, but some are brighter and cooler, some are warmer and dimmer. You can also have a "Custom" setting that will most likely lead you to lower the brightness significantly because most of the custom settings are way too bright. But beware; lower the brightness and the buzzing starts. Doh!
Dynamic Contrast is interesting but slightly annoying. It basically adjusts the brightness and contrast depending what you have on screen. Pull up your desktop with a black background and it will dim. Pull up a photograph of a sunny day and it will brighten. Cute, but definitely not something I'll be using very often, if at all.
Now this is probably my own fault, but for some reason I was thinking that contrast ratio had something to do with black levels. I mistakenly thought that a "3000:1" contrast ratio would deliver deep blacks. It doesn't. Blacks look washed out. And along the top and the bottom of the screen there is A LOT of light bleeding through. That was another reason I bought the 20" over the 22" inch, to avoid the light bleeding at the top and bottom of the screen. Well, it's here and it doesn't look very nice at all. Especially because I prefer a black background as my wallpaper... I always see it.
The screen material itself is nice. It's the non-reflective type that will not reflect background lights or reflections. The bezel itself though, while black, is almost a complete mirror surface. It will reflect everything. The silver strip at the bottom is slightly indented and will not reflect anything.
There is not really much to the menu. It is not intuitive to navigate. And while having a complete button dedicated to it, the "auto-adjust" feature only works if you are using a RGB cable. If you are using a digital DVI cable, the button does nothing but inform you with text that the feature is not available. Doh!
There is a blue light surrounding the on/off button on the front of the monitor. The screen will go into power save mode if left on for awhile unattended, and the blue light will start flashing on and off quickly until you come back to the display and restore it from power save mode. This is not an issue for me, but beware of this is you are going to have it in a bedroom or anywhere that this might be distracting.
So overall, this monitor is nothing like my 24" Dell at work. It's just not in the same class. Given, my Dell costs about $700 and I got this one for $250. In fact, this 206BW is not even in the same class as my 15" NEC. The black levels are much worse.
So, I'll keep the monitor. I am not going to go through the hassle of returning it or swapping it. It will do. But if I had seen it in action beforehand, I would not have bought it.
The moral of this story is watch out of technical bullet-points. Sure, 2ms and 3000:1 look really tempting, but there has to be much more to it than that. My Dell has a contrast ratio of 1000:1 and a response time of 12ms and the images it displays are much better than the 206BW. Shop around and be careful. For the money I am sure you could do worse. Could you do better?
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
 Great Value Jun 05, 2007
By Desktop Publisher
This monitor is a great value for what you pay for it. Haven't had any problems with buzzing mentioned elsewhere. Had to recurve the monitor slightly to get the colors right, but the ATI software makes that easy. The only negative is the stand. Bought Ergotron's Neoflex stand to get the monitor to position at useful height as well as rotate to a landscape orientation.
6 of 7 found the following review helpful:
All I can say is WOW! May 13, 2007
By Stormborn
Received this monitor last week and the wife is jealous, lol. The first monitor I have turned resolution up high. Looks beautiful for movies and games. No dead pixels, saves a TON of space and the 2ms response time makes sure games look great too! Well worth the money and would buy another.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Strong Product Jan 06, 2008
By Tutor-Ted
I did a lot of reading before settling on the 206BW. I purchased one a couple of days ago and have had nothing but good times with it. Like other reviews note, it is too bright. I've tried adjusting the brightness but haven't noticed its famous "buzz." I must confess, though, that my computer makes enough noise to cover it, should it be there. The stand is, as has been mentioned, crummy. It does the job but isn't anything special.
There is some light bleed-through at the top and bottom, but it has never been a problem, and I use a lot of Photoshop (who USES the very top and bottom of the screen, anyhow?). There is also some cursor ghosting, but I haven't noticed it while playing video games or watching movies. This is my first LCD monitor, though, so I might be a bit sensitive.
I've had a lot of success putting it on top of a Boston area phone book (roughly three inches). It puts the screen at a good viewing level (better than sitting on my desk), and I feel like the colors are more accurate.
In the end, I've determined that there IS no perfect monitor in the 250-300 range, but this one can be adjusted to meet my needs.
See all 38 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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