Meet a customer: Samsung’s new SyncMaster 220TN

Samsung has unveiled a new monitor during CES - SyncMaster 220TN. The monitor was named a 2008 CES Innovations Honoree.

We have been working on this project with Samsung for a while now, providing them some essential software components for the VoIP client. I believe this monitor brings something new and fresh to the video conferencing market - simply because it is priced at a fraction of current video conferencing systems.

Wainhouse Research (pdf) provided some insights about this new product a while back:

…you can bet that a company like Samsung didn’t get into this market to sell hundreds or thousands per year; they have to be looking at tens of thousands per year to be even marginally interested. The SYNCON [the initial internal name of this monitor, Tsahi] is more expensive than a desktop PC with webcam and software, but will offer much higher video performance.

Up until now, video conferencing was usually reserved only to meeting rooms and executives within enterprises - especially due to price issues. Samsung’s new monitor cost 3-5 times less than that of current solutions and comes with an embedded PC. It can be a compelling solution for large non-IT enterprises, where people need to collaborate and have access to office software and a browser.

On the technical side, this monitor comes equipped with AMD’s Geode LX800 and Windows XP Embedded operating system. It also has a dedicated DSP for video coding, capable of providing high resolution video conferencing.

You can also get some impression of the video quality from the demo below:
If you would like to learn more about this product, you’re welcomed to check the following links:

• Whitepaper on thin clients and how to build them
• Q&A about this product (from around a year ago)
• The product Samsung used to build this thin client (Multimedia Terminal Framework)