Samsung XL2370 Unboxing and First Impressions

The Samsung XL2370 LED Monitor has finally become available in Turkey a few days ago, after a long delay (it was released in Europe in August).

This coincided nicely with the death of my 5-year old Samsung 205BW a couple weeks ago, so I started waiting for the big day, announced as March 26th by hepsiburada.com.

The monitor became available even earlier (March 24th, IIRC) on sanalmarketim.com, an e-tailer that I’ve come to love and trust over the past couple of years, but I decided to wait until the 29th to see if I could get a better price from brick-and-mortar stores. With no sign of XL2370 at Vatan Computer on the 29th, I placed my order, becoming one of the very first people to get Samsung’s “highest performance” monitor in Turkey.

My order just arrived about an hour ago, and here are my first impressions after an hour of use:

• It’s sharp, but still not as sharp as my MacBook Pro’s display.
• It can be extremely bright, to the point that it will make your eyes bleed. (UPDATE: I’m officially using the monitor at 0 brightness right now. It’s that bright.)
• It’s also very responsive, especially when “Fastest” is selected under “Response Time” in the menu.
• Combining the last two points, it’s perfect for watching movies, and much better than my LCD TV for this purpose.
• It has an HDMI input, and both analog and optical digital audio outputs, making it perfect for use with a game console, Blu-ray player, etc. In fact, my satellite receiver has an HDMI output, so this could easily replace my TV.
• Text performance, as far as I can see, is nothing to write home about. It’s good, but not much better than my now dead 205BW.
• It’s thin. And I mean thin. Wafer-thin.
• There are no elevation, tilt or swivel adjustments, and the stand is a bit short. This translates to the bottom end of the monitor being a bit too close to the table, making it slightly uncomfortable for a guy my height. I might consider raising it with a book or something.
• The frame and the stand are acrylic, and therefore almost impossible to keep lint-free.
• The touch-sensitive menu buttons, combined with almost no feedback, might not be easy to get used to.
• The packaging, especially that of the neck of the stand, is not for the faint of heart. It took me a good 15 minutes to remove every last bit of static cling from the neck. Acrylic + static cling = not a good idea.

and that’s all I can think of right now.

Finally, here are the unboxing photos:

UPDATE (Dec. 18, 2010): A few readers asked for an update on the monitor. Unfortunately I don’t have time to write a full review, but here’s an excerpt from my reply to one of those readers:

I still have the brighness at 0. At this setting, this monitor has the same brightness as the MBP’s internal monitor at 50%.

It’s a bit low, but I haven’t propped it up. I guess I got used to it after a while, but you might want to have a thick book handy.

One thing about the monitor’s height. I’m 6’4″, and when I sit up, there’s about 15 cm between my line of sight and the top of the monitor (which isn’t ergonomic at all but anyway). Even though the official specs state a vertical viewing angle of 160 degrees, there’s noticeable discoloration on the lower half of the screen; especially on window shadows. This doesn’t bother me that much, but it will probably bother you if you do a lot of design work.

When I lower my chair (or lift the monitor), the problem goes away. Color calibration could also help, but I’m not an expert on that.

The resolution is great, and I have more than enough screen real estate for my work. Sure, 2560×1440 would be even better, but I don’t think there are many monitors that have that kind of resolution. The ones that do cost an arm and the better part of a leg. If you have the money, I’m sure the new 27″ Apple LED is a better monitor.

Keep in mind that most of my work is coding in Xcode and TextMate, and I like to keep my workspace clean; so I usually have one fully maximized window per screen. I use Spaces heavily. However, there have been instances where I had 2 or 3 large images open side by side in Photoshop; and the Samsung has enough real estate for that. I never used Final Cut so I can’t comment on that.

The acrylic doesn’t bother me at all. It collects dust, but wiping it once a week is more than enough.