The Samsung SM930BF is a 19-inch TFT display with a native resolution of 1,280 x 1,024 pixels, which puts it squarely in the mainstream if you're sick and tired of your bulky old CRT and want a nice, slim TFT screen.

The brightness rating of 270cd/m2 is relatively low, as many displays have a rating of up to 400cd/m2, and although the contrast ratio of 700:1 is reasonably high we found that the screen was far too bright and harsh on the default settings.

Once we had reduced the brightness setting from 100 percent to 50 percent to avoid the unpleasant glare, the contrast ratio had effectively been reduced with the result that the picture was very ordinary without the vibrant colours that some displays manage to present.

Samsung has tried to get around this problem with its MagicColor feature in the OSD (on-screen display), which is supposed to enhance colours and make them more vivid. Instead it made them glare unpleasantly so we left it disabled.

One part of the specification that stands out is the response time of 4ms grey-to-grey, which is equivalent to 8ms white-to-black. That's fast and looks good on the specification and, while it doesn't bring a noticeable benefit over a 12ms or 16ms display, you can certainly use the Samsung monitor for every application, including 3D gaming.

We were unhappy that the display has both DVI and VGA ports yet you only get a VGA cable in the box and have to buy the DVI cable separately. If Samsung had supplied the DVI cable with no VGA lead this would be just about acceptable, but as it is it looks very mean.

Added to that the SM930BF doesn't have any integrated speakers yet the bezel is quite wide, but it's not as though Samsung has an unimaginative design department as its SM940 models have a narrow bezel and look very attractive.

The strange thing is that Samsung lists five categories of TFT display including the SM930BF which, it turns out, is a gaming TFT. If we just look at 19-inch models we also find the Entry Level SM913V, the Narrow Bezel SM913N, SM920N and SM940N, the Digital SM940B and the Multimedia SM913TM.

That's a total of seven current 19-inch models which you can buy in the UK and it tells us that in some Marketing Person's mind every model is aimed at a specific market segment. In the case of this Gaming model it seems to mean a fast response time, no other significant features and Plain Jane looks. We'd like to be able to call it an average display but it is actually quite expensive and you get very little for your money, which is a crying shame really.

It's tricky to know what Samsung thinks it's offering the end user with the SM930BF. It's a reasonable display housed in a boring case with the bare minimum of tilt adjustment, yet it is expensive and doesn't even include a DVI cable. This is one to avoid, we feel.