This is a review of theSamsung Syncmaster P2450H by myself (Danny) and my friend Mark, who purchased the 24″ widescreen monitor.

Mark is a gamer and avid film buff and wanted a monitor that he could use with his PC (for work and gaming) and his PS3 (for watching blu-ray films and gaming). I recommended the Syncmaster P2450H and this review was written around a week after installation and after around 40 hours of game-playing and movie watching.

First, lets check out the main benefits in the specification:

• Size: 24″ Widescreen
• Resolution: 1920 x 1080
• Response time: 2ms
• Colours: 16.7 Million
• Dynamic Contrast ratio: 70000:1
• Viewing Angle (Horizontal/Vertical): 170?/160?

The reason we chose this screen was because it was only slightly more expensive than similar 22/23″ models, yet anyone that has seen a 24″monitor alongside a 22″ monitor will appreciate the massive improvement those extra 2 inches offer.

Whereas a 22″ monitor looks just like a personal monitor, a 24″ display can be likened to a small television that can be used by multiple people. We had a few friends around for a DVD night and found that the five of us could comfortably watch movies on it although the viewing angle limitations did mean that anyone who stood up or sat on the floor did have a poorer view of the picture.

The response time of just 2ms was also important to us as it was primarily being used as a gaming monitor. This is super-fast and although lower response rates would probably not have made a vast amount of difference, we wanted to ensure we didn’t have any ghosting or streaking problems during our game-playing sessions.

Across both gaming and movie-watching experiences we found the picture to be near perfect (after some tweaking of the PS3 and monitor settings). It took around five minutes to fix it to the stand and plug the cables in and perhaps another 20 mins of tweaking the settings to get our optimum picture.

We used a bog-standard VGA connector for the PC, which as you can probably guess, did not give us anywhere near the same quality as the PS3 hooked up via HDMI but as Mark only uses his PC for work and legacy-gaming, it was still more than adequate for his needs.

We should also mention that the monitor has a single dead pixel, however it’s on the far right and almost unnoticeable - we first saw it nearly a week after purchase, so it obviously didn’t bother us too much!

Overall, we think it’s a cracking monitor and a great price (it cost us nearly £200 but Amazon are now selling it for less than £175).

When the time comes for me to buy a new monitor, this will definitely be on my shortlist.

You can check out more reviews of the Samsung Syncmaster P2450H here.