Samsung ATIV Smart PC: Display

The ATIV Smart PC uses an 11.6” 1366x768 PLS capacitive multitouch display, with a Wacom digitizer. On paper, this is perfectly good, but there’s a problem here—like many of the older tablet PCs, there’s a grainy quality to the panel. When I say grainy, I’m referring to a slight sparkle or shimmer to the display, almost as though there are a number of specks in the panel. It’s not due to the active digitizer—Wacom’s EMR (electromagnetic resonance) system sits behind the display, as opposed to N-Trig digitizers which sit in front of the panel, so this is likely due to the Atmel capacitive touch digitizer.

The Smart PC Pro has a similar problem with screen grain (though to a lesser degree), but interestingly enough the Microsoft Surface Pro, which also has a Samsung-sourced PLS 1080p panel and an Atmel capacitive touch digitizer, has almost no digitizer grain. It’s really distracting, and I’m not sure why it isn’t mentioned more often. It’s actually really rare to see panels with digitizer grain now that the days of passive digitizers are over, and I seem to be seeing it more and more often with Samsung products (the Series 7 All-In-One is another one with noticeable grain). It’s a somewhat concerning trend, because it’s been a legitimately long time since this has been an issue on devices with capacitive touchscreens.

Display Brightness

Display Brightness

Display Contrast

It’s a shame, because the performance is actually not bad—regardless of how the graphs look, the panel is pleasantly contrasty, with good color accuracy and a solid if not blinding maximum brightness. Every high end tablet these days has to come with a fantastic display, and even a tablet with a comparatively mediocre display like this one would still be one of the single best notebook/ultrabook panels out there. But yes, with a resolution of 1366x768 on an 11.6" panel, it does lag behind in terms of pixel density as well as performance compared to the cream of the crop of the tablet class.

Because this is Samsung, it’s a Super PLS (Plane-to-Line Switching) panel instead of IPS (In-Plane Switching). PLS was developed by Samsung and derived from IPS and supposedly offers a number of incremental improvements, including lower panel cost and higher brightness, but it’s quite hard to tell the difference between the two display technologies in day-to-day use. I do like that with the merging of small ultraportables and tablets, it’s getting much more common to find small and inexpensive mobile computers containing wide angle display technologies.

The Wacom digitizer is also a great feature to have, and I’m glad to see a resurgence in the number of Wacom-enabled devices hitting the market since the launch of Windows 8. Obviously, the most prominent of the lot is Surface Pro, but many of the other Intel-based tablets (ATIV Smart PC and Pro, VivoTab, ThinkPad Tablet 2, etc.) are coming with active pen support as well. I can’t remember the last time we had so many consumer focused active-digitizer tablets on the market, to be honest. For Samsung, this clearly ties in with their inking efforts with the Galaxy Note lineup on the Android side of things, and so we see digital inking applications like S-Note bundled in with the ATIV. And if you rely on OneNote for, say, notetaking in class, it’s a pretty wonderful inclusion.

Samsung ATIV Smart PC: Design Samsung ATIV Smart PC: Performance
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  • beginner99 - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - link

    Suspected that but makes the whole benchmark even more flawed it is in the first place. It doesn't even mention the browser used, at least not easily visible. I assume it was IE then considering the crappy performance.
  • Kidster3001 - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - link

    Kraken ( and Sunspider ) are not CPU or even system benchmarks. They are Browser benchmarks only. Clovertrail and Clovertrial+ scale perfectly with frequency as compared to Medfield when they use the same browser.
  • kyuu - Monday, March 18, 2013 - link

    Hope a review of the Vizio Tablet PC with the AMD C-60 is incoming soon!
  • kyuu - Monday, March 18, 2013 - link

    Er, Z-60.
  • nikon133 - Monday, March 18, 2013 - link

    What about Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2? I think proper docking station option (with LAN, external screen and a few USB ports) makes it really interesting among Clover Trail tablets, but it is not being mentioned here at all. Is it available in US?
  • hughtwg - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - link

    Yes, it's available in the US. Mine is on Ebay at the moment.

    I think docking the tablet directly to a keyboard like the Ativ, or Envy X2 is much more practical than a dock like that provided by the TPT2 since the keboards have essentially the same ports as the non mobile dock for the TPT2. I bought the TPT2 for the stylus support but found it rather disappointing due to a combination Windows 8 and Lenovo issues.
  • sprockkets - Monday, March 18, 2013 - link

    Still no Nexus 10 review...
  • A.J. - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - link

    Pls try using the same Google Chrome/MS IE10 in Octane or Kraken javascript benchmark test!
    It's totally ridiculous to have the javascript benchmark score with different browsers. Am I looking at a browser test?

    with Chrome25:
    I got 2580 on Octane bench,
    about ~900ms in Sunspider,
    and ~12000ms in Mozilla Kraken.

    Intel Clover Trail Atom is way better than old cortexA9! Even close to cortexA15 in some cases.
    And with the remarkable 1.7W TDP, it totally smashes the A15 in efficiency!

    Curious to see 22nm BayTrail quad-core Atom vs Tegra4.
  • paulbram - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - link

    Although in general I agree it is not fair to compare different browsers, I think you also need to remember that Chrome on a Windows 8 CT chip is really not NEARLY as good as IE10 is. In fact, I've been incredibly impressed with IE10 perf on mine. So, sure you could run Chrome if you want to see poor benchmark results, but why not give the machine the best chance at success?
  • Kidster3001 - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - link

    Javascript benchmarks are "Browser" benchmarks, not CPU benchmarks. They are completely dependent on the javascript engine used in the browser.

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