Pixels Galore

At my office, I spend my workday in front of two 19" LCDs. That’s a lot of screen real estate, and it makes coming home to a 12" PowerBook something of a disappointment. I’ve been living with it for over a year, but poor movie-watching experiences on said PowerBook have made it pretty clear that it was time to remedy the home display situation.

My solution is a Samsung 960BF, a 19" LCD with 4 millisecond response time. That’s absurd when you think about it: there are precious few viewing conditions under which one would need such response time, and it’s debatable if the eye can even keep up. But damned if I don’t feel happily upsold on the feature.

At any rate, the 960BF is a crisp, bright display with a clean exterior that brings Apple’s iBook to mind. There are none of the usual adjustment buttons that mar most PC monitors; a power button lit by a diffuse blue LED is all that’s necessary, as all adjustments are to be done in software. Of course, that software doesn’t appear to work right on OS X 10.4.3, but Apple’s color adjustment agent handles most of the gamma-tweaking one would desire. The 960BF takes both analog and digital inputs to its DVI port by way of a supplied adaptor cable. The PowerBook took to this configuration immediately and is happily spanning the two displays, thought it cannot mirror at any higher than its native 1024×768 resolution.

Although I use two 19" displays most of the day, the 960BF seems sizable on my small computer desk at home. Its one drawback is that it’s not particularly adjustable, especially on the vertical. The display was too far from eye level on my desk’s monitor platform but a touch too low once I removed the platform. I settled on resting it on an external drive, which doesn’t quite allow full view of the PowerBook but works well enough with it tipped back.

I looked at a number of monitors in person before settling on the 960BF. Though I’ve seen them on the market for some time now, I can’t get comfortable with the increasingly prevalent glossy coating that Sony calls XBRITE and other manufacturers call what they will. Glare seems an inevitability with those displays, and I wonder how well the glossy finish wears. This seemed the best of the readily available matte-finish LCDs out there.