VOGONS


4:3 vs. 5:4

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Reply 20 of 48, by Cuttoon

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atom1kk wrote on 2022-04-16, 15:52:
konc wrote on 2022-04-16, 14:07:
atom1kk wrote on 2022-04-16, 13:21:

so as i understand 15 " tft would be the ony possible solution to get it in 4:3 ratio?

15" 1024x768 or the more rare and expensive 20" 1600x1200 are your best options

i looked at ebay for 20 " tft and i can find some for reasonable price.

It depends on what you consider reasonable. For 17" and 19" and any pre-LED backlight model, "zero Euro" is a reasonable and usual price.

Anything below full HD is utterly obsolete, no matter the state or being perfectly ok for 99.9% of modern tasks and a 17" TFT actually having almost as many lines for website display as the 1080 of HD.
I bought a 24" HD screen for a Euro because it was "pickup only", over five years ago, in a city of 3.7 million people.

Many 20" models will be very good in contrast and color but slow, being optimized for 2D artwork, rather than games or movies.

I like jumpers.

Reply 22 of 48, by Zeerex

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I do most of my retro activities on a Dell 17 inch CRT. The other day I picked up a Samsung 193P curbside which is another 5:4 LCD. I am quite impressed by this monitor. Nice bright picture, and the scaling to 640x480 actually looks decently good on it for an LCD, and I was surprised to notice that I don’t notice any ratio distortion. I was a huge snob about CRT displays prior to this, and the image on my Dell beats the pants out of it sure, but a good monitor that scales well has a lot to do with your end experience.

Reply 23 of 48, by mihai

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I bought recently 3 20'' inch monitors, 1600x1200. There are many available where I live, paid cca 40 EURO for each of them. I am currently thinking of buying the 4th one, a DELL 2007FP as I am quite sure that these monitors will disappear from the market in the future and the LCD backlights will not get any younger.

I like LCD backlight better than LED, and S-IPS monitors are usually very high quality, comparable with modern displays. I am using a 4:3 1600x1200 screen as a daily driver in my modern build, it is much simpler to play old games on 4:3 resolutions. It allows integer scaling for 320x200 and 800x600 resolutions; it is also very handy for MAME / MrFPGA.

I have a 19'' 1280x1024 monitor - I have no issues with scaling in windows - you can define 4:3 resolutions, such as 1280x960 with some black bars, for perfect aspect 4:3 ratio. For DOS scaling, the monitor must support and expose scaling options, e.g. my EIZO 1933 s2100 allows scaling options in the OSD (1:1, aspect ratio, full screen).

Last edited by mihai on 2022-12-06, 20:34. Edited 4 times in total.

Reply 24 of 48, by FioGermi

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I bought a NEC MultiSync LCD1970GX in lightly used shape with box locally for like $35. Its going to be replacing the Gateway CRT i had because i want my desk space back. 5:4 and 8ms response time, yeah. But a tiny bit of le stretch doesn't bother me, nor am i doing any competitive gaming so the response time doesn't hurt. Might throw an OSSC at it and see if that can help the correction a bit if it starts getting bothersome. Mmmm...glossy monitors. I have always wondered why high end gaming monitors these days don't offer gloss. It just makes colours pop at the expense of seeing your face in the reflection!

Only problem now is i can't use devices like the Cybershades 3D! What a travesty...

Reply 25 of 48, by mihai

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NEC S-IPS screens are very nice. I am hunting for a reasonably priced LCD2090UXi - it is one of the very few models with the A-TW polarizer, aiming to fix IPS shortcomings - such as IPS glow, tint.

Couple more things about old LCDs:

1 - beware of the panels; I would avoid TN (poor angles, poor colors), PVA (black smearing, fuzzy text). I had good experiences with (S)-IPS and good implementations of S-PVA.
2 - most old LCDs are not flicker free; most will have PWM flicker at lower than 100% brightness. Dell 2007FP has flicker at ~ 175 MHz, not visible for me.

Last edited by mihai on 2022-04-17, 01:26. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 26 of 48, by Azarien

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Shponglefan wrote on 2022-04-16, 15:19:

It's still mystifying to me they didn't at least define 1280x960 as a supported resolution. We could have had pixel perfect scaling, but instead we get messy, blurry upscaling and squashed aspect ratios.

I remember I used 1280x960 and 1152x864 on my last CRT. So 4:3 resolutions close to 1280x1024 were supported, at least by Windows. I didn't want to buy any of those 1280x1024 monitors specifically because of the weird AR, so I waited for quite a long time with a CRT. It wasn't until 2010 when I bought my first LCD (1680x1050, 16:10).

I don't know what happens if you try to force a 1280x1024 LCD to 1280x960 - is it stretched, or letterboxed?

Reply 27 of 48, by Azarien

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mihai wrote on 2022-04-16, 21:55:

I bought recently 3 20'' inch monitors, 1600x1200. There are many available where I live, paid cca 40 EURO for each of them. I am currently thinking of buying the 4th one, a DELL 2007FP as I am quite sure that these monitors will disappear from the market in the future and the LCD backlights will not get any younger.

I've been using dual 2001FP for several years now, recently I bought a third one because DVI input failed on one of the two I had.
I'm thinking of 2007FP too.

Reply 28 of 48, by Sombrero

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Azarien wrote on 2022-04-16, 23:02:

I don't know what happens if you try to force a 1280x1024 LCD to 1280x960 - is it stretched, or letterboxed?

If the monitor supports some kind of aspect ratio preserving scaling it letterboxes it, otherwise it stretches it. If the GPU can do centered scaling you could also use that to get a nice letterboxed image for 1280x960.

I found myself in a weird spot with 5:4 aspect ratio when I began my stumble down the retro rabbit hole. Back in the day when I replaced my CRT monitor with a Viewsonic 1280x1024 LCD I loved the thing, image quality was miles ahead my old coil whiny CRT and I happily used it until widescreens started to become the norm and it got replaced with one. But then later when I got a 19" 1280x1024 LCD for WinXP rig to my surprise the 5:4 aspect ratio often looked odd to me with many games, just too thin for my liking. And that's with games that natively support 1280x1024. Also as a bonus the LCD I got had no aspect ratio preserving scaling, didn't expect to have any need for that at the time so either use 1280x1024 or enjoy your stay at stretch city. I guess the years with 16:9 monitor just made it hard to get used to 5:4 again.

Had to get a 21" 1600x1200 monitor for that sweet 4:3 and can't complain about the increased real estate either.

Reply 29 of 48, by Azarien

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Sombrero wrote on 2022-04-17, 09:51:

I guess the years with 16:9 monitor just made it hard to get used to 5:4 again.

I remember going back to 4:3 after years of using 16:10 and 16:9 was very weird at the beginning.
Nowadays I don't really care much as I regularly use monitors with different AR: dual 4:3 for home PC, a single 16:10 for Raspberry Pi, triple 16:9 for work.

Reply 31 of 48, by FioGermi

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You should be able to correct the aspect ratio on a 5:4 monitor with something like an OSSC right? NEC MultiSync LCD1970GX doesn't have the option to aspect correct to 4:5 or anything in the menu.

Not that a tiny bit of stretch bothers me, was just curious.

Reply 32 of 48, by darry

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FioGermi wrote on 2022-04-18, 18:00:

You should be able to correct the aspect ratio on a 5:4 monitor with something like an OSSC right? NEC MultiSync LCD1970GX doesn't have the option to aspect correct to 4:5 or anything in the menu.

Not that a tiny bit of stretch bothers me, was just curious.

OSSC does not have any actual arbitrary scaling abilities, it can only do line multiplication (also called integer scaling), so you cannot use it to correct aspect ratios .

EDIT :

In other words, if your monitor cannot be made to display at least square pixel 4:3 resolutions like 640x480 properly (without distorting the aspect ratio) and this bothers you, you will either have to

a) learn to live with it
b) get another monitor
c) Buy an actual scaler that can scale to/from arbitrary 4:3 aspect ratio resolutions to a 5:4 one while letterboxing as needed (add black bars below and above the image) to preserve the original aspect ratio . An Extron RGB-DVI 300 series digitizer/scaler would likely handle that, but I have never tried one on a 5:4 monitor .

Last edited by darry on 2022-04-18, 18:30. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 34 of 48, by Jura Tastatura

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atom1kk wrote on 2022-04-16, 13:08:

Yes my native is a 1280x1024. Its a 19"monitor. Would it help if i find a tft with a 1024 native resolution. Should it have than a 4:3 ratio or eould it still be 5:4.

The most games i play need 800x600.

Then your best bet would be 1600x1200 4:3 display.

Reply 36 of 48, by bstar

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Reading this thread is kind of amusing... this aspect ratio issue is 100% why I had a secondary CRT monitor connected to my system from 2000-2010, specifically for NTSC video and older games.

Reply 38 of 48, by dr_st

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DELL 2007FP is a great monitor, although said to be somewhat worse for DOS than the 2001FP:
Recommend me a good 4:3 LCD monitor for hybrid modern/retro usage

2007FP comes in S-IPS (serial # ending with L) and S-PVA (serial # ending with S) variants. Both are said to be good, but I like the S-IPS more. The S-PVA may be more common.

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