Samsung Space Monitor 32 inch: big screen for small offices

Large monitors are perfect for many obvious reasons. They allow you to expand your digital workspace over a larger area and enlarge the details to make them more readable at a comfortable distance. The ultra-wide curved monitors provide an immersive experience by surrounding you with a screen. Once you've spent time working on a big screen, it's hard to get back to smaller screens.

But large monitors require large offices and tend to dominate the surface on which you place them. If you like to use your desk for other activities, a large monitor may leave little room for them.

Samsung's 32-inch $ 499 space monitor solves this big problem effectively: instead of using a standard monitor stand placed above your desk, it's endowed with an arm that attaches on the back of your desk to allow the screen to stay pushed out of the way when you do not want to use it.

Of course, you can buy a monitor arm for any other screen in order to spread it – Amazon offers a multitude of options, and a standard screw layout to mount them on your own screen – but Space's arm Monitor uniquely integrates with the screen to hide behind the panel in its upright position, allowing you to maximize the distance it pushes back to your desktop. Samsung claims that this design offers 40% more usable space on a desktop than standard monitor support for a display of the same size. It can actually sit flat against a wall, which is not an option for the vast majority of articulated arms that you can buy.

The supplied arm has channels for routing cables and the display comes with a unique HDMI cable and power cable to further reduce clutter. The arm has its limitations: it can not rotate the screen, it can not rotate the screen and it does not use the standard VESA editing system. You can not change the monitor if you want something different.

As for the actual display, it's a 32-inch 4K screen with thin frames at the top and sides. It's a VA panel, which is not as nice as IPS (not to mention OLED) for off-axis viewing, and it has an average brightness of 250 nits, which is fine for an office but does not win any prize. . The screen test with a Spyder 5 Pro display calibrator showed that the screen covers 100% of the SRGB spectrum and 83% of the Adobe RGB format. A response time of 4 ms and a refresh rate of 60 Hz mean that this screen will not be ideal for games, but is ideal for productivity and design work.

Out of the box, the screen was horribly calibrated, with faded colors and a lack of harsh contrast. After using the Spyder 5 Pro to calibrate the screen, it's much better, but the screen itself is definitely way. You really pay for the design with this monitor, not for the quality of the screen.

The screen also lacks USB-C connection. Instead, it relies only on one HDMI and one Mini DisplayPort. This makes it difficult to use with modern laptops, such as a MacBook Pro, which requires an electronic key adapter. There are no speakers either, which means you will have to use headphones or a set of external speakers (which cut a bit of space on your desk) for all its sound. .

One thing that would really make the space monitor sing would be tactile support since the arm allows you to pull the screen up to your desk up to the fingertips for tactile control. Unfortunately, this is not an option here.

Despite these disadvantages, I like to use the Space Monitor at my office a lot. This allows me to easily adjust its position and dismiss it completely when I want to do a job that does not require looking at a giant screen. I could achieve something similar with a different monitor and a third-party arm and enjoy greater flexibility, but I really appreciate the integrated feel that Samsung has got with this design.

And instead of loading an extra arm and an extra leg for that, Samsung put it in the box.

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