REVIEW: Samsung T220HD Part 10

Banding

In the grey areas, as in the colour gradients, no stepping effects or stripes can be seen. This applies for both ends of the spectrum: both the black and white gradients are flawlessly complete. Overall, the monitor delivers a very good result here.

Contrast

When it comes to contrast, the factory setting of 90 percent should never be exceeded, since the monitor saturates the bright colours too much at higher values and no differences are then visible. Even at the standard value of 90 percent, there are minimal over-saturations in the upper area of the colour spectrum. It is therefore recommended that you reduce the contrast to 80 to 85 percent. For standard applications and photo processing, the contrast ratio should always be higher than 400:1. This was the case for all our measurements. However, we were unable to reproduce the dynamic contrast of up to 10,000:1 that Samsung has advertised.

Backlight Bleeding

Black test: at a sensible working brightness level of 51 percent, perceptible light patches are visible above and below at the edges of the screen. These are very small and do not disturb the user to any great extent, at least not in PC mode. At brightness of 100 percent, the bright patches are somewhat more pronounced. This result can still be seen as good. However, overall the black image is not saturated enough. This means that no full, deep black results can be achieved.

White test: there are minimal shadows in the corners, which merge into the image about 0.7 cm from the corner at brightness of 51 percent. At 100 percent brightness, these shadows are reduced, but they do not disappear completely. The white value can still be rated good.

In TV mode, the image made a better subjective overall impression than in PC mode. Considering all factors, the Samsung T220HD achieves a narrow good overall for image quality.

Interpolation

The Samsung T220HD offers the option to change between 16:10 format and 4:3 format in PC mode. Thus, if you deviate from the native resolution and select 1.280 x 1.024, distortion on the screen is reduced. 16:9, Zoom and Wide zoom modes are not available in PC mode. The sharpness function allows text, which will always suffer a little as compared with the native resolution, to be made a little sharper and the image is therefore improved subjectively.

The monitor does not offer hardware-based interpolation such as justified or 1:1. Only the format and sharpness can be changed. However, the T220HD succeeds so well at this that its performance in the area of interpolation can be rated good.

The following pictures give an impression of the effect of format changing from 16:10 to 4:3:

Left: 1.680 x 1.050 native and right: 1.280 x 1.024 @ 75 Hz (stretched)

Left: 1.280 x 1.024 @ 75 Hz in 4:3 and right: 1.280 x 960 @ 60 Hz in 4:3

For all resolutions except for the native and 1.280 x 960 resolutions, higher frequency rates are available. These should always be selected, since they improve the interpolated image performance considerably.

Accordingly, the interpolated image at 1.280 x 1.024 @ 75 Hz was better in 4:3 format without further sharpness correction than the image which was sharpened to level 80 at a resolution of 1.280 x 960 @ 60 Hz.

For users for whom the higher frequency at lower resolutions is not sufficient, some loss of quality can be compensated for using the sharpness function. The options and performance offered by the T220HD in this area are convincing.

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