Monochrome monitors

[Unknown_K]

Monochrome monitors used to be very usefull in the early 90's for desktop publishing and other areas where having 2 crisp pages on the screen was more important then color. Music creation would be another area where a large crisp screen full of controls would be ideal.

Anybody have a monochrome monitor these days, is there any need for them?

 

[Quadraman]

Do you mean monochrome or grayscale?? The old IBM PC monitors with green, orange or white text on a black background or the Apple II green screens were monochrome. I have an Atari grayscale monitor for my 1040ST. I also remember when VGA was first released and the color monitors were very expensive and VGA grayscale appearing shortly after that, I thought at the time, to get more people to buy VGA cards because the grayscale monitors were a lot cheaper. I remember that the display on the Atari grayscale was absolutely crisp with no fuzzys.

 

[MacMan]

I occasionally use a Sanyo green monochrome monitor on my BBC computers, because it gives a very clear, crisp picture. not much good for games though as most BBC games use several of the 16 available colours.

And of course, all my compact Macs have built-in monochrome monitors which I use regularly.

 

[coius]

I got a Samsung 10" CRT GrayScale VGA Monitor (it sports one resolution. 640x480) and is a beauty. I can cart it around to ANYPLACE to diagnose a machine at command line level. On top of that, it only weighs 7lbs! The thing is so light you wouldn't believe it

 

[Kami]

I used to own two of the Apple 2 page displays. I had them sitting side by side on my desk for years. When you are doing page layouts with lots of text nothing is better than greyscale. They were sharp and bright, weighed a ton, and kicked out a tremendous amount of heat.

 

[II2II]

I think Unknown_K was referring to a monitor most similar to the ST's monochrome monitor: plain black and white and fairly high resolution.

I used to have a 19" (?) SuperMac TPD. I'm fairly certain that it was 1024x768, though it may have been higher. The image was very crisp, albeit a bit distorted due to age. I was doing programming stuff and word processing on the display, and it was great for that stuff. I'm also of the opinion that System 6 software looked best in black and white anyway. Which was great on a IIci.

EDIT: sorry, I missed Kami's post. Kami's the closest.

 

[Unknown_K]

I meant greyscale, sorry. Since color monitor are realy Red Green and Blue DOTs close together to make a color you cant get the dots as close as a greyscale monitor.

 

[paws]

Hmm..

I actually have the option of hauling away one of those two page displays. I just don't really have a comptuer to use it with... But I can see how it'd be great for programming.

 

[Bunsen]

I have a small collection of 9" greyscales at 800x600, two of the Apple Portraits, and a 21" CGA that I've never used. Like the above posters, I've used the little ones for system setup and testing, and I had the portrait as a second monitor for websurfing (reading text) and music software. Very very crisp and clear and great for reading slabs of text on.

 

[Charlieman]

The Radius and Apple portrait displays (greyscale) were rightly very popular. I still have a Radius greyscale Pivot which is lovely. The only reason that I don't use it is weight -- I don't have room to set up all my Macs so when I pick a monitor, I just grab a lightweight TFT.

As far as using big monitors for programming, you'd be surprised how little benefit you gain. Old IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) for the Mac are very efficient at using desktop space, and I happily learned Think C and Code Warrior C on a compact Mac. Old versions of Real Basic for the Mac are efficient too. By contrast, the latest Windows IDE for Microsoft Visual Studio is just about useable at 1280 x 1024 resolution.

Apple made a monochrome (black/white) composite signal monitor for the IIgs. It was nothing special IMHO and I prefer Zenith green phosphor composite monitors.

 

[Kami]

The portrait displays were awesome for writing because you could see an entire page in one glance.

You can still use an Apple TPD with a more recent Mac if you have the 13W3 cable and Mac-> VGA adapter and a video card that supports the resolution of the monitor

 

[TylerEss]

I disagree about programming; I do a fair bit of programming on *NIX boxes and usually use only two sizes of xterms: 80x24 and "not quite big enough".

Maybe it's a visual-thinker kind of thing, but if I'm doing some kind of challenging algorithm with tight loops, the small window lets me focus on just what I'm doing.

When I'm restructuring a program or revising something that's new to me, the amount of text I can get on my 1280x1024 LCD isn't quite enough. I wish I had 1600x1200 or bigger!

Wish there was an active matrix 24" black-and-white (1-bit) LCD on the market, with 2048x1536 resolution. I would *love* that for programming.

 

[phreakout]

Unfortunately, the greyscale 9 or 12" Apple monitor I had fizzled out after 19 years of use. I got a used one from a friend and I used it for a while. Suddenly, one night, it started to make a buzzing noise, similar to a spark gap on a Jacob's Ladder. I turned it off, went to sleep, woke up the next morning, turned it on, and suddenly, I heard a loud snap. I turned off the monitor, unplugged it and threw it in the trash. I hauled in the colour 15 or 17" SVGA monitor and used it ever since.

73s 8)

 

[MacMan]

You know a monitor is about to die when it starts making noises like that. I had a 17" Dell monitor do that once at work; started buzzing, the picture got smaller and smaller, then bang! Smoke rose out of the back and I threw the thing right into the skip.

 

[iMac600]

The sound of the Flyback Transformer dying. I had an Apple Studio Display do that to me while servicing it for school IT.

 

[cangrande]

I have a huge Apple Two Page Display that I used for music typesetting until it started to get jittery all over the screen. Not the slow waving that is interference (I had another color monitor too but moving them a little farther apart cured that). A 17in regular monitor is just not big enough.

I had to stop using it because of the jitters (anyone know how to fix it?) but it was a great, very clear and crisp monitor.

The darn thing weighs 70 lbs and is so big I couldn't fit it through the (admittedly narrow) door of my office building.

Also it uses the funniest looking plug (the famous 13W3) ever. I think it's a rebadged Sun workstation monitor.