I recently got a Samsung SyncMaster TA350 for my office.  I was really excited about have a nice 23" monitor for laptop and have a nice dual-head display.

The Samsung have VGA and two HDMI ports.  My laptop has DVI and HDMI so I opted to use the HDMI connection.  I was extremely disappointed to the quality of the image.  Text was blurry / fuzzy and I got it slightly better by changing the subpixel settings in my OS and messing with the options in the OSD on the Samsung.  I confirmed that the output was 1920 x 1080 however things just didn't look the best.

There are two tricks to getting great output to your Samsung.

  • I did some research and opted to buy a DVI to HDMI cable.  DVI is just subset of the features of HDMI so cables are less thatn $10. Using this cable improved things a lot.
  • You need to tell the Samsung that you have a computer connected to it.  It is not intuitative at all but it's simple. (Just be sure that your cable is connected to HDMI port 1).
  1. Press the "Source" button on the remote.
  2. Scroll to HDMI/DVI 1
  3. Press the "Tools" button on the remote
  4. Select "Edit Name"
  5. Scroll and select "DVI PC" from the list of inputs in the menu and confirm

Voila! You should have crisp text / fonts on your Samsung.  I wish that Samsung had this in their manual.