You can always get a general idea of how amazing of an item is by how many and how good of reviews the product gets. Well, Best Buy sells this, the Samsung CF390 a 24in curved monitor, their most reviewed monitor under $200 dollars. This thing has over 2,000 reviews. But, can 2,000 people be wrong, or am I wrong? Let’s get started with a little review.
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Let’s talk about the physical aspects of this monitor. There are plenty of budget friendly monitors in the 100 to 200-dollar price range, and this one stood out to me because of its curve. It has an 1800r curve, meaning it’s pretty tight, a little less curvy than a Cheeto puff, but still curvy. The base is a glossy black plastic, the bezel is also black plastic, but the back is this matte, straight-line textured plastic, that makes a lot of noise as you move your nails up and down the monitor. Annoyed yet? The monitor also has a little nipple on the right side of the back of the monitor, this controls powering on the monitor, changing settings, and changing the volume of devices connected to the monitor’s output. The cf390 has an hdmi port, a vga port, and an audio jack. Oh, and a ac port, to you know, power the thing. It also has a vesa mount for those who like to mount things.
Now, most importantly, how does it run? How does it feel? Well. This is a 24in monitor running at 1920 by 1080, full hd. Which, at this monitor size, is good, the image looks nice and sharp enough. It has a decent 4ms response time, making it a half decent budget gaming monitor. The colors are what you expect out of this price range, decent. The packaging states that this monitor is only 60Hz, but I managed to overclock it up to 73Hz, which makes it a little better for budget higher-than-average framerate gaming. The curve really makes things like RU-vid videos, and playing video games more immersive by staying in your field of vision more. I’m not joking curves really do add a benefit there. You’ll just see a difference.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t negative things to say about the monitor. For one, backlight bleed. This stuck out the most to me. This monitor suffers greatly in dark rooms because, the light bleeds more than any character in an episode of game of thrones. The color shifts in the monitor are hard to enjoy, when viewed from the side of it rather than in front of it. This is probably because it’s a VA panel, and is curved, giving you a nice angle to enjoy the light bleeding and preventing you from enjoying your movies as colorfully as you would have. The monitor does have free-sync support, but if you’re using a newer NVidia graphics card, you can’t use it because it doesn’t have a DisplayPort. So, AMD cards only. The curve, while great for media consumption, isn’t so great for excel spreadsheets, and doing work that requires precise measuring, that’s something to keep in mind. The stand isn’t the best, it can only tilt up and down.
Overall, I think the monitor provides a really nice value for this price range with its standard display specs, but I can’t help but to think the curve is a gimmick at this screen size. It does make things slightly more immersive but it’s not that noticeable at 24 inches, is it worth the premium to for the immersion, and give up productivity on a desktop monitor? That would depend on your use cases. If you’re a budget gamer looking for a monitor with decent specifications like its 72hz refresh rate and 4ms response time and the immersion of a curved monitor, or like the curve for entertainment, go for it. It’s nice. If you’re using this to get work done, I don’t think this is the best choice for stuff like that. So, were 2,000 people wrong? No. They had a use case in mind and this monitor definitely fills it for cheap.
6 окт 2024
