Samsung SyncMaster XL2370 review: Samsung SyncMaster XL2370

Samsung's SyncMaster XL2370 is possibly the thinnest consumer monitor we've seen. At least as far as the 48mm panel is concerned, although the stand of course adds to this depth. It manages this by not only having an edge-lit LED backlight like Samsung's super-thin TVs, but by splitting the power unit out into a brick — and a hefty brick it is too.

8.0

Samsung SyncMaster XL2370

$130 at Amazon

The Good

Incredibly thin and light. No noticeable light bleed. Good power savings. Excellent dead pixel warranty.

The Bad

Power brick takes up space. Still a TN screen. HDMI limitations means watching Blu-ray might not be the best experience. Pricey.

The Bottom Line

The stylish XL2370 impresses with its contrast ratio, thin screen and comparatively low power requirements. The price really stings though thanks to the LED backlight, and it's definitely not for colour professionals, but gamers are sure to like it a lot.

A rare sight: the power unit has been stripped out of the monitor to make things thinner. (Credit: Craig Simms/CBS Interactive)

The chassis is mostly constructed from black and translucent plastic, all of it shiny — which means fingerprints ahoy. Thankfully, this trend doesn't continue to the screen itself; it's matte, meaning the XL2370 minimises the twin evils of glare and reflection.

Being a 23-inch, 16:9 screen, the XL2370 joins the ranks of high-resolution monitors, displaying Full-HD ready at 1920x1080.

Specs at a glance

Stand and ergonomics

The XL2370's stand, although attractively translucent with a tinge of blue, does effectively nothing, offering tilt only. Despite the thinness of the neck, the XL2370 is actually quite sturdy and doesn't wobble too much when bumped or adjusted.

Pretty, but next to useless
(Credit: Craig Simms/CBS Interactive)

There is no cable management to speak of, although ports are mounted parallel to the monitor, which goes some way to alleviating mess.

Connections

Toslink optical, 3.5mm line out, HDMI, DVI and power. (Credit: Craig Simms/CBS Interactive)

There are no speakers, but Samsung gives you the chance to output sound to another device should your HDMI signal also carry sound.

Buttons and on-screen display (OSD)

Samsung has opted for capacitive buttons on the XL2370, with nothing mechanical in sight — and since they're behind a shiny surface, expect fingerprints. Each button is backlit by a white LED.

The capacitive buttons are all backlit, with the power button being the only symbol that's actually marked when not lit. You can set their brightness or turn off everything except the power light from the OSD if you find them distracting. A tap in the general area of the buttons will relight them so you can find your way around. (Credit: Craig Simms/CBS Interactive)

The OSD's standout features include sharpness enabled on DVI, as well as the ability to switch the monitor off after a predetermined time, scale down the response time accelerator and turn off the LED lit labels.

Samsung has three sets of image presets. The first is called "MagicBright", offering "Custom", "Text", "Internet", "Game", "Sport", Movie" and "Dynamic Contrast". Brightness and contrast are set to preset amount on the second through fourth, while "Sport" is a cool tone and "Movie" a warm one. "Dynamic Contrast" will lighten or darken your monitor's backlight depending on the scene being shown; however, we find this highly distracting and leave it off.

"MagicColor" is the next preset, and in "Intelligent" supposedly shows more vivid colours, while "Full" compensates for skin tones being pushed too red. As is usual with all presets, we recommend leaving them off, and calibrating it yourself manually.

Scaling options are limited to full screen ("wide") and scaled aspect ratio ("auto"), with no 1:1 in sight.

Samsung's on-screen display is easy enough to find your way around. (Credit: Craig Simms/CBS Interactive)

Performance

Lagom.nl LCD tests
After calibrating to a target brightness of 140cd/m² with an X-Rite i1Display 2, Eye-One Match 3 and tweaking with HCFR, the XL2370 was run through the Lagom.nl LCD tests.

A slight banding was present in the gradient test, as were slight purple and green tinges, a common display issue. The XL2370 also flickered on four of the pixel walk tests — most monitors fail between one and four of these tests.

Input lag
Measured against a Samsung SyncMaster 975p CRT, and using a Canon 40D set to a shutter speed of 1/320, an average over 60 photographs were taken using Virtual Stopwatch Pro. The average result over DVI came in as 6.98ms, a supremely low time. It's worth noting the occasional 30ms difference turned up in the sets, so on the rare occasion you might lose around two frames, but mostly the difference should be imperceptible.

Colour accuracy
ΔE is the measurement of how far a measured colour deviates from its expected value, allowing us to determine the colour accuracy of a monitor. While a ΔE value of 1 is considered perceivable, as long as it's less than 3 the shift shouldn't be too obvious. HCFR was used to determine ΔE for the monitor.

Let's see how the XL2370 arrived in uncalibrated format.

The uncalibrated CIE chart. The white triangle is the colour space of the monitor, the dark is the sRGB gamut it's trying to match. (Screenshot by CBS Interactive)

Not great. The greys are relatively uniform and near-ish to the black curve, but still are perceptibly different if you look at the ΔE values. There's overall a push towards red and green. Time to calibrate.

The calibrated CIE chart (Screenshot by CBS Interactive)

Note the particularly high contrast ratio post-calibration, along with the perfect 2.2 gamma. We've also managed to screw down most of the greyscale to acceptable levels, and reduce some of the green push and a little blue, but the colours are still a little whacked. As a consumer monitor though, the XL2370 doesn't offer us the controls we need to fix this further.

It should be noted that colour calibration of the XL2370 raised some issues with the i1Display 2, with it not measuring blue shifts until we lowered all colours to a starting point around 40. After this point, the process proceeded as usual.

HDMI performance
While a monitor might have an HDMI port that's no guarantee it'll display images as expected. We hooked up a PlayStation 3 and checked for 24p capability, as well as judder and ran the HQV Blu-ray test to see how well it coped with an interlaced source and noise.

While gaming is fine over HDMI, we wouldn't recommend watching Blu-ray movies on the XL2370, or 1080i content.

Viewing angles
Viewing angles were taken with a Canon 40D in spot metering mode, with only shutter time adjusted to obtain a good exposure.

As you can see, the typical TN panel inversion from the bottom of the panel is prevalent. Samsung's excellent contrast ratio goes some way to hiding the usual viewing angle problems associated with TN. (Credit: Craig Simms/CBS Interactive)

Backlight uniformity
Backlight uniformity was measured by placing HCFR into free measure mode, displaying a completely white image and recording the brightness along a 5x3 grid on the screen. This should be considered a guide only, as backlight uniformity is likely to change from unit to unit.

Some interesting values here. In subjective tests we didn't notice too much of a difference. (Credit: Craig Simms/CBS Interactive)

Light bleed
With all the lights turned off and a black image shown, there was no obvious light bleed — a significant plus for the XL2370.

It's important to note that the effects of light bleed will likely change from monitor to monitor, regardless of make.

Other issues
The panel itself is quite deeply inset, and the bezel is piano black, meaning that during bright scenes you may notice the screen's reflection on the bezel, which will be distracting for some.

Power consumption
We measured power consumption using a Jaycar mains digital power meter. It's important to note here that due to limitations of the meter, measurements are limited to values 1W and greater, and are reported in 1W increments.

All measurements, screen brightness and contrast were set to 100 per cent, and a test image displayed.

Juice Box
Maximum power draw	29W
Power-saving mode	9W
Off	7W

Samsung's power usage is good here. Nowhere near as good as Philips' Brilliance 225B, but still respectable.

Warranty

Conclusion