Samsung SyncMaster 305T 30" LCD Monitor Review

General Usage Impressions

Movie Impressions

All of the movies were played with a Pioneer DVR-215 internal DVD drive using PowerDVD 8 through a 9800 GTX graphics card.


Unfortunately, with such a large screen-size and the inability to play high definition content through our Blu-ray player, this is one area where the Samsung 305T really falls flat on its face. Due to the fact that the image has to be upscaled quite a bit to fit on the screen (even when playing in 16:9 format), graininess rules the day with colors getting washed out and contrast really suffering. There are also noticeable signs of compression which get quite distracting when watching almost any movie.

If you are willing to make some sacrifices like minimizing the movie to a smaller size, you will naturally get a clearer picture but if you are willing to do that, there wouldn’t be any use of getting a 30” monitor for movie watching.

To be brutally honest with you; if you are looking to play a lot of movies now or in the future on your monitor it is best to avoid the Samsung 305T. Its lack of anything but a DVI connector is a huge negative in my books especially when there are competing products selling for nearly the same price which are equipped with HDMI and even in some cases Display Port.


Gaming Impressions


When it comes to gaming, this monitor simply shines. Since we are now using the 305T for every one of our graphics card reviews, I have had the chance to use it quite a bit for gaming and can tell you that its abilities in this field are beyond reproach. There is next to no ghosting when playing fast-paced portions of various first person shooters and all the colors were spot-on. If you are an RTS player like I am you will drool over the possibilities of using this thing in games like Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes and Medieval II: Total War because the amount of screen space it gives you is stunning. I’ll tell you this straight up: once you move to a 30” monitor for gaming you will never go back…ever.

However, with over four MILLION pixels being rendered at the same time there is a small caveat…

30” Monitors & the Great Video Card Conundrum

Naturally, when you buy a huge, high res monitor you will want to play games at the native resolution of 2560x1600 and to do so you will have to purchase a suitably priced video card. When we say “suitably priced” we mean something in the $400+ range with over 512MB of memory but I guess that if you can afford a $1400 monitor you should have the coin to splurge on a high end GPU…right? Maybe or maybe not but believe it or not at this resolution I have found it nearly unnecessary to enable any form of AA. The only thing you have to remember is that you will need some serious graphics horsepower to play games on this monitor so be prepared to pony up some copious amounts of money.


Graphic / Text Impresstions


In my opinion, the size of this monitor is not optimal for text viewing since it is next to impossible to see letters at its native resolution without putting your face a foot from the screen. Yet, this can vary form one person to the next even though I know I don’t need a 30” monitor for word processing and while pictures don’t do it justice at all, the text is extremely crisp so eye fatigue should be minimal.

On the other hand, I find the Samsung 305T absolutely perfect for programs such as Photoshop and Illustrator since you are able to open numerous documents on top of one another while having literally the maximum number of toolbars open. To keep things simple, if you are using any professional program like Quark, Maya, AutoCAD, 3DStudio and so on, this monitor is exactly what you want even though it can “only” display up to sRGB color and cannot reproduce the color gamut demanded by the Adobe RGB color space. As you can see above, I could have nine 640 x 480 pictures open at the same time in Photoshop with room left over for additional toolbars.