Putting a Home Theater in Your Office

After seven years of home theater service, my 32" Proscan TV quietly expired, and perversely, I used that as an excuse to upgrade my home office monitor.

That actually makes some sense, as I've been using an older 17" Samsung LCD with a built-in TV tuner as one of my PC monitors - this allows me to watch the sultry Maria Bartiromo and the screaming Jim Cramer on CNBC all day while I work.

So with the old model relegated to the living room (where I envision a 50" plasma residing one day), my desktop now has the 19" Samsung 940MW LC monitor. Besides the built-in TV tuner (it is documented to support PAL and SECAM in addition to NTSC, which I suppose could be handy if I ever have to test European video games), it has the same complement of inputs as I had before - cable/antenna, VGA, composite, component - plus a DVI connector. The latter allows me to hook up my Mac mini and Linux box directly and discard the video switchbox I'd been using for monitor-sharing.

As a computer monitor, it looks good - both in form factor and as a display. It has a nice silvery finish with not too much border around the screen, and the speaker grill is aligned beneath. The wide aspect ratio (16:10) and resolution (1440x900) look great on the Mac and to my surprise also came up fine on my Linux PC, with no twiddling.

Initially, the wide aspect ratio posed a problem when using the TV tuner - the picture is stretched horizontally (makes Maria look bloated and Jim, well, pretty much the same). I didn't see any way to compensate for it in the on-screen menu, and the box didn't come with a hardcopy manual - there's a manual on the CD-ROM, but the disc is for Windows.
But the standard operating procedure of poking around randomly at the remote solved it - there's a "Size" button that cycles through various target aspect ratios. I expect this should also fix aspect issues with any devices hooked up to the component and composite inputs, including game consoles and DVD players, but I just play DVD's via the Mac and of course it looks fine. And in other respects, the TV has everything I need - a quick channel auto-program, and picture-in-picture if you want to watch your show in a tiny little box while doing real work.

The 700:1 constrast ratio is not particularly high but adequate for the TV and quite satisfactory as a monitor. There is a dynamic brightness adjustment option.

As with the display options, there are several sound options split between the on-screen menu and the remote, e.g. stereo/mono/SAP, music/movie/speech, virtual dolby, and some dynamic-adjustment options such as auto-volume and something called BBE. But if you stick with the built-in speakers, doesn't really make much of a difference.

My biggest complaint: no way to adjust the monitor tilt on the somewhat cheap and plasticky snap-on base.

The 940MW has been around for a while and may be at the end of its product life cycle. Shopping around, it seems to be consistently around $400 (half of prices I've seen from last year), which seems to me like a decent price just as a monitor, so if that's your primary requirement, you could think of the TV capability as a bonus.