A good business monitor with a wide range of ports and a flexible stand
Written By
Published on 7 September 2013
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1 / 4
Our rating
Reviewed price £177 inc VAT
The S24C650PL is a 23.6in display with a 1,920×1,080 resolution, and its super flexible stand lets you work in portrait mode as well as the usual landscape orientation. It’s also height adjustable, can swivel 45 degrees side to side and has 25 degrees of tilt. This makes it easy to find a comfortable working position, and its wide viewing angles make it easy to see no matter where you position it on your desk.
The monitor uses Samsung’s own kind of PLS (plane to line switching) panel technology, but it’s comparable with a more traditional IPS panel in terms of the sRGB colour gamut. Our colour calibrator showed it was displaying 96.9 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut at its default settings. We’d normally expect to see at least 96 per cent from an IPS panel, so this is good, but other IPS panels we’ve seen of this size have measured around 98 per cent. It had excellent green coverage, but our colour gamuts showed it was slightly short on its red and purple coverage. This affected its deep blue representation as well, but unfortunately we weren’t able to increase this figure after calibration.
This didn’t make too much of a difference in our solid colour image tests, though, as reds, greens and blues were all rich and vibrant, and whites were bright with only a slight hint of grey. Blacks were deep, and we measured a black level of just 0.20cd/m² with our colour calibrator.
This had a knock-on effect in our high contrast images, though, as the deep black levels often wiped out a lot of darker shadow detail. Colours looked accurate, but even though we measured a high contrast ratio of 1,248:1 before calibration, the S24C650PL was just black in several areas where our reference monitor showed detail. This was disappointing, but this shouldn’t be too much of a problem if you’re only going to be using the monitor for reading and writing documents.
As for connection ports, there’s VGA, HDMI and DisplayPort inputs, as well as a 3.5mm audio input and outputs and a two-port USB2 hub. This is great for connecting USB drives, as it means you don’t have to reach behind your PC.
The Samsung S24C650PL is a great business monitor, but it’s not quite as versatile or accurate as the more expensive BenQ BL2410PT. The S24C650PL certainly looks much prettier on your desk, but the BenQ is the better buy.
Written by
Katharine Byrne
When Katharine's not glued to her Wii U and 3DS, she's usually found darting between tiny smartphones and huge pieces of home cinema equipment.She’s tested everything from laptops and monitors to motherboards and projectors, but she currently specialises in smartphones, games and AV.
