The evaluation of a LCD monitor is very tough, because many of the results are of the qualitative type, rather than the easier to measure quantitative type.

Dysfunctional Pixels
A property of LCD monitors that can be measured quantitatively is the number of broken pixels. LCD monitors are made up of millions of thin-film transistors. Thus, it is very common that, on a TFT LCD display, a few of these transistors might be damaged, where they might be seen as missing, discolored, or as lighted dots. By counting the number of obvious dysfunctional TFT's, it can used to help determine the quality of the manufacturing process of the LCD monitor. It must also be noted that each LCD monitor, even with the same brand and model, are made differently, so, while one may contain many of these dysfunctional TFT's, another might not contain any; therefore, this test is only a rough estimate of the quality of the product line.

The 180T exhibited no clear signs of these dysfunctional TFT's, which is a rough indication of the quality of this display.

Quantative Assessment
For the quality portion, I can safely say that the SyncMaster 180T has the best image quality, period. Its colors are the most vivid that I have ever seen on any monitor, regardless of LCD or CRT, and the images are extremely crisp. The whites are very bright, although, I do find them to be a little to the creamy side, and blacks are the best that I have seen on any LCD.

The viewing angles of the Samsung SyncMaster 180T are also the best that I've seen ever on a LCD monitor; no matter what angle you view the display at, you will always be able to see the contents of the screen. Like all LCD monitors, the more you are not directly at a 90-degree angle to the screen, the more the colors will become altered--the 180T was just a tad better than the Radius RAD-7 in this area, which I felt did a great job already.

Picture Scaling
Because the pixels on a LCD monitor are already defined, the recommended resolution and maximum resolution becomes more important on a LCD than a CRT. When the resolution is not at the recommended resolution, in the 180T's case, 1280x1024, the image must be stretched and blended to fit those defined pixels. I found that the SyncMaster 180T does a decent job in this area, but found it to be a little bit poorer than the Radius RAD-7--probably because of its larger screen size and that the same amount of blurring is easier to notice on a larger area. This shouldn't be too big of a problem since it's only in games that this feature becomes a small factor (not all video cards are capable of handling such high resolutions of 1280x1024) and running any LCD display in Windows at anything other than the recommended resolution is a death sentence for your eyes.

On-Screen Controls
The on-screen controls of the SyncMaster 180T, which I found to be a little hard and confusing to use, included the usual settings that you would find on mostly any monitor these days, such as contrast, brightness, and position. There are also some very unique and useful features that the SyncMaster 180T boasts, such as scaling settings. As mentioned before, when the monitor is running at a resolution other than the recommended setting, it will stretch (or scale) the image onto it specified pixels, thus, making the image blurrier than usual. The 180T allows the user to turn of this scaling, so that the images will just become smaller in relation to the resolution, thus, maintaining the sharpness and eliminating the need for blurring. I find this feature to be VERY useful, since I far prefer to have a sharper and easier-on-the-eyes image in exchange for size. The 180T also boasts an Auto-adjustment feature that is seen on other LCD monitors to automatically adjust the phase and coarseness of the image, which I find to do a very good job of making the image as sharp as possible.

Motion Blur
Finally, another property of LCD displays is that poor-quality displays tend to blur more as a side effect of rapid movement on the screen, such as mouse movement or turning in Quake III: Arena. This is because most LCD monitors are not able to refresh their screens as fast as an equivalent CRT monitor. This is frequently noticeable in older displays, or even on some newer displays. The Samsung SyncMaster 180T has virtually no noticeable motion-blurring--it has almost the same level as a CRT monitor, which usually never exhibits such behavior.

On to: Conclusion