Reply 20 of 23, by kao
Some CRT tubes lose beam focus as they age. The CM-11 is supposed to be quite good as far as CGA monitors go
This monitor is in very good condition and looks like it was hardly used at all. I should clarify. It's fine in 40-column modes, but 80-column text is not so good.
I had heard various references on the net that color 6 (brown) is very hard to distinguish from red on a real CGA monitor and I can verify this to be true. It all looks uniformly red.
unlike, say, the CM-5 with its monster dot pitch from hell
The CM-5 had (I think) a stock 13" color TV tube, which of course is grainy sh*t. Actually the 5153 had better dot pitch than the Tandy monitors or the PCjr display.
80 video standards sure offered plenty of exciting ways to get an ocular migraine, but CGA could've been worse... at least it wasn't interlaced.
I don't think interlacing was ever used much except on some early VGA cards which used it to fudge 1024x768 (it was really 512x768 and used displaced scanlines ala TVs)