For example, if you need a display to support a higher resolution than the native mode, at different times depending on the application, the display would still function properly producing a workable image. Samsung claims this additional feature makes the SyncMaster 910t perfect for high-end industrial applications. In our experience, the image quality of this particular tweak is adequate, but not great. You're best off staying in the monitor's native resolution. The SyncMaster 910t also offers a 1280 x 1024 native resolution a super-high 800:1 contrast radio and a 260cd/m2 brightness rate.

So let's get to the really important question: how well does this sucker play games? After all, we've all heard that the refresh times on LCD monitors make game playing unpleasant. Not so with this monitor. It's fast and crisp and, in the interests of editorial completeness, I've tried it with many different first person shooters. It's sweet.

The negatives
There are a few minor negatives. The most visible (or, actually, the least visible) is how the buttons are arrayed. The buttons that control the monitor are located on the lower right side when the monitor's in landscape mode. They're very small, very black buttons with virtually invisible labels. You can see this in Figure C.

FIGURE C

The buttons suck.

It's absolutely impossible to see what each button does without shining a flashlight on them. There's no reason Samsung had to make these so hard to see. For an otherwise exceptionally designed monitor, having buttons that are so indistinguishable from each other is just a shame. If the military needed to design a monitor with stealth-plane characteristics, it'd have buttons like this. But there's just no need for "stealth" buttons on a monitor.

Another problem with the placement of buttons is that when you rotate the monitor, your hand is almost always going to go over the buttons to grip the monitor for rotation. Without fail, whenever I've rotated the monitor, I've wound up pressing one or more of the stealth buttons.

As is often the case with software that comes with a monitor, we were distinctly unimpressed with the monitor's included software. The included pivot software was adequate, but we immediately replaced it with the onboard ATI software that drives the video card. We did have some minor video-card related resolution issues, but some tinkering fixed things nicely.

This brings us to support. I originally did a dumb thing -- yanked out an old monitor and plugged in the new one, without "normalizing" the video card settings first. Being lazy, I called Samsung to ask if there was a special menu item to hit to change the settings. Because the monitor's manual was on disk, and I couldn't read the disk because I couldn't read my desktop, well, I needed to either put back the old monitor or call for help.

Since we always like to get a feel for support, I called. The gentleman I spoke to asked me to describe the monitor, and when I asked what the menu settings might be, his answer was, and I quote, "We make a lot of stuff. I can't be expected to know how each works."