If you’re not sure that a 22″ widescreen monitor is what you’re looking for, take a look at the picture below. I used this picture when deciding which monitor to buy for myself. After taking a look at it, I decided that I wanted either a 19″ or a 24″ widescreen. Since I wanted to watch widescreen movies, the 19″ was out, and the 24″ was out of my budget. That’s why I chose the 22″. It was the best of both worlds. It’s not quite as cheap as the 19″, but it’s much, much cheaper than a 24″. Now that I’ve made the decision to get a 22″ widescreen, I’m very happy that I did. Having a widescreen monitor just gives you so much extra space to work with. If you don’t watch any widescreen movies on your computer, I might suggest that you should get a 19″ because of the price, but really, I love having all this extra horizontal space. It makes photoshopping just that much easier, and since I use my monitor to watch movies, it’s really nice not having to see those big black bars all the time on widescreen movies.

Now that we’ve established that a 22″ widescreen monitor is pretty much the perfect size for a computer user that watches movies from time to time, and the Samsung is arguably the best looking 22″ widescreen monitor, let’s look into how the 225BW functions.

The monitor itself is very adjustable. After playing with all the 22″ monitors that I could, it was obvious that the Samsung had the smoothest adjustability. If you want to tilt the monitor forwards or backwards, it can be done easily with a push or lift of the finger, and it has a pretty decent range:

If you like to change the height of your monitor regularly for whatever reason, you would be lovin” this monitor. I have never seen a monitor that was so easy to change the height on. The 225BW features what Samsung refers to as the “HAS.” I didn’t read too far into it, but I’m assuming it means “Vertical Adjustment System” or something similar. Yeah, I know, it’s an “H,” not a “V,” but this thing is springo-dingo! That means you can adjust the height just as easily as you can tilt the monitor forwards or backwards. All you have to do is lift it up or push it down, and with the greatest of ease, the monitor follows your hand. The height adjustment has a great range, too:

The options are pretty easy to navigate and there is no shortage of ‘em. Clicking on the “Menu” button gives you the following screens.

Under the “Color” category, there’s a pretty cool feature called “MagicColor.” Basically, this feature just makes your colors more vibrant in some way. There are four MagicColor settings: Off, Demo, Full and Intelligent. Demo just shows you what half of your screen looks like with MagicColor on, and half off. Intelligent seems to be the best way to go. Check out the “Demo” mode:

One of my most-appreciated features that this monitor brings us is the “AUTO” button, placed next to the Power button. What does the AUTO button do? It resizes the viewing area, perfectly, so you don’t have to. Whenever you change resolutions, you can just click the AUTO button, and it makes the viewing area take up the screen area, and I must say this again, it does it perfectly.

We’ve concluded that this monitor gives us all the features we could ask, but we haven’t talked about how it looks. Let’s see how this monitor performs — as a monitor.

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