Product Reviews

At £440, Samsung's 17" SyncMaster 173P is as expensive as many 19" LCD monitors. Unlike Sony's SDMHS73P, which wowed us with its fantastic image quality, Samsung has packed its top-of-the-range screen with features in order to justify its enormous price.

For starters, there's a notable paucity of buttons on the 173P: in fact, there's only a single power button on the front bezel. Instead, the screen uses a software tool called MagicTune to control settings such as brightness and contrast. This works fine, but we couldn't

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help wondering whether a set of buttons would be quicker and easier to use. Software also controls the pivoting functions, allowing you to switch quickly into portrait mode if you wish.

The 173P passed all our picture quality tests with ease, producing smooth gradients and sharp focus using both its VGA and DVI inputs. The screen is bright enough, but comes nowhere near the remarkable brightness of the Sony. The 173P lacks the Sony's highly reflective finish, but has a very wide usable viewing angle.

For many people the look of a monitor can be almost as important as its performance. The 173P has a nice dusty silver finish to its bezel and stand, although the back is rather incongruously finished in bright white. This will look great if you have an iMac-white PC, but we wondered what was wrong with using the same silver finish all over. The stand allows for some height adjustment, and it's easy to swivel the screen from side to side.

This is a good monitor, but it's not good enough to justify the price. Unless you need the pivoting or DVI input, we'd recommend the Sony SDMHS73P instead.