I’ve been wanting a new monitor for a while now as the 15″ has started to feel cramped when many windows are open (i.e. coding) so I braved the Black Friday madness last weekend to get one. I arrived at Staples at 5:30 for a 6am opening, thinking I was pretty early, but there were already around 100 people in line. Luckily they had 40-50 of the monitor that I wanted so it wasn’t a problem. My parents bought it for me; it’s a Christmas present but I convinced them to let me take it back to school already.
The monitor they were selling was a Samsung 205BW (20″ widescreen). It has a resolution of 1680×1050 and its brightness is 300cd/m^2. It is dual-input (VGA/DVI), and it supports HDCP. It swivels 360 degrees, is height-adjustable, and tilts up and down. It has a few different selectable color modes, which I’m not sure that I will use, but I’m going to try them when I watch a movie to see if I notice a difference. Unfortunately it does not rotate to go from landscape to portrait mode, but this is not something I’m overly concerned about. It’s normally $350 but it was on sale for $180. I really love it – the quality of the display is phenomenal and it is really bright. In fact, the display is so bright that it makes my Powerbook G4’s screen look dark in comparison, so I have to run the monitor at 80% brightness so it doesn’t look out of place.
The form factor was as important to me as the specs. I wanted a monitor like Apple’s cinema displays, with a really small, symmetric bezel. Also, I wanted unobrtusive buttons. The Samsung meets both of these requirements and overall has a really clean appearance. With this and my recent purchase of TextMate, I can now say that I am programming in true Mac nerd style.
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