Philips monitor is a piece of shit

If you're shopping for a monitor, there's one monitor that you should never ever buy: Philips.

First of all, don't be tempted by the the price. Because you're gonna get what you pay for. Go for something a little more expensive like Samsung or LG or BenQ, aim for a better deal.

The problem with Philips' monitor is not the hardware, but software. Yes my friend, no matter how wonderful your hardware is, if the software is crap, that shiny piece of hardware is a total useless.

Philips has a built-in software in its monitor called "SmartImage". What it does is it tries to calibrate the settings according to the environment you are in. I don't exactly know how it works, but it's basically tries to calibrate a little bit when you watch movies to this "Entertainment" mode,etc. Anyway, the software is really not needed. It's something that they add and you need to live with it.

When you seem to be working on document or spread sheet, it will try to do it's own settings, Lock the IO control and try to be smart.

The problem with their SmartImage software is the opposite - it's the DumbImage. I would also like to call that kind of software as a CrapImage.

When I first encountered the problem, I thought this was an easy fix. So I played a little bit with the Graphics settings, and the monitors appears to be fine.

After a while, it pops up again, do it's own calibration thing, and then locks the control. I can't even turned off the monitor and at that time, I thought this is probably the SmartImage software. I thought it could be removed, but it cannot!. It's embedded into the monitor and there's no way to control it.

So by now, I knew already that the software has a bug that let it run loose on a nasty infinite loop.

I called up a friend who's really good at PC fix, and he recommend me to return the monitor.

I wasn't really given up when I found a way to fool the monitor into thinking that I was doing some settings, and the stupid setting pop-ups (you know, those pop-ups when you try to adjust monitor brightness, Contrast, etc) would only reappear about 1/2 hour later.

Finally, the time has come. When the SmartImage trying to do its own thing, it goes into "Input" selection, and it selects "DVI" as the input. Since I'm using VGA, there's no way I could reset the input back!. And since the monitor controls are locked, there's nothing I can do except staring at the blank monitor looking at the warning that says "Please check your cable connector".

What a piece of shit.