Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Wireless Airplay Monitor!”.
Thank you to samsung for sponsoring this video. Where is it? I don’t need it. So. Did you catch that? I just airplayed from a macbook to a samsung monitor, not a samsung tv, but a monitor and that’s cool, so tvs are getting updated.
It seems like every two weeks, there’s a new tv technology, but when it comes to like monitors there aren’t giant changes, they tend to just get wider and wider and wider and don’t tend to really add more utility. Samsung’S got a very unique take on the monitor. Here, uh with their m7 smart monitor, so a couple things about it that separated it from the crowd from day one first 400 bucks.
So a really nice price point, but samsung’s been obviously making tvs for a long time. Their tizen ui has all the apps you’d expect for smart tv stuff. You know netflix youtube tv hulu, everything else. What they did was they took those smarts and that app support and threw it on the monitor, while also maintaining all the stuff that a monitor can do.
So, even if you don’t have anything plugged into this, you can still use it. As you would. A smart tv and that’s awesome: if you decide to plug something into it, you can do it via usb type-c or hdmi. You get the functionality of a monitor. You get kind of everything all in one and that’s been really nice to have so i work mostly at home when i’m not in the studio, and i was using i’m not going to mention the brand name, but a monitor that just died on me and all It was was a monitor, it was, you know, tvs get smart monitors tend to always stay dumb and once it stopped working, it was totally useless to me and oftentimes i’d want to catch up on mandalorian.
My wife has no interest in star wars. I watch it by myself, usually i’m watching it sort of in a small window on my 13-inch macbook air, because my monitor’s not working something like this, though i could just sit down at my desk, use the in-screen ui use the disney plus app and watch my Show and then come back to do my work. It gives me just a lot of flexibility at a price that i was very willing to pay for a dumb monitor.
I’M now getting all the smart monitor functionality, because it’s made by samsung if you’ve got sort of a modern samsung phone. It’S also wireless decks capable which honestly i hadn’t played around with that much uh when you try it what’s crazy cool, so i’ve got a galaxy s21 here i do the pull down shade and i connect to decks, and then i have a desktop experience on my Monitor with nothing plugged into it now, maybe that’s useful for you. Maybe it’s not, but it is certainly like a nice to have – and this monitor has a lot of those like nice to have features. It’S got remote access, for example.
So if you don’t have any connected to it at all, but your pc is at home, you can just use the monitor smarts to access your files. It’S got same for office 365. You can sort of access all those things without connecting anything to it, and when you do this, i connect something to it like i’m generally using it with uh my macbook air. It’S a uhd, monitor it’s 32 inches and it’s matte, which is something that’s kind of tough to find nowadays. So if you want to use it for editing or need anything, that’s got sort of accurate color representation.
This does a nice job. It’S got some blue light filters in it also. It ranges from helpful to super aggressive, but if you’re sensitive to like blue light stuff, you’ve got that option here as well.
So all that smart stuff is nice, but probably the most useful thing is having airplay 2 built in and i don’t know if apple’s moving away from their own apple tv hardware or they’re, just opening up uh. But you get the best part of like a physical apple tv box without ever reeling to have an apple tv which i think is really cool to have airplay 2 here. So you get things like screen mirroring from your idevice uh you’ve got awesome things like you. Can show pictures slideshows, all the stuff you can do with airplay 2 is all built in natively to the monitor. It also comes with the remote too, so you can literally sit back and just watch your shows or control your content that have actually be sort of hunched and slumped over a computer. Like i said, i generally have this plugged into my 13-inch macbook air. It uses one usb type-c, cable, there’s also other usb type-a ports in the back. I kind of use it as a dock. Now you get again you’re getting a lot for 400 bucks, but there’s some things that it doesn’t have that a lot of more expensive monitors do and you can’t rotate it vertically.
If that’s you know your jam for like a huge scroll of feeds, you’re not going to get that here. It’S not gon na go up and down, but it’ll sort of angle forward and back so you’re gon na have to sort of adjust your chair to get the right look at it and it’s got speakers built in which is nice to have they’re, not gon na They’Re, not world beating speakers, it’s better to bring your own and again wi-fi and bluetooth. You can add external ones um, but i really think the sweet spot for me was putting on a pair of really nice headphones.
So this one behind me is a samsung m7. Smart monitor, if you want to sort of drop their price a little more there’s also the m5. So it’s gon na come in the same size as this one at 32, but also there’s a 27 inch version.
A few differences, uh they’re only full hd and you’re. Not going to have the usb type-c, it’s just an hdmi connector, but other than sort of those things. The smart tv stuff are still there as well.
So even there is a less expensive starting point to get all of this. For me, the extra 170 bucks was worth it had those extra pixels, but you get a choice now with what you want to do, and it’s really hard to find any fault with a monitor. That’S doing this much at this lower price.
I’Ve said it endlessly in smartphone reviews, but samsung makes really good screens, and this one is no exception. So it comes out of the box in sort of a standard mode and for me the colors didn’t look as bright as i expected. There’S a dynamic mode that switched things up that made it look a lot better to my eye, but one thing to keep in mind: you do want to be sitting kind of as straight on, as you can, with the monitor. If you get off to the sides, you tend to lose some of that brightness. So a couple interesting things too.
It’S a 16 by 9 aspect ratio which you don’t always see for monitors because it’s also kind of a tv it would make sense. It would do that, but also has a 21×9 sort of mode where, if you sort of want to watch things on aspect ratio, you’ve got the choice to do it. So here’s who i think this monitor is is good, for, if you are a student, you’re remote working from home when you’re doing a lot of document editing if you like to watch movies while you’re sitting at your same setup, you want to watch, live tv or Youtube video and you don’t want to break the bank. This is a perfect monitor for for you, and i think i fall into that category.
I can even video edit from this. This monitor is not for gamers if you’re looking for a monitor for gaming with that crazy higher refresh rate, this is not going to be the choice to to go with, but if you follow in that first category of like i just need a good monitor. It’S going to be good for whatever i want to do, and also you get the benefit of airplay and all the smart tv stuff.
The m5 of the m7 smart monitors are going to be absolutely perfect ways to go. .