Samsung has long produced beautiful monitors, and from the front the U250 looks to be another gorgeous example. With its gloss-black finish, clear edging and thin glass neck, it’s as stylish as any SyncMaster TFT we’ve seen, and the only hint that something’s amiss is the slight increase in thickness – at around 43mm there’s just enough room to hide a full set of PC components on the back.
It’s a truly impressive feat, and we’d go so far as to say the U250 is the first all-in-one PC we’ve seen that you could genuinely mistake as a monitor. It helps that Samsung has followed its TFT template almost to the letter, merely tweaking it here and there to pull off the screen and PC combo without it impeding on the all-important desirability.
The all-black design is broken up by a single glowing blue power light beneath the Samsung logo, a 1.3mp webcam at the top and a discreet row of touch controls in the bottom-right corner. Everything else you might need sits round the back or on the sides, neatly hidden away by the slightly protruding clear bezels.
It comes with two USB ports on the side – one of which also handles eSATA – and a further four on the rear, as well as a slot-loading DVD writer and a card reader for SD and MMC formats. The rear panel has a DVI output so you can use the Samsung in a dual-monitor setup, and there’s a Gigabit Ethernet port to go with the 802.11n Wi-Fi.
The 23in screen is the real draw, and it didn’t let us down. With a Full HD 1,920 x 1,080 resolution and a 5ms response time, it’s at home when displaying work or racing through games and media, and although Samsung lists the brightness as 250cd/m2, it appeared vibrant and even in our tests. The integrated 3W speakers were loud and clear enough to handle some kitchen audio and gaming, and they made a decent fist of giving movies the atmosphere they require.
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