free: exotic monitors (very high res monochrome)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 01:14:08PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> OK, so you know how great that Sun monitor was back in the day
> (1152x900) (I seem to remember that you got it much later).  PC
> monitors of the time were not even VGA (that was first introduced in
> 1987).

Yes the sun screens worked well, for text and other things that black
and white was ok for.  Anything graphical was just hopeless, and any
browser after netscape 3 seems to just not display in any usable way in
b/w mode.

> This monitor is 2040x1664, close to twice the resolution of the Sun's
> in each dimension.  And it is grey-scale, not just black and white,
> which counts as even more resolution.

Certainly a much better screen.  It was probably a dream monitor for
desktop publishing years ago.

> About power consumption:  I did some measurements of it and a Viewsonic 
> PT775 (17" VGA with a Trinitron or Trinitron-like tube):
> 
> 7-8w	PT775 asleep
> 70-71w	PT775 text login screen (mostly black)
> 73-74w	PT775 text mode, mostly white
> 84w-86w	PT775 Red Hat Linux 8 desktop, moderate resolution
> 
> 5w	DP2092 asleep
> 120w-127w	DP2092 active
> 
> That does not seem too bad to me.

No not too bad really.

> For browsing, this monitor isn't great but it works: too many sites
> use colour.
> 
> For a terminal window, this monitor is very hard to beat.
> Monochrome/grey-scale works much better than colour because the pixels
> can blend -- no dot-triads.  Colour monitors of necessity look grainy
> (unless you invent a new technology or you have resolution much beyond
> what is available now).

Hmm, I tend to find blending pixels make things look blurry and not in a
good way.  For images it is a good thing of course.

> A programmer can never have enough pixels.  My current main monitor is the 
> 30" Dell LCD with only about 20% more pixels that this grey-scale 
> (2560x1600).

Sure, but those are colour pixels.  Perhaps what you want is one of
those 22" or so 3840x2400 things.

> If only this had an X driver.  The controller cards are PCI so these
> monitors could easily be used as the second (and third) on a system.
> I daydreamed of reverse-engineering the binary drivers, but I never
> could trick myself into wasting the time.  Using a VGA card would be 
> simpler, but my desk is now full of LCDs.
> 
> It looks as if these are getting pitched :-(

If they had colour they would have much more appeal I suspect.  And at
19" they are a bit small. :)

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists