A wide screen LCD that measures 17" across is good for movie watching.

In general we were pretty pleased with the Samsung Syncmaster 172W LCD screen. The pixel pitch was effectively that of a 15" LCD screen, but I think this is more of a limitation of taking what is essentially a 15" monitor and adding a few inches to one side. Better visual results could have been had if a 17" screen had had some display cut from the bottom, but most users will be hard pressed to notice the differences between a 0.280mm and 0.264mm dot pitch even with displays placed side by side.

Magic Bright is something of a novel feature, but it really is only suitable for use with media (games or video for example). Unless you enable it in a particularly bright room for better visibility you will find that using it with standard text or documents along those lines may increase eye strain. I'd also be a little worried about the possibility of shortening the lifespan of the backlights - the small lights which illuminate the LCD screen. Samsung back the 172W with a three year parts/labour and backlight warranty incidently.

Brightness and colour saturation were quite good, but in comparison to some Viewsonic LCD's we have tested in the past there seemed to be a higher emphasis on keeping the colours cool. While it is not mentioned anywhere in the specs for this display, we did some investigation and found that the pixel response of the 172W is a quick 23ms - down 2ms from the typical standard of 25ms.

A quick test conducted by quickly moving a webpage of text up and down confirms that there was no visible blurring or streaking of the display. LCD's with a slow pixel response will often fail this test by showing a reddish blur around text as the screen is moved up and down and pixels rapidly switch from on to off.