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A new toy today

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shorthair:
Hmmm.  I was kinda curious about the image quality. It turns out the image appears to get a little clearer and brighter through the front.  I totally forgot to check it, partly as I prefer it connected in the rear, and right now I'm just using a table for both monitor and panel, and am off the table as it is. Thanks.

Zebidee:
Hi Shorthair,

What frequencies are you sending to the monovision?  VGA or something else?

I was just looking at the monovision specs and wondering ...

I think that because it is 31khz, it does a little line doubling trick to do 15khz modes.  That is, because it draws the lines twice as fast, it must draw twice as many lines to keep the vertical frequency at 50-60khz.  It says in the specs "31khz", "Resolution (Line Doubler)" and that it does "1050 Lines (NTSC) or 1250
Lines (PAL)", which is about twice as many as normal for these modes.

Clearly, the VGA 15-pin D-Sub was designed for laptops etc.

So, I'm also curious about what the picture quality is really like.  I think that these things were mainly used when people wanted to be able to display both laptop presentations and also TV/video.  It sounds like some kind of scan converter or similar is used, as it would have to add lines to 15khz input.  Alexkidd's comments seem to reflect that.  Are they actually good for mame resolutions?  Or are they really just a kind-of VGA monitor with a scan converter built in?

RandyT:

--- Quote from: Zebidee on May 11, 2007, 07:54:40 am ---So, I'm also curious about what the picture quality is really like.  I think that these things were mainly used when people wanted to be able to display both laptop presentations and also TV/video.  It sounds like some kind of scan converter or similar is used, as it would have to add lines to 15khz input.  Alexkidd's comments seem to reflect that.  Are they actually good for mame resolutions?  Or are they really just a kind-of VGA monitor with a scan converter built in?

--- End quote ---

There are a couple of types of monitors out there.  The ones to look for are actual large multi-sync monitors.  These will have a native ability to switch to different frequencies, usually VGA and lower, in order to display the information as it is received.  They would be comparable to the WG D9200 / D9400 types of monitors.

The other type are, unfortunately, just video monitors with a built in down-scaler.  Internally, they are most likely an S-video monitor, with the Composite and S-video passing straight through from the inputs.  The 15-pin D-sub would go to the scaler circuitry and then to another of the units S-Video inputs.  These units may or may not have special tubes to allow more "lines" of resolution.  The value of higher than 800 lines on a video monitor is questionable.

The sometimes difficult part is knowing which one is which when it comes to "Presentation Monitors" as to be one, it pretty much just needs to put an image on a large screen from a number of different inputs.  To meet that goal, one could just as easily attach a composite / s-video input conversion board to D9400, as one could attach a down-scaler to a TV monitor.  Fortunately, the documentation will sometimes provide clues as to whether the input is scaled and in which direction.  The word Multi-Sync and the presence of RGBS inputs usually means good things though.

I personally own and have used down-scalers and Multi-sync monitors.  There is no comparison between the two.  Scalers almost always exhibit artifacting in the way of tearing on scrolling games or some other undesirable result.  It's possible that the circuitry built into the monitors is better than the less-expensive stand-alone boxes, but there's no way to know unless you are able to actually test it and observe what happens.

RandyT

Zebidee:
Wow.  Thanks!

shorthair:
I didn't do a lot of searching, but I could only get the main specs. I think it's the latter, Zeb. And possibly like what Randy said, though I don't know about the d-sub going through the S-video, as the rear input image is actually really good - only slightly less defined than the front input, which is about as good if not the same as my Billabs, both set at XGA.

Like I've said, I don't prefer scan lines, so this monitor does fine for me. It is curious it will do vectors at apparently the same quality as my Billabs (both through my avga), though the former does this snapping back of the image, a sort of balloon snapping back and forth, then stabilising (vs the sorta schizo effect the Billabs, and apparently any multi-sync, goes through) when exiting a game back to the desktop. I wonder if I might hurt the Monivision by using switchres even with those games?

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