Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsgood not great
Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2019
first off, once again, 1 star removed bcz the carriers you choose to use lie about delivery, then dont deliver to my actual address forcing me to walk heavy boxes up 3 flights of stairs. the carriers have dollies and stuff for that, i do not, so ill keep removing a star until you gain control over your carriers.
1 star removed bcz i tried to cancel this before it shipped but received an email saying it was too late to cancel, but it didnt actually ship until 30 hours later. good job people, keep it up.
1 star removed because you sent a 400.00 item in a giant box with not one piece of bubble wrap. if i had the energy i would box all this up and send it back. all my packages from amazon these past 2 weeks have come with little or no bubble and im buying up parts for a VR computer, so that about 3500.00 over 3 e-tailers and 4 different carriers, all arriving in busted boxes at the wrong location with no protection. this is your job. why is it hard?
so you just lost 60% of your rating for avoidable things that are persistent in your supply chain. amazon has been getting worse and worse and worse ever since it started being another e-bay with shady sellers and wildly fluctuating prices and shipping. your usefulness is coming to and end when prime video is no better than free youtube, your products are price matched , and your delivery methods are corrupted.
now for the monitor. i should keep taking stars away, but i would be left with negatives. first the bezel"less". there is a bottom branded bezel, along with 1/8" of dead space. the other 3 sides all have 1/4" dead space. so you effectively have an internal bezel of non-usable screen real estate that still takes up the space a monitor that doesnt shave off inches does.
next - display port. it does have 1 display port. ive read reviews where it did not, and that was the reason for my cancel request. well, that and no vesa, really, why would you not include that? seems intentionally cheap. anyway about the DP, i dont know if samsung updated this model to include it, or previous reviewers got bait and switched with a different model (this also happens here on amazon, just look at some "renewed" item listings), or simply didnt recognize the port as it looks like hdmi in the dark, and it is dark up in the cable attachment area. in any case you get one now. just one. version 1.2
no vesa. you know, this is disheartening as vesa compatibility has almost become ubiquitous. so this was a choice. a choice made by someone who is completely out of touch with todays home and soho computing. its one thing to not include the vesa if you are going to give us a stand with lots of motion, and stability, and good materials. instead you get a cheap tube frame and about 5 degress of motion up and down, no side to side. the frame is so cheap , i assume, bcz they engineered the weight and design of the monitor to hold it steady. in this it is marginally successful, but only by using a lot of desk space.
controls - are a joke. i do enjoy the joystick type navigation on the power button, serving double duty as the way to nav the menu. however, you get contrast, brightness, volume....oh yeah, thats it. why have a menu?
documentation/box contents - you get a lot of useless information, like a warning not to pour water on it, but no product spec sheet, which i immediately hunted for to put the display port thing to rest. no case badge, no stickers of any kind, no cleaning cloth, no display port cord. nothing. im sorry, you do get a cheap 6' hdmi cable and a typical power cable.
color. when i plugged it in, i had typical hd settings on my ben-q ips. so i immediately got a pop up warning for that. once i changed it to 4k settings, it filled up my screen but was washed out, grey. even now with brightness on 100, the top amazon blue nav bar looks muted and washed out. the white area where i am typing is kinda grimy grey. there are no controls to change this on the monitor. obviously you can use windows to calibrate, which i just took a time out from this review to do. setting brightness on 50 even though it looks like typing on a gym sock, i went through the process, only to find at the end, nothing changed at all. except my brightness control was reset to zero, giving me the ability to raise total brightness past the previous max. welcome because now i can see, but still washed out colors.
cyber monday had some ok deals and there are screens by AOC and even LG that i should have tried. but i own lots of samsung stuff and im typically happy, so i went with this one. at 500.00 original cost i would lol in your face while i packed it up and returned it. at the 399.00 i paid i feel raw by about 150.00. this is a 250.00 monitor tops. there is way too much competition, good competition, for samsung to release this giant box of pffft.
im going to keep it for either my 3rd or 4th favorite computer, but thats only bcz its here in my house already, but it wont ever be connected to any machine i use every day.
skip this. people will say its the cheapest 4k so get it. but washed out colors, no vesa, simplistic controls and giant footprint on your desk make it a sure pass. i havent even tried to watch anything in 4k yet bcz it cant make web browsing look good and im too tired to get more irritated at this junk.
oh, i forgot cable management. imagine the cheapest thinnest plastic ever, then make it thinner, and this is your backplate which covers the area where the stand screws to the screen and offers a hidden channel to run your pwr, dp, and hdmi cords down to the desk level. this demands careful thought as a previous reviewer ranted about the cables falling out. well, yes, the hdmi slot is too wide and it will fall out over time, as will the power cable, however you can coil and bend the wires to a point where you can make then exert upward pressure to keep them seated. no tape or glue needed. it takes time bcz you dont have alot of room to work in and you dont have a lot of room to coil up inches of cable in there. the fisher price backplate is not strong enough to hold it if you could. this was a design flaw and an obvious one that should have been caught and rectified during product testing. recessed, side facing ports with a usb 3.0 or 2 or 3 would have been a good addition, and one which most of the competition has included so once again im left scratching my head as to why samsung decided not to include these features.
after i finished writing this, i have to go back and take another star off for quality of product. i hate 1 star reviews, but samsung and amazon deserve it.
