Sony FW900, last, best CRT ever made (that was affordable).
23 inch 16:10 CRT, 1920x1200 - weighs nearly 100 pounds and draws 150 watts if I remember correctly.
Originally like $2000, down to $300 at the end (refurbished).
Had variable phosphorus pitch, denser at the corners and an internal cpu adjusted the corners to correct for (earth?) magnetic field.
Only went to LCD when mine finally died and there was no one who could repair it and getting another was out of the question because shipping prices have gone through the roof.
There is a huge fan thread on them in [H]ardForum with lots of photos.
Absolutely my favorite resolution, and is what's currently setup on my HP ZR24w, as well as deliberately defocussed a couple of notches to fuzz the text up a bit.
In comparison to the $2000 and $10000 crts, this is a great monitor with an ips panel, a standard sRGB color-gamut, and a cheap for an ips panel price of about $380 right now.
Yeah, I'm happy to be programming now, though 6 years ago was a great time for 'if you can haul it, you can have it' deals on crts.
Sony had some great CRT monitors. I had two IBM P275's (Sony G520), I ran them at 2048x1536@75hz they worked great for years, the colors/black levels were amazing.
Eventually they started getting washed out (no black), I was able to fix it using a 10-Meg ohm (1/4 watt) resistor.
After a year or so the issue came up again and I decided to get two Lenovo L220x's to replace them.. While the colors are quite good on the Lenovo's (calibrated of course), I miss the resolution and original black levels of the P275's.
I had one of those FW900's. Unfortunately the other half got fed up with me lugging immense bits of kit around so I reluctantly gave up. Now I've got a standard 23" 1080p TFT :(
It's really sad how it seems like we're stuck with the 1080p craze for monitors, we've made negative progress in this area, it's becoming really hard to find higher resolutions. Which is weird because normally computer marketing is to absurd levels all about bigger numbers, but the HDTV crap has apparently trained everybody that 1080p is the ultimate in video. Luckily mobile seems to have dodged the HDTV bullet and they're competing on DPI.
I think the 1080p craze is driven by consumer demand. For the average consumer (not a gamer, not a power user), the ultimate visual experience is an HD movie. There is no need for better quality than HD (1080p), because you won't find a source better than that, so the most sensible thing for a hardware provider is to deliver 1080p at the cheapest point possible. Or to improve on other areas than purely pixel count (colour accuracy, brightness, viewing angle...)
It's hard to keep in mind, but the majority of buyers, and therefore the majority of income, may not be like you.
I'm just glad the days of 0.36 dot pitch 15" is over. My first one was part of a "Packard Bell" system. Damn, I'm old.(1) It was so round and so blurry, it was like looking out the portal of a submarine.
Generally desktop operating systems are not ready for high dpi displays. Mobile was able to move faster in this area, but I expect the next OS generation will facilitate decoupling content size from dpi, particularly for windows.
I'm not sure what you are referring to about monitors. Two of the main players in higher end monitors, Dell and Apple, make their large monitors in higher resolutions than 1080p, such as 2560 x 1440.
Ugh. Dear intarweb, please stop trying to outsmart safari on iOS. It works just fine as-is. We don't need your fancy-pants JavaScript-based paging implementations.
That's Onswipe, a company founded on the idea that mobile websites should consume as much CPU, RAM, and network resources as possible, because your time isn't valuable, your battery is overcharged, and you have unlimited bandwidth.
An anti-pattern I've noticed recently for "mobile aware" sites is this: on your mobile device you visit a URL for some page on a site, that site recognizes you are using a mobile browser and then completely unhelpfully redirects you to the main-page of the mobile version of the site. Considering that most mobile devices made in the last 3 years or so are fairly capable of producing a decent experience rendering a "desktop" version of a web-page this behavior is decidedly annoying and generally worse than just doing nothing.
There's an atrocious WordPress theme for iPad out there too. The iPhone one is okay though. Apparently some WP installs default to those mobile versions when browsed from iOS, and I'm pretty sure that some blog writers are unaware of it as I can't see for the life of me some of them actually putting that crap down their readers throat.
"I wonder what Carmack uses now? Whatever it is, he could probably have several of them hooked up to a machine each running at 1920 x 1080 and still come nowhere near close to drawing 180 watts."
That's a little optimistic. The 27" and 30" TFTs which are becoming increasingly commonplace consume upwards of 100W, at least at or near full brightness so you'd only need about 2.
I guess when you're talking about the 27" and 30" displays that's the case, but 24" seems to be where the very low power use can be seen. LG has a display it claims only consumes 28 watts, so an array of 6 of those and you'd still have some watts to spare on the InterView.
This would bring back some expensive memories for a few on HN I'm sure. I remember, as a multimedia trainee in around 1996-97, buying a 21" NEC CRT for $2,200 second hand. I couldn't give it away today, so it sits in the shed along with a few other CRTs.
Seeing Frank Pritchard's CRT "sculpture" in Deus Ex: Human Revolution certainly made me think...
Speaking of which, what is the highest resolution monitor available today that isn't outrageously expensive? Apple's 2560x1440 Thunderbolt/Cinema display is nice. Any WQUXGA (3840x2400) monitors available like Toshiba's $18000 one[0] but that don't come with a "medical imaging" price tag?
Why is a 1080p monitor for 1995 "amazing"? It was quite common for 21" monitors to be 1600x1200 and 1920x1080 isn't a giant leap from that. I picked up a cheap 21" CRT capable of 1600x1200 in the late 90s and I'm no John Carmack.
I think it's because that sounds amazing to average consumers, who were lucky to have 1024x768 on a dot pitch better than 0.28, but why is this on geek.com? Shouldn't most of their readers remember having large, heavy monitors in the 90s? Really makes me wonder what Matthew Humphries (author of that story) was using in 1995.
CRTs weren't like LCDs, the image didn't push off the side if you pushed the resolution too far, you could pretty much push them as far as they could go until you couldn't read it anymore or until it became all vertical lines. Ah, the good ole days...
I had a SGI 1600SW LCD and a Sony FW900 CRT on my desk in 1998. That was a bitchin' desktop setup back then. The SGI required this special graphics card from Number Nine, which ended up going bankrupt, thus ending driver availability. Even by today's standards, the quality of the SGI display was outstanding.
Still, one of the most expenses displays I've seen belonged to a dorm mate of mine in 1993. He had a 20" CRT (Viewsonic maybe?) that was connected with four component cables to a Matrox video card. I'm sure that it would be laughable today but damn, in 1993 that thing was unbelievable.
Not sure about the machine but according to Romero[1] Quake (as with Doom) was developed on NeXTSTEP 3.3, which they continued to use, later running on Intel hardware, until 1996.
Would that have been running NT back then, perhaps the MIPS version?
The environment does look like Visual C of which 1.0 came out somewhere in the 94-95 time-frame if I'm remembering it correctly, though it might have been just a tad earlier.
I bought one of these machines around that time for a design company I was interning at. It's an Intergraph, obviously I have no idea which model. These machines were built to order, so it could have anything in there. That multimedia keyboard brings back memories, prolly the worst $100 I ever spent.
This machine would be running WinNT 3 or 4, most definitely not the MIPS build.
Heck, I spent my first four years programming on a 25*40 screen displayed on a crappy old TV set... When I finally got 80 columns, it seemed like magic.
I had an Intergraph machine like that back in the day. Same giant case, except in blue. I think that one was dual Pentium II, 400MHz, running Windows NT 3.5 or so. Came with a fast array too and a similar keyboard.
They were very expensive. A typical high end CRT monitor might be 19-21", with the ultra high end being 24". 1600x1200 @75Hz refresh was what you wanted, but you usually had to use lower color depth to achieve it.
It's a frame capture from a Doom 3 promotional trailer. In fact, I was the one who captured it and uploaded it to Wikipedia in 2004; it's nice that this article calls it a "classic shot" (that's what I thought too when I saw the scene in the video the first time). With all credit to the actual photographer, of course!
[+] [-] ck2|14 years ago|reply
23 inch 16:10 CRT, 1920x1200 - weighs nearly 100 pounds and draws 150 watts if I remember correctly.
Originally like $2000, down to $300 at the end (refurbished).
Had variable phosphorus pitch, denser at the corners and an internal cpu adjusted the corners to correct for (earth?) magnetic field.
Only went to LCD when mine finally died and there was no one who could repair it and getting another was out of the question because shipping prices have gone through the roof.
There is a huge fan thread on them in [H]ardForum with lots of photos.
The colors on them are unbelievable.
[+] [-] watmough|14 years ago|reply
In comparison to the $2000 and $10000 crts, this is a great monitor with an ips panel, a standard sRGB color-gamut, and a cheap for an ips panel price of about $380 right now.
Yeah, I'm happy to be programming now, though 6 years ago was a great time for 'if you can haul it, you can have it' deals on crts.
[+] [-] protomyth|14 years ago|reply
(these are mostly used for color grading)
[+] [-] tbob22|14 years ago|reply
Eventually they started getting washed out (no black), I was able to fix it using a 10-Meg ohm (1/4 watt) resistor.
After a year or so the issue came up again and I decided to get two Lenovo L220x's to replace them.. While the colors are quite good on the Lenovo's (calibrated of course), I miss the resolution and original black levels of the P275's.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] oomkiller|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pointyhat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickyeon|14 years ago|reply
It's hard to keep in mind, but the majority of buyers, and therefore the majority of income, may not be like you.
[+] [-] noonespecial|14 years ago|reply
(1) Take your 1080p and get the hell off my lawn.
[+] [-] jasonwatkinspdx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barney54|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewf|14 years ago|reply
* It looks like Visual Studio on a post-Windows-3.x GUI, which means Windows 95 (unlikely) or Windows NT 4+ (1996 or later)
* Quake was developed on NeXTSTEP and DOS.
* John Carmack blogged (well, as close as you'd come to it in those days) that he was going to start looking at Win32 in the "near future" on Jul 1, 1996: http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/johnc_plan_1996.html...
[+] [-] unwind|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cellularmitosis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thought_alarm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alastairpat|14 years ago|reply
iPhone user agent: 37 seconds load time, 1.31MB transferred 93 network requests. Desktop user agent: 15 seconds load time, 839KB transferred, 130 network requests.
… WHY?!
[+] [-] lloeki|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watmough|14 years ago|reply
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/server_attention_span.png
[+] [-] ronnier|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Legion|14 years ago|reply
Hit the "open in Safari" button and then your complaint became crystal clear,
So awful, when the iPhone renders the normal page just fine.
[+] [-] vmmenon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmjordan|14 years ago|reply
That's a little optimistic. The 27" and 30" TFTs which are becoming increasingly commonplace consume upwards of 100W, at least at or near full brightness so you'd only need about 2.
[+] [-] ukdm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prawn|14 years ago|reply
Seeing Frank Pritchard's CRT "sculpture" in Deus Ex: Human Revolution certainly made me think...
[+] [-] spektom|14 years ago|reply
http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/11636594701461094...
[+] [-] biot|14 years ago|reply
Speaking of which, what is the highest resolution monitor available today that isn't outrageously expensive? Apple's 2560x1440 Thunderbolt/Cinema display is nice. Any WQUXGA (3840x2400) monitors available like Toshiba's $18000 one[0] but that don't come with a "medical imaging" price tag?
[0] http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1032529/toshiba-lau...
[+] [-] lusr|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masklinn|14 years ago|reply
If you can find an "old" IBM T220 or T221, that's their resolution in 22": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors
[+] [-] ohboy|14 years ago|reply
I think it's because that sounds amazing to average consumers, who were lucky to have 1024x768 on a dot pitch better than 0.28, but why is this on geek.com? Shouldn't most of their readers remember having large, heavy monitors in the 90s? Really makes me wonder what Matthew Humphries (author of that story) was using in 1995.
CRTs weren't like LCDs, the image didn't push off the side if you pushed the resolution too far, you could pretty much push them as far as they could go until you couldn't read it anymore or until it became all vertical lines. Ah, the good ole days...
[+] [-] chrissnell|14 years ago|reply
Still, one of the most expenses displays I've seen belonged to a dorm mate of mine in 1993. He had a 20" CRT (Viewsonic maybe?) that was connected with four component cables to a Matrox video card. I'm sure that it would be laughable today but damn, in 1993 that thing was unbelievable.
[+] [-] awongh|14 years ago|reply
Also, the monitor, by itself was $10k back in the day: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/New+Ultra-Wide+Format+Monitor+...
[+] [-] sifi|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mambodog|14 years ago|reply
QuakeEd on NeXTSTEP: http://rome.ro/uploaded_images/qe_dev-726646.gif
[1] http://rome.ro/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday.html
[+] [-] watmough|14 years ago|reply
The environment does look like Visual C of which 1.0 came out somewhere in the 94-95 time-frame if I'm remembering it correctly, though it might have been just a tad earlier.
[+] [-] bstar|14 years ago|reply
This machine would be running WinNT 3 or 4, most definitely not the MIPS build.
[+] [-] mgcross|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethank|14 years ago|reply
For a bit I had SGI 1600 LCD, but it required a special video card which died.
The Intergraph TDZ-2000 was a great computer though. I bought a floors model after Siggraph in 1999 or 2000. They were pricey: http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/Htm/Articles/intergraph_g...
[+] [-] WalterBright|14 years ago|reply
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