Samsung 32” UHD Professional LED Monitor (U32D970Q)

This review is going to be written from a different perspective than most of the other reviews. I bought this monitor to be used as a gaming monitor. I have only had high quality IPS monitors for the last five years. I was not willing to look at TN panel models. My most recent monitor was a 30 inch HP zr30w IPS panel that had 2560 X 1600 resolution. This was a very highly rated monitor when it came to market. Before that I had a 24 inch Dell Ultra Sharp IPS monitor with 1920 X 1200 resolution. With that as background I will start with the pros.1) The colors are very vibrant and vivid. I can see colors that I had never noticed in games I had played on the other two monitors. It was a definite noticeable improvement. I did not do a color calibration with third party equipment, but to my eyes the colors appeared accurate.2) The higher resolution allowed me to see things in those games that I had not seen before on the other monitors. I could easily see ribbing and stitching on clothing, individual facial hairs on faces, paint peeling on walls, etc. This resulted in a much more life like and immersive atmosphere that made playing the games more fun and enjoyable.3) The stand allowed for a full range of easy adjustments for swivel, pivot, portrait mode and height.4) The build, matte finish on the screen, the stand, even the buttons looked to be of high build quality and fit and finish.Now for the cons.1) High price. I was not willing to look at TN panels. At present the only other 31.5 inch 4k IPS monitors are either the first generation Asus or Dell models and the second generation models from Acer or BenQ. The first generation units are MST which is known to cause a lot of idiosyncratic problems like not waking up from sleep mode or only showing half the screen, etc. You can read about these in the online forums. Those units cost at least about the same price as this Samsung. The Acer and BenQ models cost about one thousand dollars, but have known issues with color uniformity, back light bleeding and mediocre color accuracy.2) Very Small Text. You will either have to do a lot of scaling if you read a lot of text or sit close to the screen and get eye strain. Scaling can be problematic with Windows 7 and 8. There is better support in the most recent Apple software if you have a new Apple computer.3) You will need a late model computer with high end graphic cards in SLI or Crossfire, not to mention a powerful CPU and at least about 1000 watt power supply unit. That will definitely cost a lot more than the average mainstream computer.Overall for me the pros outweighed the cons. If you are looking at this monitor for professional use you will probably be looking at different criteria to make your choice.Update 1/03/15I went into the control panel in Windows 7 and clicked on Appearance and Personalization. I then clicked on Make text and other items larger or smaller under the Display category. I then set the size to Larger - 150% and clicked Apply. You then have to restart windows and it worked perfectly. Text size is much easier to read now.

Like many others here I bought a couple of these for professional digital artwork. The monitor as a product is great, but as of this writing I've had one of them completely fail (bad motherboard) and a second one has started turning itself on and off randomly (most likely a power supply issue). If you're thinking of purchasing this, be sure to buy the extended warranty as the failure rate is quite high. It saddens me as we were going to purchase a few hundred for my business but with these many issues it will be back to Dell.

Warning first: Others claim this monitor worked with their Late 2013 Mac Pro but it did not with my base model 4c / D300 model. My first unit had significant flickering running at any resolution as did the replacement Amazon sent. Both have gone back.The Good: This is a beautiful monitor! Minus the issues with my Mac Pro the wider color gamut, size and resolution were fantastic for a designer and photographer. This did not have issues like the LG 4K monitor with color uniformity it was even across the screen. Also while the extreme corners/edges had some white contrast loss it was nothing to be concerned with.The Bad: The stand is very wobbly. It does provide great range of motion with title, swivel and height adjustments but just typing caused the screen to move on my desk. Might be best to put something under it to pad it a bit for shock absorption.

After owning this monitor for 5 years I'm sad to say that it has been a very mixed bag.The biggest issue is the power supply. It emits a pulsing high frequency whine when the monitor is on standby, very noticeable and annoying if you sleep in the same room. The noisy power supply has malfunctioned 2 or 3 times, making the monitor unusable.I'm in Iceland so shipping it to the US for repairs is not really an option, fortunately a local samsung branch could replace it but it cost hundreds of dollars and a long wait each time.The monitor is unusually heavy at 17 kgs (37.5 lbs). So heavy that most computer monitor stands are incompatible. The only one I found had very limited adjustability after setup. It was so heavy and had so much leverage due to being large that the mount basically bit through my desk. Fortunately, the monitor wasn't harmed but I never imagined that this purchase would lead me to buy a new desk, specially picking one with a hard top plate.It has caused a lot of trouble for a simple monitor.The old review is left here as an accurate portrayal of the honeymoon phase of owning this monitor.OLD REVIEW:TITLE: Beautiful monitor with everything you'd want besides deep blacksBODY: I wasn't sure whether I should have given it 4 or 5 stars but I'm leaning towards 4.5+. The screen is beautiful with an amazingly sleek design. Thin, nice looking bezel and a super sturdy stand with nice multi directional swiveling. The resolution is obviously 4k and thus super crisp and nice. The colors are amazing and the multiple color profiles are calibrated to extreme accuracy. Although I haven't pushed it to the max (it's pointless living in dark Iceland) the screen is very bright, even on relatively low settings so I imagine that if configured up to 100 you could easily use it in full daylight. Packaging was good, the monitor came in a large sturdy box that could obviously handle the journey from USA to Iceland, it included nicely designed and packaged calibration data, a display port cable and some goodies.There are two problems with the monitor that I have noticed.1. The blacks could be darker and I have two ghosts of brightness on the far left of the monitor which are mildly annoying especially when looking at low brightness content.2. The other very minor nuisance is that the pixel order seems to be non-typical. This is really only noticeable when looking at text with LCD cleartype-like systems enabled. This has the effect that before you reconfigure your system, the colors get separated from the characters, giving them a chromatic aberration like effect. After fixing it I have noticed that the change doesn't seem to apply to chrome's pdf viewer so the problem persists there and on rare occasions videos(youtubers) record computers with a more typical cleartype setting and the chromatic separation can be noticeable there.The price could of course be considered a con but I find it rather reasonable after the price drop considering the size and the quality.