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RAGEPRO
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Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 2:11 am

This is gonna be SUPER long, so here's the TL;DR—I bought a Samsung C24FG70 in February, and it is the best monitor I have ever owned. Now in June, after having spent less than a month cumulatively with the working monitor, I am attempting to get a refund from Samsung because they have the worst post-sale support I have ever experienced.

First, some background.
I spent a lot of time in my youth and as a young adult gaming on CRT monitors. I was never happy with the motion clarity of LCDs, although I didn't really understand the problem until my friend pointed me to Mark Rejhon's excellent Blur Busters blog. On the advice of that person and a few other friends, I picked up an ASUS VG248QE 144Hz gaming monitor and was blown away by the motion clarity enabled by the Lightboost strobe mode.

However, I wasn't really satisfied with the overall picture quality of the VG248QE. It's a relatively high-end TN panel, but even still there was a readily observable gamma shift from the top of the screen to the bottom without even moving your body or head. That, combined with the poor contrast and color reproduction of the display led me to aggressively seek display options that could give me the smooth motion I had become accustomed to on my Asus in combination with the great contrast and consistent colors afforded by my VA side monitors.

Here's my list of qualifications in descending order of importance:
  • Scanning backlight or black frame insertion for blur reduction
  • 120-Hz or higher refresh rate
  • At least a 3000:1 static contrast ratio
  • True 8-bit-per-channel color
  • At least 350 nits maximum brightness
  • Near-perfect viewing angles
  • At least 100% coverage of sRGB colorspace
  • The ability to toggle strobing without software
  • Curved for improved immersion in first-person titles
  • No larger than 24" diagonal
  • Greater-than-1080p resolution
It took a long time before something ticked (almost) all the boxes on my little approval form. Enter the Samsung CFG70 gaming monitors. There's two models, a 24-inch (C24FG70) and a 27-inch (C27FG70) and I went for the higher-DPI 24-inch model as they are identical aside from the size. I don't really have room for a 27-inch monitor anyway.

So the CFG70 actually ticks all of the boxes above except the last one. It uses an SVA panel in 1920x1080 resolution with an 1800R curvature, coupled with a "QLED" (quantum dot + LED) "impulsive scanning" backlight that is synchronized to screen refreshes. Its scanning backlight can be disabled, or set to "Faster" or "Fastest" modes, adjusting the length of the strobe and accordingly the motion clarity and final perceived brightness. It has a DisplayPort and two HDMI inputs, and it has a great joystick-type control mechanism for the OSD. 1080p resolution isn't great, but my graphics card (a hand-me-down R9 290X) can't drive higher resolutions all that well anyway.

The arrival
I ordered the CFG70 in early February, but I didn't really get to play with it until the end of the month due to personal stuff going on. When I finally did get it set up, it just completely blew me away. I mean this sincerely—as someone with a lot of experience across a wide range of displays, including high-quality CRTs, various types of IPS and VA LCDs, and even OLED TVs, it completely knocked my socks off. I did a quick-and-dirty "calibration" using Lagom.nl's LCD test images, and after dialing in the brightness, contrast, and gamma settings, it looked better than any monitor I've ever seen. It looks so good that when my aforementioned friend saw it, she immediately went home ordered one herself.

I'm not kidding, it feels like a true next-generation display technology. It feels like moving from mono to stereo audio. It's the feeling I was expecting (and didn't get) from OLEDs. Colors are incredibly saturated and vibrant, yet there's no banding or dithering in gradients, nor any loss of detail in colorful areas. It almost looks oversaturated, but none of the details are lost; it's not "blown out". The contrast is outstanding, too. Even when viewing games with bright, glowing elements alongside darker, obscured areas, I could make out every fine detail. Aside from the relatively low resolution, I had not even a nitpick to make.

Using the CFG70 made games so much more enjoyable. One of the first things I loaded up on it was last year's Doom, and playing it on the new Samsung was so much better than on the old Asus. It's difficult to even describe the difference. I've loved Id's Megatexture technology since it debuted in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and it is put to great use in Doom. Having the high contrast and rich colors of the CFG70 really let me appreciate the hard work of the game's art team. I also played perennial favorite Phantasy Star Online 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, both games full of bright colors and fast action. Here, too, the CFG70 excelled.

You might notice I've made nary a mention to this point of the CFG70's Freesync function. To tell you the truth, aside from a brief test I never used it. You can't use the strobing backlight at the same time as Freesync, and that essentially means I don't get to use Freesync. I have used Freesync and G-Sync before, and while I appreciate them, I don't think they have any place on a serious desktop gaming setup where there's little reason not to push for the (in my opinion!) obviously superior blur reduction modes. Your mileage may vary of course.

The fall
Anyway, less than a month after I unboxed the thing I was grinding away in PSO2 and abruptly noticed a weird blue or purple discoloration in a dark area of the screen. As I moved further into a dark place in-game, the discoloration began to affect more and more of the screen. I finished the quest I was on, at that time suspecting my (very old) graphics card. However, when I alt-tabbed out of the game, I noticed it was affecting my desktop background. Fearing the worst, I switched inputs to my Wii U that was connected to one of the CFG70's HDMI inputs and immediately noticed the same discoloration in Zelda.

I shut everything down, reset the monitor's settings, changed cables, changed ports, and finally had to conclude that the monitor had simply failed. I was less than a week outside of my 30-day return period from Newegg at this point. I went through the lengthy process to create a support ticket on Samsung's website only to be given a ticket number and told that I would have to call in to the phone support line. I did, and the person on the other end gave me surprisingly little trouble as they created a repair order and sent me the shipping label electronically. I boxed up the monitor in its original box and mailed it off to be repaired.

There were a few things about this process that I found unusual. First of all, I wasn't sending it to a Samsung location, but instead a company called "Creative Vision Electronics" in New Jersey. Creative Vision emailed me to let me know they had received the monitor and e-mailed me again to let me know that they had replaced the control board and that they would be shipping it off. I actually appreciated the frank disclosure of the repairs that were done, but not as much as I would appreciate it later.

When the monitor came back some two weeks later, I unpacked it and hooked it up, and all seemed well, at first. After around an hour of using the monitor I noticed some serious flickering rainbow artifacting in the top 2% or so of the display. I immediately tested it using the Wii and confirmed that it was, again, a fault in the monitor. I at first resolved to ignore it, because it was pretty minor, but either it quickly got worse or I quickly became more sensitive to it. After a few hours, I got on the phone with Samsung again.

You cannot be serious
This time, I reached a real moron. He couldn't find a record of my last call, he didn't understand the problem, and he didn't understand the implications of the testing that I had done and was doing with him on the phone. On the web form, when you submit a service request, there's a place to upload image or video files to show the problem. However, this idiot insisted that they never accept images or video from customers because they could be a virus.

I should have hung up and called back, which is what I usually do when I get an aggressively ignorant customer service representative. I didn't though, because after 15 minutes of going around with this guy he finally said "well I'll just create a new service order for you." Except he forgot to send me the shipping label. I had to call back and talk to someone else to get that created. Thankfully he DID give me the reference number so I was able to move through the process quickly.

But I know that this guy didn't understand the problem because two weeks later I got the service report e-mail from Creative Vision and it listed the problem as "appearance item defect" and the resolution was "inspection." Oh, hell no. Because I had no way to contact Creative Vision directly, I called Samsung and spoke to a very nice lady who immediately understood the problem. However, as it was late (~3pm Central) on a Friday I wasn't sure she could do anything about it. Oh no, she assured me, she would get the site manager for the repair company on the phone and make sure it didn't get shipped out.

I was impressed, but skeptical. I've been promised great things by low-level support staff before. She put me on hold for about 15 minutes and finally came back and said that she didn't get ahold of the manager but that she left him a voice mail. I told her that I also had a video of the problem (9MB). She gave me an e-mail address (with a sea.samsung.com domain; I guess Samsung's monitor support is in Southeast Asia somewhere) for me to send my video to, and promised that she would forward it along to the manager at Creative Vision as long as I e-mailed it within the next hour. I said "Ma'am it's already in your inbox," and she said "oh it's not my inbox but I will have it checked right away." Sure, whatever.

All quiet on the Western front
As you no doubt already expect, I received no further communication from Samsung until the monitor showed up on my doorstep the next week. I rapidly unboxed it and found that it was absolutely filthy. I mean, it was literally covered in dirt. The back of the monitor was all scratched up, and the baseplate was so dirty that when I took it out of the box and tilted it over a sheet of dirt (or dust) slid off of it. Well, whatever, it's dirty. I'm dirty, I don't care. The surface of the display itself is fine and I don't care if the back of it is scratched up. What I DO care about is whether it was actually fixed. I hooked it up, and it was immediately obvious that it was not fixed. In fact, the problem had gotten worse. Now the upper ~10% of the screen was flickering rainbow colors. Furious, I immediately called Samsung.

Now let me give you some background here. While I can be a little blunt at times, overall I'm a really nice guy. I've worked phone customer service and tech support before. I've also worked retail sales and food service for a decade. I know what those kinds of jobs are like, and I don't give anyone a hard time that doesn't deserve it. All of this is simply to say that I am usually much more polite when speaking to customer service people than they deserve.

So when I called up, furious, I spoke quietly and calmly to the young man on the line. He said "what's the deal?" and I said "man, I'm not even sure where to start with this," to which he replied "well tell me the whole story, I don't get off for 5 hours." So I did. After around 10 minutes of me going on about the debacle he was like "so I'm gonna escalate you to a supervisor, because this ain't right." Great, I thought. Maybe I can finally get a working monitor. Keep in mind that I placed my order at Newegg on February 9th, and it was at this time the second week of May.

Except as it turns out, Samsung doesn't do escalations the usual way. Instead of waiting on hold to speak to a supervisor, or "level 2" service tech, you have to wait for a callback. When does the callback come? Who knows! What number will it come from? No idea! The nice kid I was talking to gave me the option of excluding certain time periods or dates from the valid callback times -- wait, dates?! Yes, that's right, it could be up to a week before they get back to me. Really?!

Yeah, really
Well alright, whatever it takes to get this resolved. Sure, they can call me anytime. It's fine. So I waited a week. No call. After seven days had gone by, I called back in on the 8th day. I said, yeah, I'm waiting for a callback from escalations and I haven't heard a thing. The girl I spoke to at that time literally told me "I don't see anything about that in here." I was not pleased. I told her, "I'm not angry with you, you've done nothing wrong at all. But, I want to talk to your boss. The person directly over you." She, perhaps detecting the carefully-moderated tone of quiet lividity in my voice, said "o-okay" and put me on hold.

After a few minutes she came back to profusely apologize saying that this is highly irregular and that her boss will speak to me, but it might be a while, because he's busy. Would I accept a callback? No. I'll wait. Thanks. All in all it took him 20 minutes to get to me which I suppose gave the girl a nice little break (even if she probably did get in trouble due to my actions. Sorry Merdet.)

When her boss finally got around to talking to me he sounded like the absolute stereotype of the free-wheeling manager who "doesn't have time to sweat the small stuff." You know this guy. I asked him if he had my information there in front of him and his response was a very flippant "sure I got it, what's the deal?" Man, I laid into this dude. I won't go into the full details of what I told him but in the end he told me he was going to walk over to the office of the escalations people "and lay [my file] on their desk." I said "what, like you printed it out?" and he says "yeah!" Man, whatever.

He left and came back after another 5-10 minutes and assured me that I would get a callback within 24 hours. I told him, "dude, if I don't get a call by this time tomorrow I am gonna be so hot." His response? "Yeah, I'm sure." But I let it go, I was too hot under the collar already; didn't want to say something I would later regret. So I thanked him for his time and he apologized perfunctorily and we disconnected with at least the illusion of courtesy. And thus, the waiting game yet again.

I know all there is to know
If you're still reading by this point you have probably already guessed what happened. Or rather, what didn't happen. That is, I didn't get a callback within 24 hours. I even gave him an extra day. On that second day, I got an e-mail saying "Reminder - Please ship your product for repair." WHAT? I never got an airbill, I never got an incident reference number, or anything! I called back, and when the lad asked me "what can I help you with today?" I asked him, "well, can you see my file there?" and his response after a few seconds and audible keystrokes was a very alarmed "ooh" like he'd just watched someone face plant on concrete. I said, "can you tell me what the last thing you see there is?" and he replied "well, you're waiting on a call back from our escalations department?" and I said "yeah. It's been a week and a half. Please transfer me there now. I refuse to wait for a callback that is never coming."

He put up a token resistance, but I was firm, and shortly he did agree to transfer me to the escalations department after cautioning me that I might be on hold a very long time. I was on hold for a little over an hour. The person that finally picked up the phone was very polite, if unsympathetic. That's fine with me, I don't need you to care, I just need you to DO SOMETHING. He apologized for the wait time and explained that they normally do callbacks so that customers don't have to wait on hold for an hour. I snarked "you'd rather them never get their issues resolved?" To his credit, he side-stepped that and asked me to tell him the whole story again, which I did (another 15 minutes), and after all that he has the gall to say "well do you think you could let us try to repair it again?"

I just laughed. At this point the entire experience had been so ridiculous that I just laughed aloud. He started laughing too. Finally I said "yeah man, sure. Send me another label and let's repair it, but if it isn't fixed properly this time, and it doesn't STAY fixed, I want a different monitor or a refund." He said "yeah, that definitely will be an option." So alright, one last try. He sent me the airbill and I had it mailed out that day.

I got the e-mail alerting me that Creative Vision had recieved my monitor on May 22nd, and then early on the 23rd I got an e-mail from "Karen". (Name changed to protect the guilty.) Her e-mail signature identifies her as a Samsung Care Administrator from Samsung's Enterprise Business Division, and her e-mail address includes the string "samsungb2bsupport". I'm not a business customer, but sure, let's roll with it.

"Karen" informs me that my "model l LC24FG70FQNXZA serial number [redacted]​ has been apprroved for exchange" [sic] and asks for my physical address so they can send me a replacement unit. I guess they decided to give up on repairing it. I had a bit of a dilemma at this point, because when I said "a different monitor" I really meant "a different model", not "another one of these." That's because researching on the web had led me to the conclusion that this problem is rather widespread on this model. Just search for "CFG70 purple pixel issue".

Still, this seemed like progress—if nothing else I strongly prefer e-mail interactions with support personnel over phone interactions. I replied to her with my address, and then heard nothing at all for 8 days. So, I e-mailed her again asking for an update. The next day she replies that my "order" has not been sent, and that she's going to look into it. In another e-mail just minutes later she says that her "team reached out" and that my "order" is now being processed, and should be delivered by "the middle of next week" (although she couldn't give me a tracking number.) So that means that she or someone else in the chain forgot to send out my replacement monitor and that if I didn't check up on it it would have never been sent. Grand.

That was on June 1st. On the 7th (this past Wednesday), I recieved the monitor in mint condition, an unopened retail package. It included the color calibration report (my new unit had a much worse max deltaE than the original unit) and everything. I noticed that the plastic used on the casing for the monitor's arm was much lower quality, and that the screws for attaching the base to the arm were much larger. These things, along with the much later (sequentially) serial number, gave me the impression that it must be a new revision.

Hopeful, I made space at my battlestation and hooked up the new monitor. After another ghetto calibration at Lagom.nl, it was working perfectly. I loaded up Phantasy Star Online 2, played a bit, then loaded up my latest game du jour, Black Desert Online. Almost exactly seven hours after I unboxed it, at 12:30 AM on Thursday, it abruptly failed in the exact same way as the first unit. I was almost in tears. I did test to make sure it was the monitor, but I (and likely you) already knew the answer.

The end of patience
I e-mailed "Karen" immediately, at around 1:00 AM on Thursday morning gently explaining that I was very upset and that I will need a refund. I also included some pictures and a couple of videos. Unsurprisingly, I got no reply. Recalling my earlier experience with this person, I e-mailed her this past afternoon to ask if she received my previous e-mail. She replied a few minutes later informing me that she did not receive my previous e-mail, but that she would escalate the issue to get approval for my refund. Riiight.

All of this has been an enormous waste of time. It would be so easy to just blow it off for so many other products, but the monitor is so damn brilliant! It makes this experience all the more bitter every time I get to briefly use my monitor and enjoy the best picture quality I have ever been able to game on. Further twisting the knife is that there is no other monitor on the market with this featureset. Samsung not only has the monopoly on QLED-backlit 144Hz VA monitors with blur reduction, but they only sell one model (well, two, counting the C27) with this featureset.

So that's where I'm at. I'll post in the thread when my "Care Administrator" gets back to me. Assuming that happens without me having to prod her again. Heh.
 
Firestarter
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 3:15 am

well if you went through the trouble of typing all this up, maybe you should share it on twitter or reddit or something. I don't suppose many Samsung people are monitoring these forums..
 
DrCR
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 3:19 am

This is why I'm still plugging away with an oldie but goodie panel that's approaching a decade old at this point -- it seems the most awesome monitors of the current era (for gaming, not prosumers per se) have awful reports re QA.
 
RAGEPRO
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 3:35 am

Firestarter wrote:
well if you went through the trouble of typing all this up, maybe you should share it on twitter or reddit or something. I don't suppose many Samsung people are monitoring these forums..
Mostly I just wanted to vent about it, heh. I also thought it'd be good to collect my thoughts in one place.

I was going to do a mini-review of the monitor for the site but NEVERMIND, I SUPPOSE.

DrCR wrote:
This is why I'm still plugging away with an oldie but goodie panel that's approaching a decade old at this point -- it seems the most awesome monitors of the current era (for gaming, not prosumers per se) have awful reports re QA.
Yeah, I was really into that Eizo FG2421 monitor until I heard it had really serious QA problems. Surprising and disappointing from Eizo of all people.
 
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 6:05 am

Wow! :o

I question your "best monitor" bit, given that you received two obviously defective new units in a row.

The general feeling I've had about Samsung these past couple of years is that they don't give a sh*t about quality any more. Or at least, it's pretty far down the list of priorities. The 840 EVO fiasco and splody-gate (both the phones and the washing machines) seem like part of a corporate culture that encourages overly aggressive engineering and/or rushing things to market before they've got all the kinks ironed out.

Samsung remains on my "avoid" list, where they've been since the 840 EVO SSD incident (I own 3 of those turkeys). My original plan was to boycott their products for 12-18 months, but I keep reading stuff about them that makes me push that date further out. At this point I figure we'll be well into 2018 before I'm willing to consider purchasing another Samsung product, and even then it'll only happen if they offer compelling advantages in features or price/performance.

I'd like to share my own recent customer service experience, with another Korean electronics manufacturer: LG. The wireless charging on my G4 smartphone stopped working. Phone was barely still in warranty. Filled out the repair form on their web site describing the issue, uploaded a PDF scan of my receipt. Within minutes I received an e-mail with a return shipping label. Boxed it up and dropped it off at the nearest FedEx location. One week later, I had the repaired phone in my hands (they replaced the main logic board). That was basically two days shipping each way, plus a weekend, plus one day for them to turn around the repair. While I'd certainly have preferred that the phone not develop a defect in the first place, LG will be getting my business again.

Interesting side note on LG: I didn't realize until recently that they are the same company that was known as Goldstar back in the '80s and '90s. Probably best known (at least here in the US) for making cheap crappy CRT monitors and other consumer electronics back then. Guess they got their act together at some point; they seem to be decent these days.
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Duct Tape Dude
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 7:02 am

That was an epic... epic. Sorry to hear about your woes.

I hesitantly bought a Samsung monitor recently and called Samsung support to ask about monitor/driver issues. The call was impressive, they have an automated robot instead of a "Press 1 for x, press 2 for y." I gave a one sentence description of my problem and they knew my monitor model based on my phone number, and got me to a human in about 30 seconds. The associate spoke in normal-people-speak instead of tech-support-speak and after telling him what I'd already troubleshot, he took an extra minute to look a few things up before offering to email me a shipping label to RMA it for free (though it'd take two weeks total). I declined for reasons. The whole thing took less than 5 minutes.

Their support seems upgraded from years ago but I agree, their products are slipping.
 
Chrispy_
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 7:24 am

This is typical Samsung.

I love their products but man, they are quite possibly the worst tech company out there. You are not CUSTOMERS, you are ignorant VICTIMS.
Congratulations, you've noticed that this year's signature is based on outdated internet memes; CLICK HERE NOW to experience this unforgettable phenomenon. This sentence is just filler and as irrelevant as my signature.
 
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 7:36 am

Chrispy_ wrote:
This is typical Samsung.

I love their products but man, they are quite possibly the worst tech company out there. You are not CUSTOMERS, you are ignorant VICTIMS.

I don't particularly love their products.

840 EVO? Train wreck.

My old Samsung cell phone (pre-smartphone days)? Hardware was rock-solid, but the firmware was a mess. Numerous glitches, never fixed. (I am fairly certain the issues weren't due to a hardware defect with my unit because my wife knows someone else who had the same model and they experienced the exact same problems.)

I would also hazard a guess that there are hundreds of thousands of people (out of the 2+ million former Galaxy Note 7 owners) who don't love Samsung's products any more either. Ditto the people who bought the washing machines that fly apart if they become unbalanced during the spin cycle.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
 
TwistedKestrel
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 10:08 am

Very interesting. Samsung has been hit and miss for me in the past, but since I was very interested in the CHG70 this is a pretty strong suggestions to not buy it at launch and wait to hear customer feedback on it.
 
RAGEPRO
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 4:11 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Chrispy_ wrote:
This is typical Samsung.

I love their products but man, they are quite possibly the worst tech company out there. You are not CUSTOMERS, you are ignorant VICTIMS.

I don't particularly love their products.
just brew it! wrote:
Wow! :o

I question your "best monitor" bit, given that you received two obviously defective new units in a row.
Well, I think what Chrispy_ means is perhaps what I meant too, which is that they tend to make standout products with tantalizing specs. I actually also got burned on an 840 EVO, and had three close friends who bought Note 7s, so I'm well aware of Samsung's QA problems, heh. I just didn't know they also had the worst service imaginable.

As far as the "best monitor" bit, well, like I said, when it was working it felt like a next-generation display experience. But yeah, "when it was working." Ugh.

just brew it! wrote:
I'd like to share my own recent customer service experience, with another Korean electronics manufacturer: LG. The wireless charging on my G4 smartphone stopped working. Phone was barely still in warranty. Filled out the repair form on their web site describing the issue, uploaded a PDF scan of my receipt. Within minutes I received an e-mail with a return shipping label. Boxed it up and dropped it off at the nearest FedEx location. One week later, I had the repaired phone in my hands (they replaced the main logic board). That was basically two days shipping each way, plus a weekend, plus one day for them to turn around the repair. While I'd certainly have preferred that the phone not develop a defect in the first place, LG will be getting my business again.
That's really heartening to hear given that I was considering moving to an LG phone soon myself. I also have an LG 24UD58 monitor that has been flawless so far, but nice to know that if I have an issue it will probably be a better experience than with Samsung, heh.
just brew it! wrote:
Interesting side note on LG: I didn't realize until recently that they are the same company that was known as Goldstar back in the '80s and '90s. Probably best known (at least here in the US) for making cheap crappy CRT monitors and other consumer electronics back then. Guess they got their act together at some point; they seem to be decent these days.
Yeah, I had a Goldstar CD-ROM back in the day that was not the best product I ever had. It frequently wouldn't read discs; you'd have to eject it and then insert it again. It was a REALLY early slot-load model, and I guess there was some problem with the spindle mechanism. Once it started to read the disc it worked fine until you ejected it.
 
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 4:33 pm

RAGEPRO wrote:
Well, I think what Chrispy_ means is perhaps what I meant too, which is that they tend to make standout products with tantalizing specs. I actually also got burned on an 840 EVO, and had three close friends who bought Note 7s, so I'm well aware of Samsung's QA problems, heh. I just didn't know they also had the worst service imaginable.

As far as the "best monitor" bit, well, like I said, when it was working it felt like a next-generation display experience. But yeah, "when it was working." Ugh.

Anyone can make an amazing sounding product on paper. Fewer can make a product that actually lives up to those specs in real life. If you can't manufacture it in a way that delivers that performance consistently and reliably, it isn't worth squat.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
 
RAGEPRO
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 4:52 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Anyone can make an amazing sounding product on paper. Fewer can make a product that actually lives up to those specs in real life. If you can't manufacture it in a way that delivers that performance consistently and reliably, it isn't worth squat.
You're not wrong about that for sure.

There's another side to it that I think you're not considering, though. In the case of a commodity product with an established design and featureset, you need someone to come along with a product that breaks the mold, a product that is ambitious in some way. Even if that product doesn't live up to its promise for whatever reason, if the market shows interest, that may lead other vendors to move in that direction as well.

Basically what I'm saying is that Samsung has courage. :P (The real type, not the moronic Apple type.)

If I could get one of these monitors that worked I'd be pretty happy. Not completely happy, because I paid $330 and Samsung is now selling this monitor for $270—a rather telling fact in my opinion. In fact, if they get back to me and offer to replace it again or something, there's no way I'm going to take it without a $50 check. That's the least they can do to compensate me for my time at this point. Nevermind the five months of warranty that I'm out.

But yeah, it's crap that the monitor has such garbage build quality and a consistent problem across two separate revisions. But it's mostly crap because the monitor is actually amazing. If it was an unremarkable or mediocre monitor I don't think anybody would really care, and that applies to the majority of Samsung's products I think. If the Note 7 hadn't been this huge flagship product it wouldn't have been half the debacle that it was.

You know, Korean products have suffered the stigma of poor quality for a long time. Companies like LG and Hyundai are turning that perception around; it's a shame Samsung hasn't gotten the memo.
 
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 5:08 pm

About 2 years ago I bought a Samsung 3-door fridge (bottom freeze zone, french doors on the fridge stuff), and have no reasons to complain. Yes, the ice-makers are noisy, but that's part of ice-makers.
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 5:28 pm

RAGEPRO wrote:
Basically what I'm saying is that Samsung has courage. :P (The real type, not the moronic Apple type.)

Introducing the original iPhone took courage. I agree that lately, they're mostly coasting on their reputation/aura/RDF (whatever you want to call it) though.

I also disagree with you on the "Samsung has courage" part. If they had courage they would've stood behind the product. If they leave customers like you twisting in the wind when their gamble doesn't work out, that's not courage, because they're not shouldering the bulk of the risk.

At least they seem to have done the right thing for their Note 7 customers, but that still doesn't seem like courage to me; it seems more like carelessness, followed by damage control.

And the 840 EVO seems to have been a pretty clear case of "Just ship it!"... they gambled on pushing planar TLC flash to its limits, and lost the bet. If they'd done proper testing they would've known the 840 EVO was problematic.

And how do you not test a top-load washing machine with unbalanced loads? Every washing machine I've ever used shuts off if things start to get out of hand in the spin cycle. You don't blow the machine apart and send shrapnel flying through walls -- that's not acceptable!
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 5:30 pm

just brew it! wrote:
I also disagree with you on the "Samsung has courage" part. If they had courage they would've stood behind the product. If they leave customers like you twisting in the wind when their gamble doesn't work out, that's not courage, that's just greedy/sleazy.

At least they seem to have done the right thing for their Note 7 customers, but that still doesn't seem like courage to me; it seems more like carelessness, followed by damage control.

And the 840 EVO seems to have been a pretty clear case of "Just ship it!"... they gambled on pushing planar TLC flash to its limits, and lost the bet. If they'd done proper testing they would've known the 840 EVO was problematic.
Yeah, that's all true. I guess mostly I'm just really bitter about the fact that nobody else has a product that competes with this thing on raw specs yet. Haha. :)
 
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 5:36 pm

Sorry, looks like I edited my post after you quoted it. But the gist of it remains the same.
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 6:45 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Interesting side note on LG: I didn't realize until recently that they are the same company that was known as Goldstar back in the '80s and '90s.
Goldstar merged with Lucky plastics in 1958, hence the name "Lucky Goldstar" or LG. They sold transistor radios, televisions and VCRs for decades before coining their current advertising slogan "Life's Good"
RAGEPRO wrote:
Yeah, I had a Goldstar CD-ROM back in the day that was not the best product I ever had.
They still make optical drives themselves, and in a joint venture with Hitachi you may have heard of called Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HL-DT-ST). Oh dear it looks like their webpage at http://www.hlds.co.kr got hit with ransomware.
just brew it! wrote:
And the 840 EVO seems to have been a pretty clear case of "Just ship it!"... they gambled on pushing planar TLC flash to its limits, and lost the bet. If they'd done proper testing they would've known the 840 EVO was problematic.
Consumer SSDs are supposed to retain their data power-off for 1 year even at the end of rated life, which is why many SSD manufacturers quote ridiculously small TB written endurance specs. Samsung though did not actually specify a write endurance for the 840 Evo--only a 3-year warranty, and the firmware fix for the unexpectedly short data retention (leading to difficult and slow reads) was to refresh the cells more frequently which of course wears them out even faster. Pushing the envelope of planar one last time at least did lead them to the best-in-class 40nm 3D NAND they use today, and they would've probably had to withhold the product for over a year of extra testing before discovering it didn't meet the designed retention life. Even then they would've had to ship it anyway, just with the firmware fix. Intel had to get burned by Prescott too before they turned away from Tejas.

Enterprise SSDs aren't intended for power-off data retention so under worst-case storage conditions can begin to lose data in as little as 7 days. But they are designed that way.

Let's just say that (opposite of Apple #courage) their engineering is brave and warrantying sleazy?
 
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 6:49 pm

bfg-9000 wrote:
and they would've probably had to withhold the product for over a year of extra testing before discovering it didn't meet the designed retention life.

It didn't take a year for the slowdowns to manifest.
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 6:50 pm

RAGEPRO wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
I also disagree with you on the "Samsung has courage" part. If they had courage they would've stood behind the product. If they leave customers like you twisting in the wind when their gamble doesn't work out, that's not courage, that's just greedy/sleazy.

At least they seem to have done the right thing for their Note 7 customers, but that still doesn't seem like courage to me; it seems more like carelessness, followed by damage control.

And the 840 EVO seems to have been a pretty clear case of "Just ship it!"... they gambled on pushing planar TLC flash to its limits, and lost the bet. If they'd done proper testing they would've known the 840 EVO was problematic.
Yeah, that's all true. I guess mostly I'm just really bitter about the fact that nobody else has a product that competes with this thing on raw specs yet. Haha. :)


Samsung's specs aren't worth anything until it works in the wild. It reminds me of the CF791 - 100Hz FreeSync ultrawide where FreeSync only works without corruption over 80 FPS. It's a shame, because their raw panel technology appears to be better than LG or AUO.
 
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 7:22 pm

What an amazing write up. Thanks for sharing.
 
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 9:14 pm

RAGEPRO, I have the exact same monitor and had the exact same "purple in the black" issue. I'll tell you how i fixed it but you're not going to like the answer... once I stopped running at 144hz and switched to 120hz, I have not had it happen again.

"But you can't use 144hz!" - yeah I know, but like RAGEPRO said, it's such a good looking monitor and even at 120hz, I'm a happy camper. In the grand scheme of things, only being able to use 120hz is a pretty good problem to have.
Last edited by slavik6 on Sat Jun 10, 2017 11:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 10:27 pm

DrCR wrote:
This is why I'm still plugging away with an oldie but goodie panel that's approaching a decade old at this point -- it seems the most awesome monitors of the current era (for gaming, not prosumers per se) have awful reports re QA.


It's why I'm still rocking a Dell 2408WFP-HC as well. I love the 1920x1200 resolution, it's a nice S-PVA panel, with DisplayPort (older DP, but still) and it's built solid as a rock. Yeah it probably has minor input lag and isn't a fast-twitch gaming monitor, but I can't imagine it ever, ever dying on me.

I don't feel Samsung's quality control has been up to snuff in the past few years; I hear plenty about mediocre capacitors failing in them all of the time, and I have a 22" 1680x1050 Samsung on my SO's desk because I got it for free (non-working), opened it up and along with a buddy, replaced its failed capacitors with much higher quality Japanese Rubycons, which solved the problem. It's a crying shame too, because back in the CRT monitor days, they made great equipment.
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sat Jun 10, 2017 11:17 pm

Just wanted to post here, I have very similar requirements for a monitor.

I have a BenQ XL2720Z and its been a great monitor for about a year now... the only monitor I like more than my 12 year old HP p1230 CRT (which I actually switched back to for a while before buying this BenQ).

The only issues I have with it are all the standard TN panel issues. The colors just aren't that appealing to look at and the viewing angles and color shifting leave a lot to be desired (though not as bad as my much older Asus 25" LCD). Overall its a great quality TN panel, but it is still TN.

The Blur Reduction features and the flexibility of using software tweaks to adjust the monitor's internal timing settings make it highly appealing, especially since it is one of the few monitors out there that will let you use them at 60Hz when playing older games or hooking up an older computer (or presumably a modern game console). There is a noticeable flicker, but it doesn't bother me and the clarity is wonderful (especially coming from 60Hz with no strobing).

Anyway, if you ever find another monitor that checks all of the boxes (especially if one shows up that is 2560x1440 or something similar), please post here or even PM me. I'm content with what I have, but once in a while I like to look around to see if any fancy new monitors have been put out that actually have it all. The Samsung you bought looks to be nearly perfect on paper, but quality control issues and terrible support completely ruin it for me.

Hopefully soon will start seeing screens with instantaneous response times (OLED or something equivalent) and blur reduction along with all of the other features you mentioned. I don't care much about Gsync or Freesync myself as long as it really truly is an upgrade from a good CRT with no exceptions.
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sun Jun 11, 2017 12:17 am

slavik6 wrote:
RAGEPRO, I have the exact same monitor and had the exact same "purple in the black" issue. I'll tell you how i fixed it but you're not going to like the answer... once I stopped running at 144hz and switched to 120hz, I have not had it happen again.
Yeah, I've read that fixes it for some people. Not for me, at least, not this time (I didn't test my first one.) In fact, even disabling MPRT mode and moving to 60 Hz HDMI input doesn't fix it for me.
ozzuneoj wrote:
I have a BenQ XL2720Z and its been a great monitor for about a year now... the only monitor I like more than my 12 year old HP p1230 CRT (which I actually switched back to for a while before buying this BenQ).

The only issues I have with it are all the standard TN panel issues. The colors just aren't that appealing to look at and the viewing angles and color shifting leave a lot to be desired (though not as bad as my much older Asus 25" LCD). Overall its a great quality TN panel, but it is still TN.

The Blur Reduction features and the flexibility of using software tweaks to adjust the monitor's internal timing settings make it highly appealing, especially since it is one of the few monitors out there that will let you use them at 60Hz when playing older games or hooking up an older computer (or presumably a modern game console). There is a noticeable flicker, but it doesn't bother me and the clarity is wonderful (especially coming from 60Hz with no strobing).
Yeah, that BenQ actually uses the same panel as my VG248QE did, I believe. Great monitor for gaming, but the picture quality is just barely tolerable in 2017. Like you said, basically.
ozzuneoj wrote:
Anyway, if you ever find another monitor that checks all of the boxes (especially if one shows up that is 2560x1440 or something similar), please post here or even PM me. I'm content with what I have, but once in a while I like to look around to see if any fancy new monitors have been put out that actually have it all. The Samsung you bought looks to be nearly perfect on paper, but quality control issues and terrible support completely ruin it for me.

Hopefully soon will start seeing screens with instantaneous response times (OLED or something equivalent) and blur reduction along with all of the other features you mentioned. I don't care much about Gsync or Freesync myself as long as it really truly is an upgrade from a good CRT with no exceptions.
Don't worry, you'll see a post about any suitable monitor on the front page of the site, I assure you.
 
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sun Jun 11, 2017 12:48 am

just brew it! wrote:
It didn't take a year for the slowdowns to manifest.
840 Evo wide availability in major markets August 2013. First reports of speed degradation reported September 2014. First firmware fix October 2014, 2nd one April 2015.

840 non-Evo was released even earlier in October 2012 and didn't get reports of speed degradation until after the newer 840 Evo did so about two years later. However owners were hosed with no firmware fix until June 2016.

My opinion is the cutting edge can always be dangerous, and I don't doubt the next gen QLED will be more reliable. Early adopters sometimes get hit with more than just a high price. But then I just retired my last CRT from daily use and moved to VA panels, which I prefer over IPS for mostly static images. I do really like plasma TVs so am hoping for wider availability of OLED soon.
 
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sun Jun 11, 2017 1:05 am

bfg-9000 wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
Interesting side note on LG: I didn't realize until recently that they are the same company that was known as Goldstar back in the '80s and '90s.
Goldstar merged with Lucky plastics in 1958, hence the name "Lucky Goldstar" or LG. They sold transistor radios, televisions and VCRs for decades before coining their current advertising slogan "Life's Good"

Samsung though did not actually specify a write endurance for the 840 Evo--only a 3-year warranty, and the firmware fix for the unexpectedly short data retention (leading to difficult and slow reads) was to refresh the cells more frequently which of course wears them out even faster. Pushing the envelope of planar one last time at least did lead them to the best-in-class 40nm 3D NAND they use today,
[/quote]

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840EVO was not Sammys last planer TLC-They still selling 750EVO............
 
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sun Jun 11, 2017 4:47 am

I have to agree with just brew it, and Rage Pro's experience only reinforces my antipathy towards Samsung. This company does not respect its customers. Some of its low end TVs are positively bottom quality, a friend of mine had a panel burn out on one (a few months past warranty) and they offered to fix it for more than a new unit costs! I've got a 840 vanilla SSD - the one they didn't even recognize had the problem and took more than a year for their lousy "fix". My old Samsung Galaxy S2 phone turned me off android for life. Their "internet of things" ....security system, of all things, was a huge liability filled with crucial and DANGEROUS security holes.

This company does not deserve to be called an upper tier consumer electronics manufacturer, really... As far as quality is concerned they're suspect at best -depending on what you buy from them- and as far as technical support is concerned they're at the bottom of the heap.
 
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sun Jun 11, 2017 8:18 am

bfg-9000 wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
It didn't take a year for the slowdowns to manifest.

840 Evo wide availability in major markets August 2013. First reports of speed degradation reported September 2014. First firmware fix October 2014, 2nd one April 2015.

Pretty sure there were people who were seeing issues after just a few months of use, but I could be mis-remembering.

In any case, companies are supposed to do stress testing to find these kinds of issues. They could've easily taken a sample of drives, repeatedly re-written data to them to simulate a year of "typical" writes, then checked data retention and read performance after letting the drives sit for a month or so. This would've found the problem and only taken a couple of months, not an entire year. Even if the product had already been released by then, they could've gotten nearly a year's head start on the firmware "fix" and rolled it out before it became a serious issue for their customers.

In some ways it's a similar thing to what happened with the Note 7 - pushing the envelope, combined with insufficient testing/validation.
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sun Jun 11, 2017 9:07 am

HERETIC wrote:
840EVO was not Sammys last planer TLC-They still selling 750EVO............

Isn't that one based on previous-gen (larger cells) flash though? The leakage issues with TLC didn't become unmanageable until the last process shrink pushed things over the edge. That's why V-NAND/3D-NAND is such a big deal -- it allows flash chip storage densities to keep increasing, while keeping the size of individual cells large enough to prevent leakage from wreaking havoc with long-term data retention capabilities.
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Re: Samsung C24FG70—best monitor, worst support

Sun Jun 11, 2017 9:20 pm

I'm planning on purchasing a new monitor in the next few months and the Samsung C27FG70 was on my list. It was low on the list because of the low 1920x1080 resolution for a 27 inch monitor. I'm looking for one with 2560x1440 resolution and Freesync like the Asus MG278Q, 279Q or Nixeus EDG 27. The Samsung didn't check enough boxes for me but I'm going to avoid that brand in the near future. I had a 20" Samsung monitor back in 2005 and it lasted a several years without any problems. Hopefully they can get their QA problems worked out and become a reputable company again.

Also, I bought a Samsung 840 SSD (non EVO) and it's been very dependable. I saw there are new drivers for both versions of the 840. I might download those in case I'm having SSD issues and haven't noticed it. Thanks for all the info!

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