Date: December 12th, 2004
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product Submitted by: Samsung Canada
<--SHOP FOR A SAMSUNG SYNCMASTER 193P LCD MONITOR HERE

PRODUCT VISUAL QUALITY TESTING (cont'd)

Three Dimensional Gaming

It is widely known that most LCD monitors are not a very good option for gaming seeing their respective pixel response latencies just cannot keep up with the framerates produced by most first person shooter and online games.

The SyncMaster 193P unfortunately does fall in this category. With a pixel response time of 20ms, image ghosting is pretty bad especially when using the DVI connection. The analog connection is slightly better, but it doesn't bring it up to a level which I would deem it game worthy. Understandably, Samsung knows this and in no way condones this monitor as a viable gaming option.

It's a shame though seeing that when you are sitting still, the picture quality is amazing and the high contrast ratio does make the environment very vivid and crystal clear. But with the good, there is always a bad thing that raises its' ugly head.

All LCD monitors have support for 16bit color which is not really a huge concern when a monitor has a lower contrast ratio seeing it will wash the colors slightly and the difference is not that noticeable. Now when you have a higher contrast monitor, color washing is almost nonexistent. What this brings about is what you see in the photo above. You can see where the lack of 32bit support and the high contrast ratio leads to rather poor picture.

But honestly, I cannot hold these problems against this product. It is not meant for gaming so therefore I cannot judge it poorly on that one application.