Nieman brand monitors

[Ken Layton]

Just to let everyone know, last week I was out of town for several days in Oak Harbor, Washington at the Blue Fox Drive-in Theater repairing a bunch of games in their arcade building. A previous tech had removed the monitor main and neck boards from two monitors there a year ago! I called around all over the place trying to find either a universal replacement chassis (one game had a medium res monitor the other a standard) or a complete 25" (or 24.8") monitor. No luck, so finally I decided to call Rick at Nieman (who posts here on these forums).

Rick picked up the phone right away and I talked to him for a while. We decided it would be best to get two brand new monitors for the machines in question (which are good earners at that theater). Rick was very helpful and he's building two 25" monitors in the resolutions needed to order! They will be shipped soon and I will be installing these monitors around Jan 15th on a return trip to the theater. There are still 5 machines down, but we had to order parts for them from several different suppliers and the parts won't be here till then anyway.

If you get up to this part of Washington state, this drivein theater is open year round with Fri-Sat-Sun operation this time of the year and 7 days in the summer. Game room operates on days the theater is open. Food there is excellent and they show a cartoon before the movie too. Check out the go karts and kiddie train ride too.

Anyway, I will post my experiences with these monitors once I get back up there and then give a review. So far it looks like I'll be giving a good review.

[Ken Layton]

Well here's my review. We got two of the new model 3M25SF tri-sync monitors. These have a flat face and are 24.8" tubes. We did buy two of them for the broken machines at the Blue Fox Drive-in Theater. One went into an "Ultracade" conversion in a Midway "Blitz" cabinet. The other went into a Sega "Rally" 4 unit linked sitdown driver. The Nieman monitors were well-packed and arrived in perfect condition.

The monitors have a really nice remote adjustment board with tons of adjustments (including Pincushion) on it. The pots are not those cheap white ones like Wells-Gardner uses. You know the ones that break so easily. Well, Nieman uses big herky ones that won't break (very good thinking). The only drawback is the cable that connects the remote adjust board to the monitor main board is a bit short. I feel it should be a foot longer.

Monitor comes with a conventional 3 wire home power cord hard wired to the main board. I feel it should have a Tyco/AMP # 350825-1 connector like other monitor makers use on the main board for unplugable power cords. Wells-Gardner and Neotec use those and most late model cabinets have those connectors on the power harness to the monitor. These monitors do not need an isolation transformer.

The video input cable is a conventional 15 pin computer monitor cable. If you want to use with a CGA or EGA game, there's a dongle wire harness adapter that plugs into the 15 pin cable. This little adapter board has tiny non-standard 6 pin connector and wiring harness that ends with stripped & tinned leads that you are supposed to cut and splice into the cabinet's existing video/sync harness. This I didn't like. I believe a better solution would have been to eliminate that phony little connector and it's harness and instead install a Tyco/AMP # 640445-6 header the same as Wells-Gardner and just about every other monitor maker use.

Aside from the peeves mentioned above, these monitors looked great onscreen right out of the box. I only had to tweak the vertical size and pincushion on the Ultracade game. Picture looked great! From unboxing & installing the monitor to actually playing this machine only took me ten minutes. The Sega Rally took longer, mostly because you have to dismantle the entire front of the machine to get the monitor out. The replacement Nieman monitor just fit. It was a tight fit, but it replaced the original Nanao monitor.

All in all I give these monitors thumbs up. Rick is supposed to be sending me a service manual and schematic for my reference.

[Aurich]

Thanks for the review Ken. My interactions with Rick have all been positive, I'm still thinking I'd like to throw one of those 24.8" tri-syncs into my current cab build. We've exchanged e-mail briefly about doing some testing with an ArvadeVGA/MAME setup, so I know he's interested in providing good solutions for the community here.

[D_Zoot]

Just to backup what Ken said,  the two Nieman's I have had out for a while now (see earlier post/review) are still going strong and looking great on the route (seeing near 24/7 service). 

I've been very pleased with the performance and picture quality of these.  Thumbs up to Rick!


D

[Ken Layton]

By the way, Nieman's monitor frame includes a beefy metal plate spanning the rear of the frame to protect the neckboard. That's a nice touch and a very good idea.

The picture looked pretty good on these monitors right out of the box with very little tweaking needed. About all that was needed was the vertical height and horizontal position controls to be slightly adjusted. The monitor I put in the Sega Rally game (4 unit linked sitdown driver) which the gameboard runs at 24 khz (EGA) resolution, I had to adjust the focus control slightly as the picture was not sharply focused. I had to break the seal on the focus control on the flyback and adjust it a little bit. Then the focus was right on the money.

As mentioned in my review above, I do wish it came with arcade video game industry standard power and video connectors. That would truely make these monitors plug 'n play.

Oh yes, something else too. Every monitor should include a service manual in the box.

[Rickn]

Thanks Ken, Aurich and DZoot- I appreciate the support and Ken's comments.

Yes I am always caught on which way to go with the signal ad power connections as I get the same type of comments that favor the 3 prong AC and the pigtail adapter for the signal.

I do not want to go like some of the competitors that charge for a power cord of any sort, who knows, maybe they will start to charge more if you really want atube included... Just kidding.

Unfortuenately to many it is all about cost, so hard to go both ways- but your comments have definitely provoked more thought, perhaps optional connectors is the way to go.

As far as the manual goes- honestly- I have completed the schematic and will forward it to Ken in the next day or so, the manual is still in process, hopefully I can find a few more hours to complete it.

Likewise I am close to a revised website watch for it soon still niemandisplays.com.

Thanks again

Rick Nieman
Rick@Niemandisplays.com
519-621-1722

[StephenH]

Rick,

Maybe you could make an adapter that has a DB15 and an arcade connector on the other end, that would allow plugging an existing arcade games connectors into a Nieman monitor.   The same would be true with the power plug.  I think that a simple cable adapter that plugs into the 6-pin wire would work.