Got a Samsung 226CW , my first lcd and I'm extremely disappointed so far.

After quite a few people recommending the Samsung 226BW to me and knowing the CW was right around the corner I made the choice to pick one up as my first ever LCD monitor (coming from an old NEC CRT).

Well, it arrived today and I couldn't wait to get it installed. I took it out of the box and man, compared to my CRT it's so light and sleek. I got it set up after an hour (my room/set-up made it quite difficult)

When I first turned it on it looked ok to me, a bit too bright/washed out. Then when I got it set to the right res and went into view some movies/games I found myself to be simply disappointed.

The Monitor has three major problems for me.

1. There seems to be a heavy "red" dominance to the monitor, no matter what I do. Hell I can turn the Red to 0% and it's still there. I've tried loading all the different color profiles people have put up for the 226bw monitor (IE albert's famous one, etc) and no luck with it at all.

2. When something is black there is no detail to it. This is mainly whalt I notice when I play games. When I get into a dark area It's literally lilke one whole uniform "black" there's no light black/different shades, this makes it extremely diffcult if not impossible to know where the hell I'm supposed to go in some games since you can't make out any difference.

3. Blacklight bleeding. When I'm watching a dvd or viewing something with a black backround it's very noticeable to me. The bottom and right side of the screen is quite brighter then the top and upper left.

I'm going to give it another day or two and see what I can find/keep trying to tweak it, but I must say for all of the constant praises people were giving the samsung 226bw and such, I must have got a very short end of the stick with this monitor, or I must have a bit of a higher quality control in mind.

You should get a another one. I wouldn't even hesitate.

I'd give yourself sometime to adjust since you just came over from CRT side. My lcd is fine but it can't match the black details on my old sony trinitron crt.

I don't know how people are getting a "red" dominance in their 226BW and CW models. I picked one up and compared it to my NEC Diamondtron and it's fantastic. Sure I did lower contrast and brightness a little but that was it. You should try swapping it.

The 22 inch lcd's are all TN panels as far as I know, the samsung most definitely is a TN panel so there may be some uneven lighting top to bottom.

What kind of a video card are you using and have you made any adjustments to its settings since swicthing to the samsung lcd? Did you install drivers for the samsung lcd and get rid of your CRT drivers?

These considerations may also have some bearing as to your problems. As for blacks, they will not likely be as nice as your CRT but higher end LCD's do have better blacks.

backlight bleed does dissipate after a few weeks of use, also reduce the brightness of the lcd panel to 50 or below and adjust contrast to your liking. Are you using an nvidia or ati video card? Ati cards dont always play well with LCD's. Certainly whatever graphics card you are using it wouldnt hurt to update its drivers as well.

you should have gone for a hp w2007 colors are just like on a crt vibrant. blacks are jet black not dark grey.i veiwed both samsung 226bw and hp w2207 ' and opted for the hp .

1. The red tint is not going to go away. Return it.
2. Calibration puck, puck, pucksssss, will not help.
3. Ironically there is a problem with the new 97% color gamut technology
a. Significant difference between viewing images in color aware applications (Photoshop) and non color aware applications (Windows Desktop & Internet). Can't be fixed via calibration.
b. Test - create image in color aware application (PS) and make it non aware Desktop image. Compare the two images.
c. 226cw using same technology as Dell 2407-hc.
4. I had the Dell 2407-hc, loved the monitor but had to return it. All non color aware applications rendered imaged oversaturated. Could not fix.

Why can't we just buy monitors that work out of the box,

Dog Star

i don't think anyone can say that theres a problem with the 97% gamut technology at this point, there isn't even a review out there. also, who told you that the 226CW uses same backlighting as the dell? i'm honestly curious as i want to buy a 226CW when they come out up here. sources please!

conghelach said:

The 22 inch lcd's are all TN panels as far as I know, the samsung most definitely is a TN panel so there may be some uneven lighting top to bottom.

What kind of a video card are you using and have you made any adjustments to its settings since swicthing to the samsung lcd? Did you install drivers for the samsung lcd and get rid of your CRT drivers?

These considerations may also have some bearing as to your problems. As for blacks, they will not likely be as nice as your CRT but higher end LCD's do have better blacks.

backlight bleed does dissipate after a few weeks of use, also reduce the brightness of the lcd panel to 50 or below and adjust contrast to your liking. Are you using an nvidia or ati video card? Ati cards dont always play well with LCD's. Certainly whatever graphics card you are using it wouldnt hurt to update its drivers as well.

Click to expand...

I uninstalled my crt drivers and installed the ones that came with the samsung.

I haven't did anything with my video card (nvidia 6800 ultra).

I have tweaked the colors myself and also tried other people's color profiles.

The black itself is fairly good, a nice dark black. It's not light unless it's like that because of the blacklight bleeding. The middle/top part is fairly close to the black I got on my CRT. It's just that it seems the monitor makes everything that's "dark" one uniform "black" color and you can not make out any details or such. In gaming this makes it extremly hard to see in area's that are supposed to be dark (IE games like Fear, Resident evil 4, etc are almost u nplayable in some places).

Here are a couple pics from Stalker showing just how dark things look in games.

That's showing us nothing about your display, the images look fine to me on the 2407WFP-HC. You showed us what the video card sends through the DVI cable, not what the monitor displays..

Stiler said:

When something is black there is no detail to it. This is mainly whalt I notice when I play games. When I get into a dark area It's literally lilke one whole uniform "black" there's no light black/different shades, this makes it extremely diffcult if not impossible to know where the hell I'm supposed to go in some games since you can't make out any difference.

Click to expand...

Its like that with ALL lcd's my friend. ALL of them. you can calibrate it with a hardware tool which helps some but its the nature of the beast, there is no getting around it. You cant get good blacks on an lcd which has been the argumant sticker ever since they came out.
playing something like splinter cell is virtually IMPOSSIBLE on an lcd

if you still have the crt i would at least use it for those dark games, as viewing anything with dark areas on an lcd is just plain frustrating and pointless.

good luck.

Are you sure? , cause I fixed it.

After looking around a bit I found this very helpful link:
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1865

which led me to:
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7193

I followed the directions a bit and setting the black out to .10 instead of 0 helped me. Now I can finally set details in dark area's and such, I just have to bump other things around now.

So games like Resident evil 4/stalker/fear, etc are playable for me now. The blacks look black, gray's look gray, etc.

Still, this has been a huge headache and you'd think this is something that should have been done at the factor long before you yourself set it up.

As far as using the CRT , that wouldn't work out, it was on it's last leg (constant image flickering on the top half at anything under 100hz and kept going up (started at 60hz, then 70, etc) so it wouldn't have lasted but another couple days at the most. Even then I don't have anywhere on my desk for a huge crt + this lcd now.

I had the same problem... I went through three of the Samsung CW's and they all had a similar red push. Admittedly the first one I got was the worst of all, but the two I exchanged it out for after that were noticeably pushing red as well. Hell even after turning red down drastically everything still has a red hue/tint to it.

Interestingly enough my friend has a 226BW with an mystery panel and I think his looks great. It doesn't seem to have the horrendous red push and everything is pretty good but the vertical viewing angles. He just recently purchased it and it is one of them with no letter after the 226BW part.

Fleat said:

I had the same problem... I went through three of the Samsung CW's and they all had a similar red push. Admittedly the first one I got was the worst of all, but the two I exchanged it out for after that were noticeably pushing red as well. Hell even after turning red down drastically everything still has a red hue/tint to it.

Interestingly enough my friend has a 226BW with an mystery panel and I think his looks great. It doesn't seem to have the horrendous red push and everything is pretty good but the vertical viewing angles. He just recently purchased it and it is one of them with no letter after the 226BW part.

Click to expand...

What I did to get rid of the red push was go into the osd menu and reset the colors/image.

Then d/l wincolor. After you install that d/l the color profile here:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/667-3/samsung-226bw-a-and-s-series-the-verdict.html

Then just tune the brightness/contrast to your liking. I have mine at 50/50 right now. It seems to be about the sweetest picture I've been able to get on it so far. Starting to warm up to it a bit, gonna give my 360 a spin on it later tonight.

Interesting I honestly didn't try that.... hrmm maybe I will go pick up another one to test out that.

Stiler said:

I uninstalled my crt drivers and installed the ones that came with the samsung.

I haven't did anything with my video card (nvidia 6800 ultra).

I have tweaked the colors myself and also tried other people's color profiles.

The black itself is fairly good, a nice dark black. It's not light unless it's like that because of the blacklight bleeding. The middle/top part is fairly close to the black I got on my CRT. It's just that it seems the monitor makes everything that's "dark" one uniform "black" color and you can not make out any details or such. In gaming this makes it extremly hard to see in area's that are supposed to be dark (IE games like Fear, Resident evil 4, etc are almost u nplayable in some places).

Click to expand...

update your video card drivers, the latest nforce drivers improve things on wide screen lcd's, raise your gamma through the nvidia control panel and perhaps digital vibrance will sharpen things. you should also be able to adjust the gamma in the individual game settings to make things lighter for that particular game.