Samsung CF591 Curved Monitor Review

The CF591 is a fine monitor for business use, but whether you’ll see the curved panel as an asset to office work is up in the air. The curved display is meant to offer a better field of view, with less eye strain, and potentially more uniformity in color and brigthness, and while it works well for entertainment, we didn’t get the sense of any real benefit to the curve while working in Excel, Photoshop or Word.


Text is easy to read on this display, but didn’t appear as crisp to us as it did on a Dell UltraSharp 24 U2412M we used for comparison. Making adjustments with the OSD settings helped somewhat.

Video Playback

The CF591’s common resolution and aspect ratio (1920x1080 and 16:9, respectively) work in the monitor’s favor when it comes to video playback. We watched videos on Netflix, HBO Now, and YouTube without trouble and all of the content looked good.


The 3000:1 contrast ratio comes into play here, as does that tight 1800R curvature. We had no trouble losing ourselves in Game of Thrones and other shows, even when the room was well-lit.

Gaming

Games looked fine in our tests generally. That said, our experience with games was similar to our experience with text: While the CF591 provided quality images in our games, they seemed to lack a little of the crispness we experience when we moved the PC to higher-end monitors.


Although we didn’t have a FreeSync enabled system handy for testing, we liked Game Mode, which is easy to enable in the OSD. It’s a temporary setting, so choose “Always On” if you use the monitor mainly for gaming.


The monitor suffered only a little from glare under our office lighting – and that was if we tilted the display slightly upwards. When we tilted the CF591 slightly down (and when we let it sit straight, which will probably be the most common position for the display in most settings), we didn’t experience any major issues with glare worth noting.