Summary

This monitor appears to have been pitched for a budget-conscious office or home-office user that wanted elements of high-end specs without needless cost. It seems to be primarily designed for text, with some additional considerations made for media playback. It is a reasonably bright monitor, especially when considering its highlight mode. An excellent contemporary review of this model is available here: Review: Samsung SyncMaster 955DF monitor.

Literature

• Owner's Manual
• Service Manual

Notes

Some users have reported a degree of inconsistency in the tube’s luminosity and color intensity, which is made more obvious in the corners and edges where the thickness of the glass increases due to the Dynaflat’s interior curve. This monitor does suffer from some moiré in the edges and corners. These quirks may be due to the Dynaflat design, but could also be related to the chassis design.

It has a “highlight mode” that allows a user-defined jump in the contrast. The highlighted area is a rectangle that can be adjusted in size and position by the user. The highlight mode menu offers R/G/B color gain adjustments, an overscan/zoom feature, and a sharpness filter. It automatically turns off after 3 hours and it has to be switched on after powerup. R/G/B color adjustments are not available with the standard OSD controls. They are only available within the highlight mode menu, and only apply when highlight mode is active.

Calibration including color calibration is possible, but only with Samsung’s proprietary software and a hardware jig that can be assembled with a chip and some resistors. See here for a post with loose details on how this process works (you will need to auto-translate from Russian). There are multiple schematics for how to build the jig, but schematic number 2 seems to be the most easily assembled.

Dynaflat Tube

This monitor has a Dynaflat tube. Similar to Sony’s FD Trinitron, it has a flat front and internally curved mask. Dynaflats have a dot mask and FD Trinitrons have an aperture grille. See this graphic for a comparison: