clouds@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Kathy Strong) (12/14/90)
In article <41313@ut-emx.uucp> I foolishly wrote: >Christopher, I collected information on full-page monochrome monitors for >the Plus/SE just a few weeks ago. I'm sending you the summary in email. >If anyone else is interested, please drop me a line and I'll send it to >you also. > Okay. Well, if you've ever wondered whether there's any interest in big- screen monitors for little Macs, wonder no more. I stopped sending email after 30 or so requests. Here's the summary. By the way, I should stress that these answers were to a request for info on INEXPENSIVE portrait monitors. A tip of the hat to Radius for having the savvy to request a copy of the summary. :-) P.S. It's long. =====BEGIN SUMMARY===== From: "Omar Souka" <souka@uh.msc.umn.edu> You could also take a look at the Mirror Technologies Pixelview I ($500, I think) I have a Pixelview II (19",$900) for my SE/30, and I love it. ------------ From: dana@are.berkeley.edu (Dana E. Keil) I would also be sure to look into the new portrait monitor from Sigma Designs, Inc. Somebody came to BMUG to show it to us the other week and it looks really good. Also, Sigma Designs claims to be meeting the Swedish standards for monitor emissions. Sigma Designs Inc. 46501 Landing Parkway Freemont, CA 94538 415-770-0100 -------------- From: "brian wendell ogilvie" <ogil@midway.uchicago.edu> I used to work for a Mac peripheral and software store here in Chicago, and we got one of the Mobius FPD + accelerator systems a few days before I left. I installed it and played around with it a bit (and used it to do an ad layout). Some impressions: 1. It's really easy to install. Took me under 15 minutes to install the card, from opening up the case to screwing the last screw back in. Plugging the monitor into the Mac and the wall takes no time. The cable seems to be well done--not too long, but not constrainingly short. The tilt-swivel stand seems to be the weakest part of the setup--I was never quite certain I had it installed all the way, though it seemed quite stable. 2. The picture quality is better than that on the 3 year old SE in which I installed the card. It's really sharp. The aspect ratio seems a bit off, though; the image seems a bit taller than it should be. This is especially evident near the bottom, but it's not, in my opinion, bad enough to impede your use of the monitor in any way. 3. The monitor software is well done. It allows you to set your Mac or the Mobius monitor as the main monitor (the one with the menu bar) and to adjust the relative heights of the monitors. You can put the Mobius on either side of the Mac, though Mobius recommends that you put it on the right side so the Mac power supply doesn't cause interference. The only annoying feature is that if you move the mouse pointer anywhere off the side of the Mobius on which the Mac monitor is, the mouse snaps up to the smaller Mac monitor (I know that that sentence is a little vague). This diagram should explain things better: -------- | |------ | Mobius | Mac | | |------ | |<=== if you move the mouse pointer off this edge, it snaps -------- up to the Mac screen rather than stopping. 4. The accelerator is a great feature. It has a few problems; the only serious one is that sounds (actually, snd resources) don't play perfectly. I think that Mobius is working on this. The sounds come out fuzzy, with a lot of noise. But the speed increase is definitely worth it. Speedometer says that overall performance is 1.95 times that of a standard 8-Mhz SE. And since more screen area means that screen updates take more processor time, the acceleration is important. I wouldn't recommend a full page display for the SE without one, either built in, from the same company, or from another party. The Mobius, while only a 16-Mhz 68000, is fast enough to make screen updates painless, and it's on the same card as the video hardware, which makes installation easy. Overall, I think that the Mobius monitor/accelerator combo is a great deal. The only thing I might caution you about (and this applies to any third-party monitor for the SE) is that there may be some incompatibility problems with System 7. ---------- From: tn505981@longs.LANCE.ColoState.Edu I USE THE MOBIUS PORTRAIT/ACCELERATOR AND IT WORKS FLAWLESSLY. EASY TO INSTALL AND VERY EASY TO USE. THE STARTUP INIT IS A LITTLE CLUMSY IF YOU CONSIDER CLICKING A BUTTON TO VERIFY INSTALLATION EACH TIME A PAIN (I DO). SO ALL IS WELL EXCEPT THAT. I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO GET OMNIPAGE TO RUN, BUT I DON'T THINK THAT THE DISPLAY IS THE REASON... SINCERELY, TODD NATHAN -------------- From: jjwcmp@ultb.isc.rit.edu (Jeff Wasilko) I have a Ehman here for Evaluation, and am very unhappy with tfeh display quality. It had significant distortion, and became fuzzy after it was left on for awhile. It interfered with the built-in video of the SE. I also have a Princeton Publishing Labs monitor, and I feel that the display quality is on par with the Radius Pivot or the Apple FPD. It comes withe a Tilt/Swivel. I don't know about the list price, but I'm ppaying around $600 ea in qty with a video card, and $400 without a card (for ci and si built in video). -------------- From: shell@cs.sfu.ca I would be very interested in a summary of your replies. I have an Apple full page display, but it makes a buzzing noise. People say there is no fan inside but it sure sounds like it. I'd like to know if the monitors you are looking at make noise. reply to shell@cs.sfu.ca -------------- I've had a Samsung FPD on my SE for over a year now, and I'm quite happy with it. Here's a review I posted shortly after I got it - everything I said then still holds. "Well, enough speculation and hand waving about the Samsung/Cornerstone single page display - I bought one, so here's a review... First, I use a number of different large screen displays at work, so I'm familair with the various sorts of problems large screens have. I bought the Samsung/Cornerstone combination for my Mac-SE at home two weeks ago, for $495 from Software That Fits. STF shipped it Airborne - got it the next day. It comes with a one year warranty (which my credit card doubles). I am VERY happy with this display - especially for the price! It is perfect for my application (custom typography and compositing for various publishing houses, mostly using TeXtures). MONITOR: Has a very solid feel, and a good tilt/swivel stand built in. Weighs about 11 kg. Contrast is not as high as the Mac 9" monitor, but still quite acceptable. Linearity and pin cushion well adjusted. Curvature of the screen is higher than, say, the Apple single page display, but not unpleasently so. Focus is crisp and uniform across the entire screen (in part because of the higher curvature). If the Mac and the monitor are closer than about 8 inches together, there is some interference between the two, which results in a wavy display. If the Mac is to the left of the monitor, the interference is only on the Mac screen. If the Mac is to the right, there is interference on both screens (Mac HV supply is on the left). If you don't have room on your desk to keep them apart, some sort of shielding will be necessary for stable displays. There is no anti-glare coating on the monitor, but I haven't found this to be a problem. INTERFACE card: Installed with no problems in the SE. Comes with all hardware to put the connector in the punch out panel. With Mac cracking tools and a pair of pliers, it took maybe ten minutes to install. One jumper header on the board, allows you to change the base address in case you have conflicting devices in an expansion chassis. No provisions for multiple boards inside the SE - if you have an accellerator, you'll need an xpansion chassis, I'd guess, unless the accellerator has provisions DRIVER software: There are two versions of this. The package came with something called "Single Page INIT," a sort of bare bones driver. Lets you configure what side the Mac screen is on, and at what height, so the total screen area of the two monitors (L or T shaped) is both logically and physically contiguous. Automatic screen saver. That's about it. I had a few problems with incompatibilities with other inits, which cleared up when I renamed the driver to have a space character in front of its name, so it loaded first. I faxed a message to both STF and Cornerstone about features I'd like to see in the driver. STF called me back in a few hours - they had just received new software from Cornerstone with a mooseload of features. Shipped it to me Airborne overnight, got it the next day, no charge. Never heard from Cornerstone. I've been most impressed with the service from STF. The new driver, called " Cornerstone," does everything the old init does, and a lot more. It's a cdev, so a lot of it is configurable on the fly, from the control panel. Select normal size menubars and menus, or big ones (with a special font supplied), normal or big (actually, pretty giant) arrow cursor. Set idle time for screen saver. Pop up menus, with various options. If the Mac screen is disabled, you can set it instead to act as a magnifier (2x, 4x or 8x) of the area around the cursor. If you have applications that are incompatible with the large screen (some games, and old versions of Hypercard), you can set them so when they're launched, the large screen is disabled and everything's moved back to the old screen (doesn't work with Multifinder). You can select either 72 or 84 dpi. I actually haven't tried a lot of theses features, so I can't say how well they work. COMPATIBILITY: I run system 6.0.2, multifinder 6.1b7. 2.5M memory. I mostly use Textures 1.01f, MS Word 4.0, Cricket Draw 1.1, MacTerminal 2.3, NCSA Telnet 2.3, MPW 3.0. Inits: MenuClock 3.0, Suitcase II 1.2.5. I haven't had any problems at all. I found that the heirDA init caused system crashes, but I didn't persue it, since the driver provides pop up menus. There is one pretty annoying bug. For some reason, the _HideCursor toolbox call does not seem to function. In many text based applications, the cursor will disappear while you're typing, until you move the cursor. It no longer disappears, so on occasion it partly obscurs what you're working on. Not deadly, but annoying enough that I hope they fix it. SUMMARY: I like it. A lot. If you're looking for a large screen, and don't want to spend a lot of money, this is the way to go. If you're thinking about the double page display (which uses the same driver, and I think the same interface card with more memory installed), you might want to look at it first to see if it's flat enough. Software That Fits has been a great mail order company to deal with." cheers, -m- Mike Blackwell The Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, 15213 412-268-8830 mkb@rover.ri.cmu.edu ------------- I bought the Pixelview I full-page monitor from Mirror Technologies. $567 plus shipping. It was well packed, very easy to install, came with tools. The picture was a tiny bit skewed (upper left corner was a little higher than upper right corner) but not distractingly so. Contrast and brightness pretty good, not outstanding. Design of case and tilt\swivel stand was sturdy. Hefty cable. The software, Desktop Designer, had some nifty things. One was the ability to configure your small screen as a virtual window on the large one. Let me explain: Say you have the big screen at left, Mac screen at right. Your cursor is at the top of the big screen. As you pull your cursor down, still on the big screen, the image on your small Mac screen starts to move down too. So no matter where you are (vertically) on the big screen, the small Mac screen is "next" to it. Hard to describe, but very handy. There is also a configurable <meta-key>-click combination that makes a popup menu. That is, you could choose Command-click, and then whenever you do Command-click, a pop-up menu will appear under your cursor (apple, File, Edit, etc. etc.) which has one level of hierarchical submenus. Saves some travel up to the menu bar. One other item looked nice, but it works only on Mac IIs. You could configure a certain mouse movement--say, drawing a small letter C with your mouse--so that when you perform that mouse action, you get the pop-up menu. No keyboard action required! I found the redraw to be slow--no surprise, I guess, as I'm running a stock SE with Adobe Type Manager and lots of fonts. If I were buying again, I'd probably go with an accelerated card, if I had the extra money to spend. Oh, service from Mirror was quite good. They faxed me lots of info before I finally decided, and the salesperson called me the day the system was due to confirm that it had arrived--a nice touch. =====END SUMMARY===== -- ........................................................................... : Kathy Strong : "Try our Hubble-Rita: just one shot, : : (Clouds moving slowly) : and everything's blurry" : : clouds@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu : --El Arroyo : :..........................................................................: