Hi all....

I have a MacBookPro 15" and want to get an external LCD. I have narrowed it down to two.

- Samsung 2233BW 22" LCD,
- Samsung 2433BW 24" LCD

Which one.???

Is it worth the extra $100 for the 24" LCD.??

Thanks in advance.

Well a bit more would help out here. Why do you need an extra screen? Is colour correction an issue? Do you need a fast refresh rate? What is your budget?

etc.

get the 24 bigger is better

Having just purchased a 24" iMac, after thinking that 24" was too big, i would recommend the extra real estate—22" seems small to me now!

Having recently purchased a samsung 2243bw 22", I can honestly say I have regrets. Not with the size, but with the colour, saturation and gamma. It's terrible for video even though I was advised they were decent monitors. No matter how much fiddling around, it just seems incapable of being calibrated to something appropriate. Worst buy this year.
Even the calibration software supplied with it is so buggy it almost froze up my mac pro.

Should have listened to Brains...

have you calibrated it with a hardware device eg spyder or eye one?

No, as the saying goes "you can't polish a turd."
It looks good for all your web stuff or games. Appears clean/crisp. But if you're going to get into photography or video work it simply can't show a realistic interpretation of your image.
I have to always monitor out to a crt even when doing pretty basic things as I just cant trust what I'm seeing. My old MBP was so much better.
I'm just saving for an Apple, Ezio or NEC now. You get what you pay for.

Without a doubt, 24" panels are becoming the "sweet spot" in terms of price compared to that 22" panels were priced at only a few months ago. So whatever you do, go a 24" which will provide a much greater resolution anyhow. TN panels are not good for colour reproduction but movies and games look impressive. Look into something like a Dell 2408WFP if you need it for image work; there seem to be many cheap deals from Dell for this panel at the moment if you take your time and pounce when the price is good.

JB

you would be surprised how much properly calibrating can do

Mate, go buy one and try it for yourself.
I'm not going to spend more money on a hardware callibrator to try and fix something that was not made for the job I intend to use it for.
I will buy a calibrator when I purchase something worth using it on.

Well, I bought the Samsung 2433BW LCD monitor. For $380 after cashback, that's cheap enough for me for a big monitor.

I don't do pro video or photo editing, gaming or anything that requires huge calibrations. If I want to calibrate, I'll just grab an EFI spectro and do the deed.

Besides, how many monitors can display CMYK..????

If you were in adelaide id let you mine

Imo if your using your monitor for anything colour critical you should have one anyway


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Five, and they're all in the Eizo ColorEdge range. Their 12-bits-per-channel custom designed, NEC-built MH-IPS panels and advanced true-white LED backlighting means they're the only monitors on the planet which can accurately display the full Adobe Colorspace. They're so good, so even, that you can print-proof off them.

... but at $7,000+ each, you'd have to have a really big need for something that accurate

The Dell 2408WFP (Samsung S-PVA 8-bits-per-channel) at around A$650 represents the best value LCD monitor on the market today, and is suprisingly accurate (Eizo use the same Samsung panel in their FlexScan range). The only drawback is they still use CCFL backlighting, so to maintain accuracy they need to be calibrated every three months for best results.

If you're planning on doing image tweaking, movie editing, pre-press or graphics design and need good onscreen colour accuracy, under no circumstances get a TFT-TN based screen (which unfortunately eliminates almost 80% of all screens on the market).

Those cheap Samsungs will be TN (Twisted Nematic) screens. If I were buying a 24" screen I would look at something similar to the Dell 2408WFP, which is a VA (Vertical Alignment) panel. These cost significantly more (about twice as much as the cheaper TN screens), but I have looked at the latest cheap Dell TN panels and I think they're dreadful. A cheap, crap product is not a bargain in my mind.

Just ran an EFI spectro over the Samsung with Monitor Profiling software. Before and after was very close.

I honestly can't complain.....