dsc@izimbra.CSS.GOV (love comes tumbling) (09/28/87)
in the september 22nd issue of macweek there is an advertisement for what looks like the xerox nutmeg full page display for $995. does anyone have any experience with this display? thanks, dsc `see across the view. see the sky ripped open. see the rain through the gaping wound, pounding the women and children who run into the arms of america'
callas@decwrl.UUCP (09/30/87)
I bought a Xerox/Nutmeg full screen monitor at Mac World in
Boston. I like the thing. It is 720 x 900 pixels (8 x 10 inches
at 90 dpi). Most things work quite well with it, notably Word
3.01 (in which Page preview is gorgeous -- it uses the whole
screen and gives you a nice legible picture), Lightspeed Pascal,
and Superpaint. Hypercard centers its window in the middle of
the screen, leaving lots of space for tools &c. Macsbug even
works.
You start up the screen with an application. I'd much prefer an
INIT file, but you can't have everything, I suppose. It doesn't
seem to consume much memory. I've gone prowling with Heapshow
and MacNosy, and not found the nutmeg code (not that I've tried
that hard), and I don't notice much less memory. The screen
memory itself seems to be on the interface card (which is a
clear plastic thing that slips over the CPU of a Plus or SE. I
can't imagine it working any other way.
The phosphor is a soft white with a bit of a yellow cast to it.
A nice, friendly, *paper-colored* phosphor. I'm no fan of amber
screens, but the more I stare at this screen the more I like the
phosphor. It is also *very* long-lived, and there is essentially
zero flicker (I'm a bit sensitive to flicker). I like the look
of the screen better than any of the other screens I looked at
(Radius, Megascreen, and a couple others -- I spent most of Mac
World looking at large screens with intent to buy).
You can direct an application to the Mac's screen by holding
down the command key while the application launches (this also
works for the Finder when you leave an application).
Most applications that aren't smart about the large screen
simply put themselves in the upper left-hand corner of the
screen and work normally. Often, I run these programs on the Mac
screen, simply because I find all that empty real estate
distracting.
There are a few things that don't work:
* Tempo crashes the system with an odd address trap if you start
it on the nutmeg screen. If you start it on the Mac screen
and switch to the nutmeg, it seems to work okay.
* Switcher animation is broken. Period. Messes up the screen. It
looks like some twit hard-coded the number 512 in it. I haven't
tried Switcher without animation -- this is not because of the
screen corruption, but because I'm scared of Switcher, as it has
a tendency to crash. It's cost me work more times than I like. I
developed this aversion to Switcher long before I got the large
screen. I'm hoping for better with Multifinder.
* Remove Autoblack from your system folder! This should be
obvious, but I spent most of the first afternoon I had the
thing wondering why it crashed. The nutmeg screen has its
own screen saver, so you don't need it.
All in all, I recommend it whole-heartedly. If you can find it
for $995, then get it! It's wonderful. If both screen could be
used at once (` la Radius), it would be even nicer, but hey...
Jon Callas