I just bought a 22" Samsung T220 to replace my 19" Viewsonic VP930b. I only did it for the extra viewing area. It was not worth it, I am taking the T220 back. It was an atrocity to LCD panels everywhere. Going into the purchase, I knew it used TN fillm technology (I'm coming from a very nice *VA), but I wanted a little extra reactivity and definitely wanted Widescreen, so it wouldn't feel like I had tunnel vision in FPS games.
Well out of the box the picture was very harsh and with poor color. I went to Anandtech Forums and was greeted by high intensity whites I have never seen before. After literally an hour of tweaking its settings, what I concluded was that without having the gamma, brightness and contrast up, you could see the many flaws associated with RTA, the overdrive component that speeds up response times. Artifacts with black text against a grey background (AT) while scrolling was an obvious thing that I saw.
Any text I read on this monitor made me want to gouge out my eyeballs, making it awful for school work. Basically, if you have black text on a white or any shade of grey background, you're screwed. I turned on cleartype and that helped slightly but it still didn't seem "focused" (Makes me think back to the old CRT days). The search function on Firefox highlights text as bright green, and makes the text white. On my VP930b, it is a warm, comfortable green that is easy on the eyes, but with the T220, it was literally a neon green with white text that was very hard to read. That combination right there stressed my eyes pretty badly. Just highlighting text with the mouse in Firefox made the text pretty unreadable because the highlighting is a light blue and the text is white. Those 2 colors seemed to merge together as a bright neon green or something, depending on the height at which you are looking at the monitor.
The monitor is so bright it feels like you are staring into a 2x4 fluorescent light fixture. OK, tone down the brightness, and all sorts of color and uniformity issues are revealed. After properly adjusting the color, the picture still doesn't look as crisp as if the brightness and contrast were jacked up to 80-100. Which is unbearable without sunglasses. Major BLB on the top and bottom of the screen. I ran the hidden menu check, and it is a CMO panel. That would explain its tendency to display too much blue, as I've read around the web.
Alright, there are a few pros to this monitor. There is absolutely no hint of input lag whatsever, and games and movies look pretty spectacular on it. Those two things are about all that I can think of. Otherwise, I'd resort to describe the colors that this monitor outputs as bright neon pos.
So have caution if you want to purchase this screen. The sleek rose red bezel is the only slightly good thing about this monitor. Maybe if you get a true Samsung panel, things will work out, but I'm not willing to spend anymore time on this thing other than a quick RMA refund.
I am staying with my VP930b for now (Xtknight actually recommended it to me about 2 years ago, great monitor) and it's absolutely awesome now that I have experienced the illustrious "gamer LCD," which I will never again buy into. I will keep my eyes on good IPS/*VA panels only from now on.