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Cost

The 173MW does not come cheap. The MSRP weighs in at 1299$ CDN while the expected street price is closer to 1099$ CDN. This is not too far off of the pricing for the 172MP which had a street price of roughly 1000$. It is still a bit on the steep side as the number of pixels in the MW are only about 75% compared to that of the 172MP. Functionally though, the MW is aimed at a different market as it can act as a HDTV ready widescreen display, a claim that few other manufacturers can claim.

Conclusions

There are many improvements that Samsung has made over the 172MP. One of the bright lights on the 173MW is the new OSD which is stellar. Hopefully Samsung will port it over to their other displays also. The tactile buttons for the OSD are also much better than the touch sensitive ones on the 172MP. Picture quality is much improved over the 172MP especially in the area of streaking and ghosting. Switching between inputs is much quicker this time around with a delay that is not much longer than a digital cable box changing channels. The addition of a DVI input is a nice addition and it gives the MW pretty much every type of video connection possible with the exception of the now defunct BNC and the strange proprietary Apple inputs.

As a computer monitor, the biggest gripe I have is that the resolution is too low. The Apple Cinema displays started off at 1600x1024 in a 20" package. Unfortunately the 172MW is only a 17" display. The resulting resolution of 1280x768 is a desktop area less than that of a standard 1280x1024 17" LCD . The result is a monitor whose average area is between that of a 15" 1024x768 screen and a regular 17" 1280x1024. 1280x1024 is a little low for my tastes and losing more on the vertical hurts it a bit more but like previously mentioned, the horizontal span is more important for my daily uses.

Game support is a bit on the spotty side. The end user who is not willing to explore console commands or play with command line switches and just wants to play games in wide screen mode should probably avoid this monitor. This is a shame because games like Halo look really cool on the 173MW and the feeling of immersion with the extra width gives a different perspective on the game. There is of course the option of playing in a non wide screen resolution which results in distortions. That is something that bothers me personally but I have friends who have no qualms about that. As we mentioned before, this is not the fault of the display but of developers not having the foresight to support such modes.

Media including DVD and Divx playback on the computer were quite good as well with no anomalies or noticeable blurring.

As a television, the 173MW did not fare as well especially in full screen mode. Noise was the primary suspect for poor video quality. Using a Playstation 2 and the default RCA cables as the video source, both games and DVDs looked much worse than a regular television with many picture elements having a shaky effect. DVDs in particular looked very pixelated compared to the computer counterpart. The picture quality improved dramatically when the PS2 was used in PIP mode. Many people I think will prefer to do this rather than full screen mode especially with the TV Tuner. The 173MW has a fairly limited viewing angle with the picture dropping off quickly both to the sides and on the vertical front so this product will be unsuitable as a display for any kind of group function. The user really needs to be directly in front of the display for it to look good.

The 173MW was a difficult product to evaluate. It has a lot of strengths but at the same time there are various shortcomings that will make it a hard sell as either a computer monitor or as a television display because while it does both adequately I do not feel that it excels at either. This is a good product for where space is a premium and it is difficult to fit both a computer monitor and a television into the same area. Samsung has improved upon the shortcomings of the 172MP quite a bit but there still needs to be more work. The biggest improvement that Samsung could make is to make the MW a larger display, the resolution should be no less than 1600 x whatever height.

On the input side, there needs to be better filtering or maybe the total elimination of the RCA inputs if that is indeed the cause of the poor video quality. A lot of people are going to be irked when they do not see the sharpness that is usually associated with LCDs.

The 173MW comes across as a niche product that is not entirely practical for every day use but I still look forward to the day where wide screens are the norm, on the desktop, in terms of software support, and have the ability to transfer seamlessly from a computer display to a television display without any sort of visual degradation. The 173MW gives the user a taste of that but it is more of a tease; it is not quite ready for primetime yet it offers a glimpse of a brighter future where the boundaries between home electronics and computers blur even more.