Date: May 3rd, 2002
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product were donated by: Samsung Canada
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After pulling the monitor and it's components out of the box and shedding there protective packaging and bags you are left with this.

The actual monitor which includes speakers.

A package containing the usual driver disk, the owner's manual, warranty registration card and the special pivot software which allows your monitor to be positioned for landscape viewing. This will be covered in more detail in our product features section.

PRODUCT FEATURES

Here is a little rundown on the features included when you are the lucky owner of this fine monitor:

Well, for one, you will have your monitor which comes with a protective plastic cover which I left on to lessen the occurrence of dust buildup on the screen. And the nice advantage of LCD monitors is that when it's marked as a 15 inches monitor, the viewable area is 15 inches.

From this nice photo of the monitor's back you can see the base which has an included bearing in the bottom for rotating the whole unit side to side. Along with most LCD monitor's, it contains a hinge for tipping the monitor up and down to obtain that true contrast and optimal viewing angle for your workstation setup. The last feature contained within this photo is the spinning point which allows you to spin the screen 90 degrees to the right to allow for the use of the monitor in landscape orientation.

And what do you mean by "Landscape Orientation"??? Well, as you can see buy the photo, it allows you to use the included pivot software and view long documents without having to constantly scroll up and down the page. Nice feature, but I wouldn't really use it. It would be probably be best suited for journalists, or lawyers viewing long legal documents all the time.

The monitor footprint is negligible and with all the added space you just freed up with this purchase, I don't think the size of the base is a big concern to you.

This monitor also uses a analog, standard VGA connection for everyone out there that hasn't upgraded to the new Nvidia Geforce4 or ATI Radeon line which has the new digital DVI connector for the newer model of TFT's that I will be reviewing in the weeks to come (Just as a hint, it's 19inches).

Now, a rare find is a LCD monitor that incorporates speakers into the monitor chassis. I checked out the sound quality of the speakers and found them to be a little bass-less and rather tinny at best and are not intended to play anything more than classical music and/or windows beeps and chimes. Any music other than that would distort them at a moderate level of volume. Now also in this photo you can checkout how the volume of the speakers and the TFT's menu controls are accessed. Simple and efficient.

And for the people that would like to plug in their headphones or to hook-up their own CD player, Samsung has the foresight to include some handy 1/8" stereo headphone and input jacks in the bottom left hand corner.