Wow, it’s been 9 months since my last post!
Yeah well I’ve been busy doing other stuff… you know, mundane stuff like “work”. Oh yes, I got into Star Trek Online too, but that’s another story. The topic of this post very conveniently has references to the previous post made here, 9 months ago. Yeah, my HP monitor died. Truly dead. As in, “no sound no picture.”
As a quick recap, the monitor suffered a weird red-dot syndrome and I had to call in for servicing just a few days before the warranty ran out. Now, 9 months after the monitor was replaced, it truly died. I was just surfing the net, then I moved away from the PC and fiddled with something on my phone. Now, I had set my PC to blank the monitor after 10 minutes of inactivity, as a power-saving option. So, as I was fiddling with my phone, I saw the monitor blanking from the corner of my eyes. No big deal, it’s just going to sleep mode.
So, when I was done with my phone, I turned back to my PC. I shook the mouse as usual, and waited for the monitor to come back on. Nada. Hmmm, strange. Ok, so I pressed a couple of keys on the keyboard. That should wake it up nicely.
Nope, the monitor stayed blank.
So, now I turned to look for the power button on the monitor…. AND SAW THAT THERE WAS NO LIGHT! Dammit, not even an orange light for standby. I pressed the power button a few times, hoping it’ll come back up, but it didn’t. I pressed the power button repeatedly, hoping that it would come back on, although I knew it was stupid. Well, yeah it remained off.
Ok so I called up HP, and went through the whole helpdesk routine. They told me to turn off the power, disconnect the power cord, press the power button 10 times, the try to turn it on again. I thought it was even stupider than what I did, but I did it anyway. Yup, as expected, the monitor remained dead. So the nice man on the helpdesk gave me a ticket number and told me I had to drop it off at HP HQ in Singapore (ie Alexandra) or I could drop it off at a number of “convenient” locations and HP will pick it up, repair it, and return it to the same place I dropped it off. One of those locations was a shop in Sim Lim Square. Since the monitor was out of warranty (yeah it was only less than a week away from warranty expiry when I got it replaced for the red-dot problem), I would also need to pay for any repair charges.
I was thinking – what the heck, if I’m gonna be going to Sim Lim, and I will also have to pay for repairs, I may as well get a new monitor. The track record for this HP monitor wasn’t impressive at all. 1 yr after I got it, it developed red-dot syndrome. 9 months after getting that fixed, it died. I, for one, am staying clear of HP monitors at the very least, from now on. It didn’t even manage to last 2 years!
On the other hand, I have a 17 inch Samsung 4:3 monitor which I bought YEARS ago… something like back in 2002 or 2003. It’s still working. The picture looked as good as the day I got it. So yeah I decided my next monitor would definitely be a Samsung. I was actually amazed at all the options available today – LED monitors, LCD monitors, 23, 24, 25 inch sizes etc. Man I was dazed. However, I am limited by the size of my table. I can’t get anything bigger than a 21.5 inch (or 22 inch as some manufacturers label them). Hence I knew from the start that I would be spending roughly $200 to $250 for a new monitor.
At Sim Lim (The Holy Shrine Of All Things Technological), I was also bombarded by many offers, discounts, special promotions of many brands of monitors – Philips, LG, Viewsonic and so on. Many times I was almost convinced to get another brand, but I forced myself to stick to the plan – get a Samsung. Prices for other brands with equivalent features were sometimes cheaper too… by as much as $30 in some cases.
In the end, I stuck to my guns and got myself the Samsung B2230H model.
The first thing I noticed when I got the new monitor set up was – HEY THE IMAGE LOOKED WAY BETTER!
And this was on Samsung’s default settings. I haven’t even started to fiddle with the settings yet! The first thing I do with all my LCD monitors is – reduce brightness. Damn, they are super bright when you first turn them on! In fact I turned on Samsung’s Eco-brightness feature to bring the brightness down to a level my eyes are comfortable with. Unlike some other monitors, at high brightness, the picture doesn’t look washed-out, which impressed me. Samsung has this “Magic Bright” technology built-in to the monitor to adjust contrast and gamma levels automatically to complement the brightness levels.
The thing I loved about Samsung monitors is that you don’t need to press the buttons on the monitor to change the settings. Samsung has something called “Magic Tune”. It’s a piece of software (or “app”, for those iPhone folks) that lets you configure the monitor via the windows app. The one that came on the disk somehow didn’t work with my PC. I had to go to Samsung’s website to download an updated one, which worked flawlessly.
Secondly, it’s also kinda hard to “press the buttons” on the monitor because it seems that modern monitors now DO NOT HAVE BUTTONS. Everything is “touch”. You touch the area above the words “MENU” and the OSD menu pops up, and so on. Yes, even the “power button” is just to touch the area above the power symbol on the monitor. That kinda makes it hard to turn on your monitor in the dark since you can’t even “feel” for the button… there’s NOTHING to feel for. Everything’s part of the monitor. No, it’s not pressure sensitive too, I tried. It probably works on the same technology as your modern iPhones and other smartphones do with touchscreens – capacitive touch. Only a human finger can trigger the menus. Not a pen, stick, or anything else.
