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Desktop Usage

On the desktop, the 192MP fares well with no glaring problems and good color reproduction. The viewing angle is quite wide and compares well to the 172x which has one of the widest viewing angles on LCDs that have come through the lab. The viewing angle is light years ahead of the 173MW for which the brightness dropped off sharply from both the side and the height. As mentioned before, the 192MP is still capped at 1280x1024 like all other 19" LCDs.

Gaming

The 192MP looked reasonable in games for a 25ms panel but there was a fair bit of ghosting in shooters, especially Far Cry and faster games like Quake 3. As someone who games strictly on CRTs, the ghosting effect was fairly disorienting. On some games such as Need for Speed Underground, the ghosting effect was much less pronounced. Avid players of shooters may want to avoid the 192MP if it is used primarily for gaming.

Console Inputs

Video input capabilities

To test the capabilities of the 192MP’s input, we used a Playstation 2, which doubled as a game system and as a DVD player. For kicks, we used both the provided RGB cable and the aftermarket S-video cable to see if there was a noticeable difference. After all, we are talking about a relatively high-end ‘television’ set here, so it should be able to easily make S-video look better than RGB.

Gameplay

When turning on the PS2 for the first time using the RGB cable, we were thoroughly unimpressed by the quality of the output. You know when people claim that a TV is very good at hiding ugliness? Well, they’re right. There’s a pretty significant amount of color bleeding and ghosting, text was blurry and the . Another problem that was found was that intermittently, the screen would ‘hop’, as if the monitor was resyncing to the input source. This occurred randomly every 3-5 minutes. For some people, these problems could make it unplayable.

Switching to the S-video cable, there’s a remarkable improvement. Whereas on a low-end 19 inch TV you would be hard-pressed to notice a much difference between S-video and RGB, that is simply not the case with the 192MP. Using S-video, the output is much sharper and the colors do not bleed. Text is still a tad blurry and ghosting is still noticeable, but the overall quality is much improved. Most importantly, we no longer experienced the weird hopping behavior that we had with the RGB cable.

Even when plugging in a S-video cable, the output still had noticeable aliasing if you sat as you would from a desktop, but if you sit as far as you would from a TV, it’ll look better (well, obviously).

DVD

DVD output was tested only using S-video cable. We expect most people who purchase this will use either S-video or component video from their DVD player. To cut a long story short, the quality was much better than a PS2, with none of the aliasing or blurriness of the game. Most of this can be attributed to the higher native resolution of the DVD, and it shows.

While the image itself was fairly sharp, ghosting in video was apparent during close ups of characters and the subsequent camera panning away. For scenes with a lot more movement it was not as noticeable. The ghosting effect will probably be better with a progressive scan source.

The quality of the console output was comparable to a Samsung 192 with a Leadtek TV Tuner which indicates that Samsung has a robust tuner solution but is constrained more by the output quality of the Playstation 2 and TV Tuner technology itself than any pitfalls with Samsung's implementation.

Picture In Picture

PIP mode is a simpler implementation on the 192MP as compared to the 173MW. The four locations of the PIP screen reside in the corners and there are only two sizes for the PIP screen. Unfortunately all the cool options like the split screen and quarter bar mode were not available.