| Shuttle SG33G5M and Samsung LE37M86BD |
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November 1, 2008
Samsung LE37M86BD was my choice because:
Several reviews mentioned a good picture quality and Yes, it's a fantastic display! A perfect 1920x1080 pixel display, great for my computer AND great for television + DVD/Blu-ray.
Connecting the Samsung At the moment (february 2009) I use a DVI and a HDMI connection to my Samsung display. The Samsung has no problems like 'overscan' on the HDMI-input.
Setting the picture, tuning colors is very difficult! There are many options to tune this dsplay. First of all: each function - television, AV, component, HDMI1, etc. - can have its own tuning. Each function can have 3 profiles: Dynamic, Movie and Standard. Each of these profiles has a variety of options to adjust light and color of the display...
I used a calibration unit: Spyder 2 to get the best picture quality If you you really want the best image quality you need a calibration set! My calibration set is a Colorvision Spyder 2. There are better and more expensive ones... But I am very happy with the results of the Spyder 2. There is no way to get a better picture quality! See for more information: http://www.datacolor.eu/en/products/display-calibration/index.html
Receipe for tuning the Samsung LE37M86BD
From these basic settings you can start experimenting.
Here are some of my settings:
Samsung HDMI-1 settings (from a HDMI computer output):
* Standard: typical for using computer (Wordprocessing, Internet, screenreading) ** when using a computer the colorspace of the graphics card should be set to 'RGB wide'. *** for better black and slightly more intense colours I lowered the backlight (3), increased Contrast and set the 'Black adjust' option to 'low'.
The best colors I have ever seen... Anyone who has seen my website and specially the wallpapers, can understand why I am keen on good picture quality. Not only the photographs that I made look excellent but also DVD's and Blu-rays look fantastic on my callibrated Samsung LE37M86BD display! Blu-ray discs like 'Planet Earth', 'Australia', 'Alaska' look so incredible beautiful! Standard DVD's look great but blu-ray makes images sharp, clean and realistic.
About DVI and HDMI DVI is used mainly for connecting computers to a display. It's good for designing and photography editing. On my Samsung display I have less video options to adjust image quality compared to the HDMI-input. HDMI is typical for connecting DVD-players. When using HDMI-HDMI the Samsung display has extra options to adjust image quality: sharpness, color, tint and options to select another colorspace called xvYCC and more. With the Catalyst software of the HD 4550 I can select for the HDMI-output the wide colorspace called: YCbCr. The resulting image is so beautiful that watching movies over HDMI suddenly becomes preferable? It's a bit more complicated because there is also a wide colospace called 'RGB wide' which results in about the same Image Quality. Both connections - DVI and HDMI - are perfect. DVI is computer-based and has a RGB-colorspace. HDMI has an extended colorspace (YCbCr) and more options for adjusting colors om my Samsung display. Note: The colorspace YCbCr originates from the way movies are encoded on DVD's. Most important question: is it better? So far, when comparing YCbCr and RGB-wide colorspace, I have seen some color differences. YCbCr tends to have slightly more 'vivid' colors. But human skin tones are better with RGB-wide.
update februari 7, 2009 Comparing DVI and HDMI proved to be quite difficult. When using DVI from the computer there are less options on the Samsung display to adjust Image Quality. With a real HDMI-HDMI connection more options for Image Quality are available. Turning on the xvYCC option on the Samsung introduces a color-shift!!! This is quite dramatic. A color like 'aqua cyan' (#00FFFF) becomes light-blue! In the end I came to this conclusion: HDMI-HDMI results in the best Image Quality with these crucial settings: HD 4550: Pixelrendering: RGB-wide Samsung (in Film-mode): colorspace: wide and xvYCC: off. When the Samsung is set to 'Standard-mode' the colorspace options are not available.
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It's over a year now since I decided to buy a full HD display and I enjoy it every day!