Samsung LN-R268W 26-Inch HD-Ready Widescreen Flat-Panel LCD TV
Gorgeous picture.
I'd had my eye on the Samsung LN-R**8W series for quite some time after starting to see them in various places used as monitors for PCs and as televisions hooked up to XBox 360s. Every time I saw one of these sets (the demo models were invariably the 23\\" version), I had to stop and stare. Usually the game playing was \\"Call of Duty 2\\", but it looked positively stunning. Finally I watched some high-def programming at a store on the 26\\" model and I was sold. Having read not a single on-line review and without doing any research whatsoever, I was sold by my eyes alone. The only 'research' I did was comparing this set to other brands, and this was the clear winner. <br /> <br />The 3000:1 contrast ratio is misleading. They used 'dynamic' contrast ratio to come up with that figure. I've since learned the actual contrast ratio as used by most other manufacturers is around 800:1, which is still among the best of the current crop. The next generation will undoubtedly beat this figure. But for my purposes, this set is just fantastic. The blacks are black, and all shades of gray seem to come through as intended. To judge this, I'm replaying \\"Deus Ex\\", a PC game from back in 2000 (which runs fine in WinXP and supports 1360 x 768). This game takes place entirely at night, so there are a lot of dark areas along with many shades of gray. This game looks amazing, as does FarCry (2004) with its beautiful vivid tropical colors and water. Those are the only two games I've tried thus far. And I imagine games that natively support 1360 x 768 will naturally fare better on this set. For instance, a game that only supports 1024 x 768 will probably look kinda crappy because of scaling problems, a problem all LCD monitors share when not running in their native resolution. <br /> <br />I'm using it primarily as a huge monitor for my PC. I had to think hard about this, because using this set as a PC monitor, your screen resolution will max out at 1360 x 768, which is great for television, buthardly cutting-edge for a computer monitor. However, to find a PC monitor this BIG with ultra-high resolution would have set me back about double the dollars. And since my rig (An Athlon 2600+ with an NVidia 6600GT video card) isn't capable of playing games at ultra-high res anyway, I'm happy with this. Also, I've since learned that this series of sets is the easiest to configure for computer use. It's got a VGA port on the back, so just buy a VGA cable, hook it to your PC, and it's Plug-And-Play. Just remember before unhooking your old monitor to resize the screen in Windows to 1360 x 768 so it boots to the correct size after you hook this up. <br /> <br />Picture quality is excellent. The best I've ever seen in an LCD. They're all pretty decent these days, but this one stands out as brighter, sharper, crisper, clearer, at least to my eyes. Before buying anything this expensive though, I'd make sure you actually see various brands in action at various stores before you buy. <br /> <br />I don't have high-def service at home yet, so the only HD I've viewed on this has been at the store, but it looked awesome to me. <br /> <br />Picture-in-picture is really only useful if you're surfing the net and want to watch TV at the same time. For that, it's great, though you'll have to manually use the remote to activate sound in PIP each time. An annoyance. The speakers sound clear and crisp. Not huge, but nice-sounding. <br /> <br />And now, the only flaw I've found: Out of the box, the reds can be oversaturated when contrasted with black. I've only noticed this with text; graphics are fine. I might be able to adjust this in the set's menu, but haven't tried it yet, because otherwise it looks just absolutely perfect and I hate to mess with it.