Samsung 970P

Call the 970P “Mac Daddy,” because its shiny and sleek white cabinet with brushed-metal trim is way reminiscent of Apple’s products. A double-hinged neck allows you to raise and lower the screen’s height, but we found that the neck wouldn’t remain fully upright, inevitably folding under the weight of the screen. Still, there’s approximately 4.5-inches of height travel. You can tilt and rotate the screen, and the neck swivels 90 degrees to either side.

The 970P also sports a unique cabling system: A connector dongle, with ports for a single DVI cable and a bundled power brick, is separated from the monitor by a 9-inch cable, meant to keep all unsightly wires off your work surface and out of sight. We’d prefer a longer cable between the monitor and the dongle and an integrated power brick—the way Apple builds its displays.

Continuing with the clean aesthetic, the monitor bezel is totally austere—Samsung relocated the power button to the monitor’s base, and replaced the standard onscreen display buttons with a software controller called Magic Tune, which offers the usual assortment of picture adjustments, as well as a calibration routine, presets for certain types of applications, and custom-profile capabilities. While the software is useful, we’d like to be able to change the brightness or switch presets without having to launch an application.

In the DisplayMate (www.displaymate.com) evaluation scripts, the 970P stood out as offering the best screen uniformity of the LCDs here, betraying nary a hint of backlight on a completely dark screen. It also proved to have the deepest black level and superb off-axis viewing. In real-world use the 970P’s performance was equally strong. Be it web surfing, movies, or games, the colors appeared true and screen quality was consistent.

Month Reviewed: June 2006

+ OSD: Strong performance and ergonomic features.

- OCD: Cabinet is a little fancy-pants for our tastes, no OSD buttons.