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(POLL) What kind of monochrome monitor do you prefer?

(POLL) What kind of monochrome monitor do you prefer?

  • Total voters
    38
I prefer green because it provides the sharpest image on the human retina. That part is just optics, but I also like the very slow phosphor on monitors like the IBM 5151. TTL also is cheap and easy to move around because of the low parts count. It is just plain superior for communications. That said, I do like both amber and yellow as well. They're also quite close to the middle wavelength, like green, so provides a fairly clear image. I collect them all and even have a white one. One other nice thing about TTL is that there's no veil of little black dots like on a modern screen. My (totally unbiased!) opinion is that TTL is superior to anything which has come along since, and it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. :)
 
Green, definitely. Amber just doesn't do it for me. Of course, if it's VGA rendering, then white--green or amber just looks weird in gray-scale.
 
patscc said:
Gotta go with amber, preferably 5155 amber. Seems to be easiest on the eyes at night if I have the lights off.
patscc
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I think that's a very important point on which to make a personal choice. Amber is my second choice for that, it just doesn't seem very retro, and I like things to be a bit old-fashioned if possible. ;)
 
I like white. I think the contrast between normal (light grey) and intensified (white) looks nicest in white.
 
Ole Juul brings up a point. When did the first amber monitors start showing up, anyway ?
And why did they pick green as the official color for monitors, when even before computers where around, there was a huge industry churning out b/w crt's ?
patscc
 
In every (old) movie I see the monitor is green, always. Brazil followed this thing, and monochrome here = green. There was any monochrome green VGA?
 
patscc said:
And why did they pick green as the official color for monitors, when even before computers where around, there was a huge industry churning out b/w crt's ?
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Radar scopes. Going back to WWII, they were always green, I think due to both the technological limitations of the phosphor at the time, as well as green being easiest on the eyes, for the people who had to watch the scope for hours on end.

Anyway, in an Apple II computer lab I remember seeing an Amdek monochrome composite monitor with light blue (cyan) phosphor. It was the strangest thing ever!
 
I had a monochrome monitor with a switch to change the color emitted. I preferred to use it in white mode when I was working with any graphical program but used the amber mode for text programs. I can't have been the only person to adjust the monitor based on the software run.
 
So how did that work, then ? Was it a regular color monitor that forced the display to amber, or did it actually have a b/w phosphor and an amber phosphor ?
patscc
 
patscc said:
So how did that work, then ? Was it a regular color monitor that forced the display to amber, or did it actually have a b/w phosphor and an amber phosphor ?
patscc
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I am not sure. Had to be really cheap since it was the cheapest monochrome/hercules monitor available in 1988. I suspect that it had seperate phospors since parts of the amber stopped working while the white screen worked fine.
 
Amber feels much more calming to me, so I like my Amdek monitor. Green (or bright green in the case of the Apple //c screen) makes my eyes hurt after a while.
 
krebizfan said:
I am not sure. Had to be really cheap since it was the cheapest monochrome/hercules monitor available in 1988. I suspect that it had seperate phospors since parts of the amber stopped working while the white screen worked fine.
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At one point, small color CRTs were actually cheaper than monochrome ones (supply and demand). You could take a color CRT, fit it with a monochrome yoke and simply switch individual guns for color. The downside is that the shadow-mask makes for terrible resolution. On a monochrome CRT, the only real limitation to resolution is the spot size.
 
It's kind of sad, really, that hi-res monochrome monitors kinda went by the wayside. I'd be perfectly happy working with shades of gray if it meant I could have a nice, sharp display free from all the various compromises you have with shadow or slit masks.
patscc
 
A lot of the display quality on monochrome has to do with the phosphor persistence. The green on the 5151 display had a very long persistence, which drove people crazy. On the other hand, some of the early amber screens had too-short persistence phosphors, which made flicker particularly annoying to some. Some of the early graphics systems (as well as radar displays) have a different color while being painted (fluorescence) and while decaying (phosphorescence). I remember the CDC 250 IGS as being one of those--very long persistence greenish-yellow but blue while being painted.

Phosphor formulation always seemed like a black art to me.
 
I use green on black for text in most of my current CLIs so on a monochrome if it was mostly text I'd do that. If it was GUI I'd prefer Amber. Still both are nicer on your eyes than white for night time use. krebizfan, was it an IBM clone looking monitor? I have a VGA monitor that does that where you could (I think push a button? .. it's been too long) to change it between regular color, green, amber, or IBM (white on blue). On GUI screens it just uses only that gun I guess so it's all green or amber-scale (vs grey-scale). I thought it was a really considerate feature since they're making it for folks who were on night shifts or in a dark environment so it wouldn't damage their eyes as much.
 
Amber's not usually a seperate gun in an RGB monitor, though. I can see them hard-wiring the amber color in, though, and then just using the luma component of a signal to drive it.
patscc
 
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