Yep, that was Samsung's first-level tech support. I finally forced him into giving me a call ticket and send me to the next level of support. After an hour on hold, the line got disconnected. I called back in, got another first-level to transfer me, spent another hour on hold (yes, I have a headset and yes, I can turn it down, ignore it and work on other stuff), and eventually had to make another phone call and decided to ignore the problem.

I put my old monitor back, reset the video card, and then connected up the SyncMaster 910t -- which now worked nicely.

I have to say that I was underwhelmed by "We make a lot of stuff. I can't be expected to know how each works." Hey, at least it sounded like he was in the U.S. and I could understand what he said!

Later, I had some resolution concerns, and via our very helpful Samsung public relations contact, I wound up talking to a product specialist. When I told him I was running an ATI Radeon 9800 card, which is just about the most common gamer card, he said that Samsung hadn't tested the monitors against the ATI boards. I was astounded. After all, if you're making a monitor that's meant for consumer use, I'd expect that the company would test the monitor against the most common board types.

Our final rating
Rating this monitor was something of a challenge. On one hand, we had a physical device that just simply rocks. It works exceptionally well and provides a huge amount of value for the money. On the other hand, you have completely moronic support and some minor annoyances like poor button design.

If this was a device that really required a lot of support or constant use of those buttons, we'd have to ding the rating points. But because the product is very much a set-it-and-forget-it device, those complaints will very rarely get in the way of the product's usage. Given the product itself is so damned fine, we have to give it a very vivid 4 out of 5 and rate it as our Product of the Month.

OUR RATING: 4 of 5