The name itself (it spells out as Plane-to-Line Switching) was quite a surprise for specialists because it was not a variant of the proprietary PVA technology but seemed to resemble IPS matrixes which were produced by Samsung’s largest competitor LG. In late 2010 Samsung responded to e-IPS with its PLS technology. Later on, Dell and some other brands introduced their e-IPS based products which met the mainstream requirements by having a reasonable price and well-balanced specs. Although Samsung claims that corporate users were eager to buy them, these models were not interesting for home users due to their high response time and some color rendering problems. The SyncMaster F2080 and F2380 were not much of a success, however.
Over a year ago Samsung made an attempt to introduce an alternative to mainstream TN-based products by releasing monitors with C-PVA matrixes. A new Samsung monitor may have an original exterior design, a slightly revised menu, a couple of added “image enhancement” features, but is almost sure to have the same matrix, electronics and specifications as its predecessors. Samsung Electronics frequently releases new LCD monitor models but, unfortunately, it is rarely that there is something really innovative about them. As soon as first mass production SA850 monitors become available, we will post an update to this review.
Note that the characteristics of production units may be different. Today we are going to discuss a pre-produciton engineering sample of the Samsung SA850 monitor.