For attracting more customers a smooth black frame surface can be a clever move. But from previous experiences we get used to those big monitors have that “serious” look: it’s black with matte surfaces.

Control menu keys are actually sensitive touch areas, marked with barely visible letters. For one of them you can choose what its function will be from several offered. Menu is full of all sorts of options and many of them you won’t see on cheaper monitors. Some of these options can provide you very fine picture adjustments, so fine that it possible to setup displayed picture to anybody’s taste. Ergonomics is almost perfect. Display can be lowered or raised enough to achieve perfect position (especially in case of pivot position). It would be nice to have some kind of mark for horizontal position, but instead you need to rely on your own visual sense or spirit level to set monitor in horizontal position. Rotating ring is built in bottom of the stand and it provides easy rotating around vertical axis. Speakers are placed on back side of the SyncMaster 2693HM, hidden from sight and not spoiling visual exterior of monitor.

If you try to imagine some buyer in a store, walking through field of turned on monitors it’s easy to guess that he will be attracted to display with most glaring picture. This logic may work for TV screens but when it comes to monitors it is not healthy to look at one of these “with saturated colors” for long time period. Well, Samsung SyncMaster 2693HM is one of those models, but this can be easily corrected thanks to presence of controls for color, contrast and brightness adjustments. On default settings color range is moved to lighter shades with a lot of effort invested from Samsung to keep correct position of dark tones. By doing this Samsung created more vivid colors but less precise. All this can be corrected with OSD menu but buyer mentioned above will certainly ask himself was his tactics for buying display correct. After some adjustments shaded gradations become smoother and contrast is regularly distributed all over color range. Black color starts to look like it should while breaching of backlight is almost gone.

Big monitors cannot hide that easily problems with view angles and fortunately SyncMaster 2693HM doesn’t have to hide anything. Even though it is TN film Panel it’s not likely that average user will be in situation to adjust display often or, what’s worse, its own position according to monitor. Response times are not, according to our impression, artificialy accelerated so we didn’t encounter any unusual problems, like we used to stumble upon while we were testing some big monitors. In spite of that, performances completely satisfied all our demands from movies to games.