Samsung SyncMaster P2370 review

Samsung’s 23in P2370 full HD 1,920×1,080 display is only 25mm thick – less than half the thickness of many other monitor here.

This svelte profile comes at a price, though. There are no integrated speakers, for a start, and there isn’t a huge choice of inputs, either: there’s a power socket and a DVI port on the rear, and you also have a bulky external power adaptor to deal with. The DVI port isn’t HDCP compliant, so you won’t be able to connect a Blu-ray player.

The base is attached to the monitor by a thin translucent neck, and although this looks fragile and squeaks a little when you tilt the screen, it feels sturdy. The screen sits firmly at whatever angle of tilt you choose. There’s no VESA mount for hanging the screen on the wall to show of its minimal lines, although most people are unlikely to miss this.

As the base extends a good 8cm behind the screen, it can’t sit flush against a wall. The only advantage of its slender dimensions is that from the side, it looks amazingly thin. From the front, it looks bloated, with a fat, glossy bezel that has an extra 5mm of translucent plastic bordering it. We prefer thin bezels that let you concentrate on what’s on your screen.

Aesthetics aside, the P2370 performed admirably in our tests, and produced stunning images. Colours were incredibly vibrant across the entire spectrum and looked amazing. The only slight downside is that colours didn’t jump out as much as on other displays due to the relatively dark 250cd/m2 backlight.

Contrast was good, but we were unable to make out as much detail as on other displays, even with the dynamic contrast ratio mode turned on. Samsung also provides ‘Magic’ modes for colour and brightness, which are supposed to enhance these settings. However, we found that they created over-saturated images that were too sharp. It was good to see a gamma control, which we used to improve the contrast and colour slightly.

The SyncMaster P2370 looks great and produces stunning image quality, but the lack of inputs means that we prefer Philips’ 230C1.