phungus's Full Review: Samsung 226BW 22 inch LCD Monitor
Buying this monitor is like buying a pack of baseball cards, because you don’t know what’s inside until you open it up. Keep reading and you’ll see what I mean.
I recently purchased a new HP desktop PC and needed a monitor to go along with it. At the store where I bought them both, they were offering a $140 rebate for buying both a PC and Monitor. It happened to be the late evening on the very last day of the rebate offering, so I jumped at the offer. I know I could have saved maybe $20-40 ordering this same monitor online, but then I would have had to wait for it to ship and not been able to use my new desktop, plus the rebate made the package deal a good one. After shopping around the store for what was available in stock, I opted for the Samsung SyncMaster 226bw 22” Widescreen LCD Monitor. That was three weeks ago.
When I got home and hooked everything up, I immediately noticed that the monitor had an odd flicker to it. The flicker seemed to come and go at times, and was noticeably worse when looking at a full screen of one solid color, like the black background on a website. At the time, I was connecting the monitor to the PC using VGA cables going to the onboard video on the motherboard. This monitor also has a DVI connection and includes a cable, but I wouldn’t use that for another week.
I will say that I’m not entirely unhappy with this monitor, as the display is still incredibly bright and the colors are vibrant. It is supposed to have a 2ms refresh rate, which is incredibly fast, and I will admit that I haven’t seen any kind of ghosting problem while playing fast-paced 3D games. Even so, that whole flicker thing just bugs me. The monitor only supports a 60hz refresh rate, and there is no way to change it. In the past, when I’ve seen flicker problems on a monitor, usually adjusting the refresh rate will fix it, but that’s not an option on this monitor.
I figured the flicker was just part of the newness of the monitor and it would go away after it warmed up, but it did not. I tried all I could to adjust the video settings every possible way that I could, and although I did make the flicker less noticeable, it was still noticeable. I then decided to search Google for this model monitor and see if anyone else had similar flicker problems. A search of Samsung 226bw flicker yielded 11,200 results. Yikes! Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to have this problem.
By this time, the store had already closed and it was too late to take it back that night. I also was stuck in the predicament of invalidating my rebate since if I exchanged the monitor for another one, it would show up on a different receipt. Part of the rebate rules specified that they must have been purchased together and show on the same receipt. If I had taken this monitor back the next day, I ran the risk of not getting the rebate, and then I would have really been mad. So I was stuck with this monitor, otherwise I’d have to eat $140 in rebates and my whole PC/Monitor package wouldn’t have been that great a deal.
Since I planned on upgrading the video card, and that new video card would utilize the DVI connection, I decided to wait and see if that made an improvement. A week later, when I put an MSI Nvidia Geforce 8400 GS video card in the PC and connected the DVI cables, the flicker problem was drastically reduced. However, it still flickers from time to time. It’s not nearly as noticeable or as often as before, but it still happens, and it still aggravates the hell out of me.
While researching the flicker problem on Google, I figured out why some people hate this monitor and complain about problems like flickering while other people say it is the greatest gaming monitor on the market and there is none better. What I uncovered made me burn-the-factory-down mad at Samsung.
Here’s what I uncovered: There are three different versions of this monitor on the market. Not one or two, but three. These three are not alike, either. The box looks the same. The price is the same. The supposed features are the same, but the monitor inside is not the same. The only way to tell which one of the three you got is to open the box and look at the back panel of the monitor to read the serial number. When you look on the back, in the upper right hand corner of the silvery white sticker with the model and serial number, you will see either an A, S, or C.
Samsung’s first line of 226bw monitors were excellent and got rave reviews. When a company releases a product, it’s that first line-up that gets reviewed in technical magazines and the like, because they send free products to a lot of places for review. After Samsung got all the good reviews, they outsourced the manufacturing of this monitor to other companies in order to make cheaper models. These cheaper models don’t work quite as well as the original line-up, and are essentially cheaper knock-off models of the superior original. There is a link at the bottom of this review that will provide you with all the details on how much different the A, S, and C models can be, and the differences are very noticeable.
The model that I ended up getting was the C panel, which isn't even made by Samsung. The C panel is usually what you will find at most retail stores, like the one where I bought it. The C panels are made by a Chinese company called Chi Mei.
What Samsung did with this monitor was very dirty business. They changed manufacturers and allowed someone else to produce a cheaper version of the same monitor, but Samsung kept the same model number and everything. This means two people could buy a Samsung 226bw monitor in a store and one might get the good Samsung-made one while the other person might get the cheaper knock-off. Both people will pay the same price, but they won’t be getting the same quality monitor. This kind of thing sometimes happens on eBay where unscrupulous people mislabel certain computer products and hope nobody will notice, but I can’t believe a major company like Samsung would do such a thing. Samsung should have at least put some kind of label outside the box to let customers know what is inside.
In the past, I once returned a 42” Samsung Plasma TV because the picture quality was so horrible on it that I couldn’t stand ‘getting used to it’ considering what I paid for it. It looked fine showing the cartoon in the store, but it couldn’t render skin tones worth a flip. Furthermore, just this past weekend my two month old Samsung cell phone screen broke. After what happened with this monitor, I will never buy another Samsung product again. What they pulled with the SyncMaster 226bw is inexcusable. If you really wanted to get into the legality of it all, this amounts to false advertising in that they are touting one product while selling you another.
The bottom line here is that Samsung cheated their customers with the SyncMaster 226bw monitor. Don’t take the gamble on this monitor. Just buy from a brand you can trust. Boycott Samsung!
The folks at BeHardware.com have done an extensive review of the three different model (A, S, and C) Samsung 226bw monitors, and you can read their findings at the link below.
http://www.behardware.com/articles/667-1/samsung-226bw-series-a-s-verdict.html
22" Widescreen Lcd Monitor. Vga Compatible ; 2ms Response Time. 800:1 Contrast Ratio. Features 16 Million Colors, Tft Display. Also Features Magiccolo...More at Target
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