Home > Consumer Reviews > Samsung 957 MB 19" CRT Monitor

Like most people buying this monitor, I read alot of positive reviews that influenced my decision to buy this monitor. After hooking up the monitor and turning it on, I was amazed at the brightness and color quality. I noticed that the geometry needed just a little correction. I downloaded the Nokia Monitor Test (Ntest.exe) to help calibrate the monitor. As suggested by the tool, it said to wait for the monitor to warm up before calibrating it.

Unfortunately, during the next 30 minutes or so, the geometry of the monitor became progressively worse. The moire was absolutely terrible. While the center of the monitor had great picture quality, the edges looked squished at any resolution wider than 1024. I verified this fact by opening a small window with text and moving the window from the edge to the center and back while measuring the width.

No amount of fiddling with the geometry & moire controls could fix the problem. Any resolution above 1024x768 resulted in a distored picture. I am very disappointed with this monitor and I sent it back to Amazon. I guess I'm just used to the perfect geometry of the Sony Trinitron monitors. I currently have a GDM-400 19", but the red electron gun went bad...

The only other monitors I have considered are the Dell P1130 (a 21" Trinitron CRT) and the Samsung 172x (a 17" LCD).

After using it for a week, I have to say I'm pretty disappointed with the 957MB. The reviews I scrounged up on the web were almost uniformly glowing (heh!), so I'm forced to conclude that they were using a different monitor or that they had low standards. Don't get me wrong -- the 957 MB isn't horrible -- but it definitely has some issues.

The worst is that the sharpness is not uniform across the screen. When the sharpness settings are set so that text is clear in the center, the sides will be over-sharpened, creating highly annoying vertical artifacts that almost look like vertical scanlines. Needless to say, this hurts my impression of the image quality on the sides quite a bit. Turning the sharpness almost all the way down is the only way I found to eliminate them; of course, that makes the rest of the picture go to hell.

The "MagicBright" modes are somewhat questionable as well. They are called "Text" "Internet" and "Entertain," in order of brightness. The latter two do a real job on on-screen text, making it too blurry to be acceptably legible. As a result, I exclusively use Text mode when using Windows. Only in games do the other two modes come in handy, and even then I usually avoid Entertain -- it's very, very bright. So, don't buy into the MagicBright hype. It's of limited use outside of games.

Lastly, the color purity is somewhat lacking, and the monitor makes a bit more noise than I would like. A small but very noticeable hum or buzz is constantly emitted, and sometimes the monitor makes highly audible clicks and pops -- even after it's been off for a while! Odd.

In short, I could have done better, but that's what I get for going with a $... monitor. Next time I shop for a screen, I'm going to spend a bit more money (and make sure my vendor has a satisfaction guarantee!) before making my purchase.

I read all the glowing reviews on all the other sites and really was excited to get a hold of this monitor. Installation was a snap and material is high quality. BUT.. the display quality is ABSOLUTELY unacceptable for anyone doing graphic work or photo-retouching. I quickly switched back to my 19" Sony G400 (4 year old) within a few days and waiting to return this monitor tomorrow. Definitely not worth the money. Problems were:

-vertical artifacts on the sides of the screen
-VERY bad convergence.. long horizontal dashed lines did not line up straight
-Things are too sharp on the edges and too fuzzy in the middle

Just horrible to use for someone who works in graphic design. And for those who can quickly tell what is good or bad, you will be severely disappointed. If you are a gamer, you might be okay with it.

This monitor is a great bargain, and produces a superb picture. It took little to no adjustment to get a perfectly square and crisp image. The 3 brightness modes are of limited use, but they work well if you really need them. OSD menus and controls are fairly easy to use and understand. If you are wanting the real estate of a 19 inch monitor, but cannot afford the 18 or 19 inch flat panels yet, this is a great choice.

Yeah that's right, I said good hearing. This monitor emits a high-pitched squeal when lots of text is displayed on a white background on the screen. That means, most any time you look in Windows Explorer, and on many web pages. Go figure. I thought it was a problem with my particular monitor, so I RMA'd it and got another, which had the exact same problem. Guess I'll RMA this one too, and go back to the Samsung 955DF.