I was looking for a monitor which could rotate Landscape/Portrait for my programming needs and a secondary monitor for my laptop. So i went looking and hit all the normal stores: Best Buy, Future Shop, Bureau En Gros, MicroBytes. I was very surprised that I only managed to find 2 monitors which had this capability. A few years back, most offered this option…

From a technical standpoint, the SyncMaster BX2440 had everything I was looking for:

• Decent resolution: 1920×1080; Full 1080p resolution
• LED technology with power saving features
• And it could rotate

In a general sense this is a nice monitor:

• It is large. Actually, at 24″ it is huge, but that means no more squinting!
• It has a beautiful quality of image, nice and bright display
• It was easy to setup and configure. Actually there was no real need to do anything since it is a plug & play monitor. Although I did choose to install the specific drivers that came with it rather than relying on the generic plug and play, but that was merely my personal choice.

However, the main reason I made this purchase was to have the flexibility to rotate my screen at a whim to easy my programing process. Sadly, I have been greatly disappointed by this. Yes, you can set up your monitor in either Portrait or Landscape orientation. However, you cannot change the orientation on a whim, as you have to unplug the monitor, rotate it and then replug it?! Now which brilliant engineer (and I say this with the upmost respect as I myself am an Engineering graduate) was unable to foresee this problem! No really, they go to the point of allowing a user to rotate the screen but then don’t position the connection to avoid clearance issues? And no one caught this during the design or testing phases!!! In my humble opinion, if you are considering this monitor because it rotates, don’t. No seriously, don’t! I know there aren’t many options, but put your money into a monitor which will enable you to work properly, rather than frustrate you endlessly as this one does (me). Heck find one online and order it. I know at my old company, we had beautiful HP monitors that rotated easily, it may be worth looking to see if HP still has such monitors. And one can always hope the store will start to carry a few more such monitors.

Also, hopefully Samsung will resolve this MAJOR design booboo in their next monitors.

 

Update: 2011-09-02

Well I’ve had the monitor for several months now and I am sad to report that it has recently started to have issues. The monitor flickers different ‘hues’ on the screen. I will be working when all of a sudden the screen will go yellowish. I can still work, but all the colors are yellowed. Then a short period will go by and everything will return to normal. And back and forth we go all day long!

 

Sadly this is turning out to be another bad purchase recently.

 

UPDATE 2011-11-29

I have to take back my previous Update comment and appologize as I was mistaken.  Further testing has revealled that the monitor is not at fault, but rather my KVM switch has failed me.  That said, this experience still enabled me to test out Samsung’s warantee/service and I was very impressed at how easy it was to request service.  Everything can al be done online in a matter of a couple of minutes and they gave me a UPS waybill so I could send it back to them for servicing free of charge…  In the end, I didn’t need to because I was able to determine the true culprit, but never the less, it showed Samsungs dedication to customer satisfaction.  A lot of companies could learn from them (BELL perhaps!)!