David Hurst

I have been searching for a HD screen these past few weeks that will take component inputs from my XBox 360, double up as a good PC monitor (with a reasonable resolution) and have a TV tuner. What I didn’t want was a gargantuan willy extension plasma, nor did I want to pay through the nose. Yesterday I stumbled upon the Samsung 940MW in PC World at £299 and solved my problems.

The Samsung 940WM is a 19″ widescreen TFT monitor and TV with speakers. Overall design is pleasant, with a nice modern silver appearance. Whilst, there are no markings on the screen or the packaging to indicate that this is a HD ready screen it does have component inputs on the rear, so I figured it had to be worth a shot (NB: the Samsung website does state in the specifications for this screen that it is HDTV ready). Alongside the component inputs, you have left and right audio, then there’s a SCART socket too. On the side of the screen we have S-Video, a single phono style AV input and a couple more audio inputs. For PC use, there is both a VGA input and a DVI input (only a VGA cable is included) along with a stereo 3.5mm jack socket for PC audio input. Then finally we have an antenna socket for your TV aerial input. All this connectivity allows you to attach a plethora of devices and simply switch between them using the source button on the remote.

You can see the screen and specifications at: http://www.samsung.com/uk/products/monitors/lcd/lcdtvmonitors/ls19dowssedc.asp

I plugged my 360 HD component cable in, set the Xbox to 720p mode, and hey presto! I had HD quality gaming. The crispness in comparison to a standard CRT TV is stunning. I did find the colour saturation a little heavy, but a quick tweak of the brightness resolved that. I switched the 360 to output digital stereo and that came through fine too. The in-built speakers are good for a smaller TV, although a little lacking in bass.

Tuning the TV was really easy, and the PC monitor mode in VGA is excellent. I’m sure DVI will be great too as soon as I get a cable to test. What I’m particularly interested to see is whether you can connect 2 seperate PC sources, one on VGA and one on DVI and switch between them - I’ll update this post when I figure that out.

So now I have TV, XBox 360 and Mac Mini connected up giving me a complete front room entertainment option that doesn’t take over the lounge. It’s all hooked up wirelessly, and I have a new Ubuntu Linux fileserver serving up iTunes to the various computers in the house. Now I just need to find a hack that will let me stream those tunes to the XBox 360 too!

One really neat feature is Picture-in-Picture (PIP) which allows you to watch TV in a window whilst you are working on your computer.

In summary, this is a really excellent screen at a bargain price, and it is absolutely perfect for XBox 360 HD.