Holering wrote:

Excellent work badmojo! What game is your avatar from?

Thanks! It's one of the Mentats from Dune 2, an old fave.

You might remember the story of my Samsung VGA monitor with dreadful dot pitch from a few pages ago, where a friend found this monitor in the weirdest place (at a redneck flea market somewhere along the Argentina-Bolivia border I believe) and in terrible condition. He was after a K6-II tower full o' goodies but the seller didn't want to part with the PC and monitor separately so he ended up taking both and bringing them to Chile, putting the monitor away in storage after finding it didn't work. One day chatting about VGA-only monitors he mentioned he had this one lying around and gave it to me. Against all odds given its condition I managed to get it working and bask in its terrible resolution (seriously, it can't even do 640x480 decent enough), I ended up really digging the "TV" look it gives to low resolution DOS games and it became a prized piece of my retro PC gear even with all its drawbacks:

• Bad internal condition (rusted metal plates, corrosion on PCB) which might make it more failure prone.
• Bad aesthetic condition (burn mark on top of the case, lack of a tilt-swivel base, some yellowing)
• Chassis is 110VAC only, making me lug a large and heavy step down transformer in order to use it, not to mention increasing the chances of a catastrophic accident should I or someone else forget that and plug it straight into 220V mains.

Imagine my surprise when that very same friend called me a while ago and told me he had found two more of those exact same monitors right here in Chile, on the same day and in two different dumpsters. What are the odds of that?! He proceeded to tell me that unfortunately one of them had been vandalized, his plan was to keep the good one for himself (he's into this sort of thing too) and I could keep the broken one to use it for parts to fix up the one I already have, sounds good to me! so he dropped them off by my place a few days later:

Pretty obvious which is which 😵

I know what you're thinking... in fact RacoonRider hit the nail right in the head with this comment. 🤣

RacoonRider wrote:

133MHz, wow, that is one big coil of copper! Insane retail price guarantee 😁

It had indeed been trashed for the copper in its deflection yoke, as sadly seems to be the norm nowadays. Fortunately whoever did it didn't destroy the back cover in the process, which is one of the pieces I need.

The back cover is in good shape, a bit yellowed but some Retrobright should take care of that, the chassis is in much better condition (no rust), the tilt-swivel base is present, and the icing on the cake, the chassis is a 220V model so I can say goodbye to that bulky transformer and plug the monitor straight to the wall or the back of an AT PSU. So it seems I've got all the needed parts to fix up my own monitor real good. 😊

After disposing of the broken glass tube, cleaning the board and 'retrobrighting' the back cover everything's ready for the transplant:

By having a cursory look at the power supply stage on both boards it seems the only differences between the 110 and 220V versions of this monitor are the switching regulator IC and the main filter capacitor: 110V version uses the STR53041 and 220µF 250V while the 220V version uses the STR54041 and 220µF 400V, so voltage conversion might be as simple as replacing those two components.*
*I'm not 100% sure of this so don't blame me if you try it and the whole thing goes bang!

I went ahead and swapped the entire chassis first:

I 'copied' the settings by roughly turning the potentiometers to the same position as their equivalents in the original chassis as a starting point, then fine-tuned what seemed off, namely the RGB drive/bias and pincushion adjustments (it probably needed white balance re-setting after ~25 years anyway). After running for a couple hours with a nice picture I installed the 'new' tilt-swivel base and spotless back cover on. So in the end it went from this:

To this:

I'm pretty happy to see it pretty much restored to its former, low resolution glory. 😵
The other monitor works fine except for the fact that it's a little finicky with the vertical sync at 640x480. Could be a cold solder joint or a dried electrolytic at the sync input stage, I'll check it out later. In the meantime here are both monitors side by side:

Now for some action shots!
One thing I find amusing on this monitor is its extremely coarse dot pitch for something VGA-res, the RGB triads are clearly visible to the naked eye much like a television tube. Here's a close-up shot of the phosphor on this monitor (left) compared with an IBM SVGA monitor that I have (right):

Curiously, the Samsung is clearly a PIL type while the IBM (and most PC CRTs I've ever seen) are Delta. I'm now starting to think that maybe this monitor was made as economically as possible by reusing TV-grade parts, but I don't really have a frame of reference to base myself on. I've never seen an EGA display in real life and my first home PC had SVGA.

Here are some side by side shots so you can truly appreciate how low the resolution really is on this thing. Once again Sasmung VGA on the left and IBM SVGA on the right:

(using the powered VGA splitter I just got today)

It makes the SVGA display look like 4K UHD in comparison! 640x480 is not really usable in my opinion, but lower resolution DOS games get this sort of 'old school console game' look, much like 8 and 16 bit video games look on a real SDTV vs a higher resolution display where the pixels become razor sharp and it looks different as a result. Being a CRT die-hard I totally dig this look, while it also makes me appreciate how clear even the crappiest of SVGA monitors was compared to this. 😵

That blurry look on the svga is a much better result than a dead monitor IMO. Congratulations on appreciating them! I wouldn't have any problem with the blurry CRT unless I had to use it on a PC maybe. I'd personally use it with a line doubler of some sort, with a 8-64 bit game console. You sure there's no focus pot? I see two pots on your fifth picture on both PCB's, where red wire goes from anode cup.

I find it strange how good the image is from vga splitter (on the sharper monitor). I wonder if that'd be better than my vga hub (it is a powered vga switch box that doesn't split signals. But it certainly alters quality)?

Well done, 133MHz! That's a really nice job. How long did it take you to do the repairs? Did your friend decide to let go the second monitor? 😀

133MHz wrote:

You might remember the story of my Samsung VGA monitor with dreadful dot pitch from a few pages ago, where a friend found this m […]
Show full quote

You might remember the story of my Samsung VGA monitor with dreadful dot pitch from a few pages ago, where a friend found this monitor in the weirdest place (at a redneck flea market somewhere along the Argentina-Bolivia border I believe) and in terrible condition. He was after a K6-II tower full o' goodies but the seller didn't want to part with the PC and monitor separately so he ended up taking both and bringing them to Chile, putting the monitor away in storage after finding it didn't work. One day chatting about VGA-only monitors he mentioned he had this one lying around and gave it to me. Against all odds given its condition I managed to get it working and bask in its terrible resolution (seriously, it can't even do 640x480 decent enough), I ended up really digging the "TV" look it gives to low resolution DOS games and it became a prized piece of my retro PC gear even with all its drawbacks:

• Bad internal condition (rusted metal plates, corrosion on PCB) which might make it more failure prone.
• Bad aesthetic condition (burn mark on top of the case, lack of a tilt-swivel base, some yellowing)
• Chassis is 110VAC only, making me lug a large and heavy step down transformer in order to use it, not to mention increasing the chances of a catastrophic accident should I or someone else forget that and plug it straight into 220V mains.

Imagine my surprise when that very same friend called me a while ago and told me he had found two more of those exact same monitors right here in Chile, on the same day and in two different dumpsters. What are the odds of that?! He proceeded to tell me that unfortunately one of them had been vandalized, his plan was to keep the good one for himself (he's into this sort of thing too) and I could keep the broken one to use it for parts to fix up the one I already have, sounds good to me! so he dropped them off by my place a few days later:

Pretty obvious which is which 😵

I know what you're thinking... in fact RacoonRider hit the nail right in the head with this comment. 🤣

RacoonRider wrote:

133MHz, wow, that is one big coil of copper! Insane retail price guarantee 😁

It had indeed been trashed for the copper in its deflection yoke, as sadly seems to be the norm nowadays. Fortunately whoever did it didn't destroy the back cover in the process, which is one of the pieces I need.

The back cover is in good shape, a bit yellowed but some Retrobright should take care of that, the chassis is in much better condition (no rust), the tilt-swivel base is present, and the icing on the cake, the chassis is a 220V model so I can say goodbye to that bulky transformer and plug the monitor straight to the wall or the back of an AT PSU. So it seems I've got all the needed parts to fix up my own monitor real good. 😊

After disposing of the broken glass tube, cleaning the board and 'retrobrighting' the back cover everything's ready for the transplant:

By having a cursory look at the power supply stage on both boards it seems the only differences between the 110 and 220V versions of this monitor are the switching regulator IC and the main filter capacitor: 110V version uses the STR53041 and 220µF 250V while the 220V version uses the STR54041 and 220µF 400V, so voltage conversion might be as simple as replacing those two components.*
*I'm not 100% sure of this so don't blame me if you try it and the whole thing goes bang!

I went ahead and swapped the entire chassis first:

I 'copied' the settings by roughly turning the potentiometers to the same position as their equivalents in the original chassis as a starting point, then fine-tuned what seemed off, namely the RGB drive/bias and pincushion adjustments (it probably needed white balance re-setting after ~25 years anyway). After running for a couple hours with a nice picture I installed the 'new' tilt-swivel base and spotless back cover on. So in the end it went from this:

To this:

I'm pretty happy to see it pretty much restored to its former, low resolution glory. 😵
The other monitor works fine except for the fact that it's a little finicky with the vertical sync at 640x480. Could be a cold solder joint or a dried electrolytic at the sync input stage, I'll check it out later. In the meantime here are both monitors side by side:

Now for some action shots!
One thing I find amusing on this monitor is its extremely coarse dot pitch for something VGA-res, the RGB triads are clearly visible to the naked eye much like a television tube. Here's a close-up shot of the phosphor on this monitor (left) compared with an IBM SVGA monitor that I have (right):

Curiously, the Samsung is clearly a PIL type while the IBM (and most PC CRTs I've ever seen) are Delta. I'm now starting to think that maybe this monitor was made as economically as possible by reusing TV-grade parts, but I don't really have a frame of reference to base myself on. I've never seen an EGA display in real life and my first home PC had SVGA.

Here are some side by side shots so you can truly appreciate how low the resolution really is on this thing. Once again Sasmung VGA on the left and IBM SVGA on the right:

(using the powered VGA splitter I just got today)

It makes the SVGA display look like 4K UHD in comparison! 640x480 is not really usable in my opinion, but lower resolution DOS games get this sort of 'old school console game' look, much like 8 and 16 bit video games look on a real SDTV vs a higher resolution display where the pixels become razor sharp and it looks different as a result. Being a CRT die-hard I totally dig this look, while it also makes me appreciate how clear even the crappiest of SVGA monitors was compared to this. 😵

sometimes on newer displays the pixles become dull and smuged/blurred. at least on LCD monitors with 640x480 games like SC1/FO1/FO2 etc etc.

-

Here's mine, been using it since I was a kid. I've always liked it. I did have another one exactly, in better condition. But ultimately this is the one I kept because the gamma correction doesn't need to be so severe compared to what the other one was.

Do monitor outputs get darker with age, the brightness and gamma are maxed out on the monitor's controls, but I still use the gamma correction tool in nVidia control panel by another 0.5 to make it as I feel it should be.

It's an AST ASTVision 5N. I don't know when they came out, it's Never listed in the drivers list for monitors in Windows, it has November 1996 on the back, and i've never seen another, nor is there anything on the internet about it at all. It clearly says N, not T or V etc.

Like I say, Been using this every day since the late 90's. Maximum native resolution 1024x786, 60hertz max refresh. I think the ventilation pattern and the blue stripe alone the top make it a handsome design, unlike alot of CRT's.

What can I do with this?

It powers from the PC's PSU, and it's BW but it has a VGA connector.

That's Newer heard of one that runs off the PC's PSU.

It plugs on the 2nd connector there: http://www.home-computer-support.org/images/c … ower-supply.jpg
But you can plug it on a PSU power cable and then directly on the wall.
I don't have any further info on this, if anyone knows a thing please tell me!

Back in the 1980s and 1990s color VGA CRTs were very expensive. So people in some cases bought cheap monochrome VGA CRTs. Offices also very frequently bought monochrome VGA CRTs in bulk.

Connecting monitors to the auxiliary connector on the PSU was also very common back then. I remember doing the same with my Philips 7BM749 and Philips P3238.

This has a datestamp of 1994 and seems to work under 640x480. As of size, 12" I think (less viewable of course).

-

I wonder why auxilery outputs on PSU's fell out of favour so much? Obviously there is a certain amount of current being taken from the PSU. But surely, CRT's take a huge amount more electricity than an LCD, so removing it for that reason is now redundant. 😕 😕

I've seen a usb powered 21,5" full hd led lg monitor 😜

PeterLI wrote:

Back in the 1980s and 1990s color VGA CRTs were very expensive. So people in some cases bought cheap monochrome VGA CRTs. Offices also very frequently bought monochrome VGA CRTs in bulk.

Connecting monitors to the auxiliary connector on the PSU was also very common back then. I remember doing the same with my Philips 7BM749 and Philips P3238.

Thanks for mentioning this, I've been driven mad with curiosity trying to figure out what those were for.

Blurredman wrote:

I wonder why auxilery outputs on PSU's fell out of favour so much? Obviously there is a certain amount of current being taken from the PSU. But surely, CRT's take a huge amount more electricity than an LCD, so removing it for that reason is now redundant. 😕 😕

I think as PCs themselves needed more power it became problematic for the rating on the cords, but that's just a guess.

Here's an old, and somewhat over-lit, picture of my two surviving CRTs:

The silver one is a Philips 107X4 with "Lightframe" (yes it can be used to "cheat" a little in Doom 3 😜 🤣), the blue/grey one is an HP mx75 (I've long since lost the speakers that hook onto it, but the microphone worked the last time I plugged it in). Both will happily do 1152x864 at 75 Hz.

Both still work, and are both currently in quasi-storage (I use them for testing new builds but neither is hooked up to a regularly used machine); my desk lacks the depth to handle them. 😢 Years ago I had two more (also 17" and also different models - one was a Gateway that wasn't completely flat, and one was a no-name that weighed about half what the other three weighed, and died inside of 3 years) - those died over time, sadly. Also once setup (just to try it out) these two with a 19" WS LCD in the center, 1152x864 + 1440x900 + 1152x864 all the way across, and it was just perfect for basically everything (gaming across it was very neat). Whole thing can run at 75Hz too. Wish I had the desk space for that... 😵

Darkman wrote:

well I finally managed to fix this Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 750 a bit, its not perfect (there is still slight discoloration on the […]
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well I finally managed to fix this Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 750 a bit, its not perfect (there is still slight discoloration on the top right) , but its much better than it was before and actually usable.

the camera used wasn't the greatest but it will do

King's Quest, the oldest game I have for the PC

this is Quake 2 on the monitor's max resolution of 1600X1200 on a Voodoo3 , fairly playable, but not ideal since it slows down quite a bit

Well, you don't need the such high resolution for your 17" monitor anyway. Quake II forever!

retrofanatic wrote:

Here's a photo of my Samsung 1100df 21 inch giant new in box I picked up a little while ago for next to nothing. The guy selling […]
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Here's a photo of my Samsung 1100df 21 inch giant new in box I picked up a little while ago for next to nothing. The guy selling it just wanted it out of the way because it is so big. I included a stock Internet photo because I didn't want to take it out of the box.

20140515_181140_resized_1~2.jpg

samsung_1100DF_Ivory.jpg

20140515_181313_resized_1~2~2.jpg

I personally wouldn't go for anything over 19" for a retro PC. I think 17" is the perfect size for most people, 19" for me 😀

Nahkri wrote:

I'm using this Philips 107E21,image quality is good,a bit too dark even if i increased luminosity to almost max. […]
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I'm using this Philips 107E21,image quality is good,a bit too dark even if i increased luminosity to almost max.

There is should be an addition button inside to increase brightness, but it's very dangerous inside.