Barking up the right monitor

Occasionally, we all must bow and scrape before the might of the Silk Suits on High. The guys who know little of any practical value, yet somehow manage to be the ones in charge of signing all the checks.

Most of the time, they bark, and I blink and keep on walking. That’s because, much like my neighbor’s Yorkshire Terrier, they almost instantly forget what they were barking about and simply go on to bark at someone else about something entirely different. But then there are those days where their little fangs latch onto my proverbial pants leg, and snarling, they simply refuse to let go.

That happened a couple of weeks ago. The time before that, I had to sit through a two-hour meeting with a guy who wanted all the execs to carry BlackBerries — except he kept referring to them as Blueberries. Then again, I hear they have those now so mayhap he was simply ahead of his time. Last week it was about this exec’s sudden discovery that CRT monitors are bad. He didn’t know exactly why they were bad, but he wanted all new flat-screen displays right away and they had to be “fully compatible with Windows XP, too.”

OK.

I placed a bunch of displays at the disposal of the executive buying set, and for a change they made a pretty good choice: Samsung’s pair of new SyncMasters. The execs wanted the SyncMaster 192MP for themselves because you need 19 inches when you play solitaire for a living. Everyone else got SyncMaster 172Xs. I got the last word there, though, and outfitted all the IT boxes with dual-head video cards, giving us enough justification for two monitors per box.

If new displays are on your to-do list, you could do far worse then these new panels by Samsung. The SyncMaster 172X is a very nice piece of work, maximizing screen real estate while minimizing desktop foot print.

But it’s the SyncMaster 192MP that truly wowed the suits. This is an impressive display without being unduly behemoth. Picture quality is excellent and the thing will support resolutions well over 1280×1024. Its 75MHz sync rate makes for a rock solid image — an image that can be easily adjusted using the monitor’s front-mounted controls. It took me a few minutes to figure out how, but then I’ve got that twisted aversion to opening a manual.

Another desktop sleek factor for the 192MP is the embedded speakers. Samsung stuck a pair of highly serviceable speakers into the base of this display along with front-mounted volume controls and even a headphone jack. That would have been simply nifty, but the device also has an S-video jack. Now that actually made me glance at the monitor, and sure enough, the 192MP can act as an HDTV-ready television tuner capable of running a high-def image on top of the Windows XP desktop using PIP (picture-in-picture) technology.

Once they saw that, they all stopped barking and did the executive equivalent of the low whine and tail-wag. With a street price of $679 for the 172X and $939 for the 192MP, you can bet we had a bunch of new Samsung boxes in the office double-quick. Wonder what they’ll do when I tell them that the office isn’t cable TV-enabled?