In this article I am going to review the Samsung Syncmaster 205BW, which is a flat-screen monitor. The little brother of Samsung’s 225BW, the Samsung Syncmaster 205BW aims to give you 20″ of LCD monitor for a fraction of the price.
Positive points
The 205BW has lower response time than its big brother, 6ms compared to 8ms. However the colour depth is unaffected and you get all 16.7 million colours thanks to its 8 bit panel.
This attractive monitor has a slim silver bezel surrounding its imposing screen and, rare for monitors of its vintage, full vertical adjustment. it also comes with a HDCP compliant DVI connection, and a D-SUB connection, which is handy if you want to plug two computers in at the same time.
The definition is pretty good, though not perfect as there is a slight green tinge in the grey scale and one or two shades of colour missed out in testing, but the price more than makes up for something that in use you would almost never notice.
If you were to use this in an office or home environment where six or seven people would be crowding around the screen, the image is still quite visible even from a fairly extreme diagonal.
Negative points
Though there is full vertical adjustment, it does have a tendency to sag slightly and there is no horizontal adjustment, so you have to shift the whole thing, stand and all, to move it side to side.
While exploring the menu options, you might find Samsung’s ‘MagicColour’ function, which is supposed to analyse the image it is showing and adjust the colour settings in order to achieve the optimum colour balance. Great idea in principle, but in practice it is predictably awful, producing a garish display. Thankfully, there are many fine defaults and, of course, a custom display option.
It also, has trouble with low-light scenes in that it sometimes cannot quite resolve the details, but that is quite common with LCDs.
My opinion
While there are better monitors out there, you might think that this one would satisfy your needs. I would disagree; the 205BW is not a bad monitor, but it is worth saving a little more to get a far superior model.