I got the Samsung 940BW Plus 19″ Widescreen about a month ago, after finally getting enough money to replace my old, dull and blurry 17″ Samtron 76E CRT monitor. It really was very blurry - I couldn’t tell an i from an l or a 1.

I chose Samsung because Samtron monitors were made by Samsung and before it went dull and blurry, the Samtron was an excellent monitor. I have also had many other Samsung products, all of which are of a high quality.

I am so far extremely happy with the Samsung 940BW Plus. The colours are bright and it is crystal clear, although any monitor would look good after the Samtron. I have had no issues with ghosting at all (it has a 5ms response time), which worried me a little coming from a CRT.

One of the things I liked in particular was the simple design - it is just a rectangular shape of silver coloured plastic, with the screen and 6 buttons in the bottom right. Other monitors of a similar specification had fancy designs, which isn’t at all necessary in my opinion (you’re looking at the screen, not the surround).

At the same time I got an Inno3D 7600GT 256Mb AGP Graphics card to replace my Leadtek Winfast A350 (128Mb FX5900 XT) card. The A350 was an excellent card, playing anything the chipset supported very well, however I doubted it could handle the jump from 1024×768 to 1440×900 without a major degradation in performance, so I got the Inno3D 7600GT.

It is physically smaller than the A350, but has considerably more power. Not only can it handle the resolution jump, but it has added considerable performance on top. I was expecting it to do well (it is 2 series newer than the FX5900) but not quite as well as it has.

I have had some issues with the widescreen and gaming unfortunately. Most games support it, even ones I thought wouldn’t like GTA III and GTA Vice City. However Grand Prix 4 and Battlefield 2 fail to support it natively. Grand Prix 4 I can understand as it is old. It runs but everything is stretched. Battlefield 2 though seems stupid, considering games released at a similar time support it. There is a workaround by adding a modifier to the shortcut path, but it’s not as good as native support, especially when it comes to running mods.

Overall I am very pleased with both products. My Mum was also suitably impressed - she purchased another Samsung 940BW Plus and an Inno3D 7600GS for my sister.

My sister’s Colin McRae 2005 skills have improved considerably now as a result. Not sure how but she is 20 seconds faster.