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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
Many color EGA and early multisync monitors could switch between full color, green monochrome, and simulated amber monochrome modes, because these monitors could also be driven with MDA, Hercules, and EGA monochrome video signals. Others didn't give you a choice of color, such as my Mitsubishi AUM-1381A Diamond Scan monitor -- if you feed it with a monochrome signal, it automatically switches into simulated amber phosphor mode.
 
patscc said:
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 ?
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I was hoping that one of our senior professionals here, like Chuck(G), would have been close enough to when that was happening to be able to at least hazard a guess. Is green actually more retro, or is that just my skewed sense of it? Certainly green seems to have been used in CRT displays of various kinds when they first came out, but was it used in the first computer displays?
 
I can remember seeing a long-persistence amber oscilloscope (>20 sec) in the 60s. On computer monitors, I don't know--certainly by the time the 5150 came out. Maybe someone with an old OEM monitor kit catalog might be able to say when they were offered in computer monitors. I seem to recall that green was generally accepted to be the most readable for many years.
 
Among the commonly used monochrome CRT phosphors -- P1 green, P3 amber, and P4 white -- green was the only one with a long persistence, ideal for reducing flicker. Amber phosphor is medium persistence, so it can result in some visible flicker when used with a 50 Hz refresh rate (such as with MDA/Hercules), and white phosphor is short-persistence, good for black & white TV sets but not for computer monitors.

There was also P2 blue-green phosphor with long persistence, used by some computer monitors, but not nearly as popular as green or amber.

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor
 
I did a quick search on Infoworld and found an article in the April 23, 1984 covering the transition from green to amber monitors. (Page 50 and 51). It points to the first computers shipping with amber screen in 1983 and people paying $200 -$300 extra* for amber. Which surprised me since when I went purchasing a computer in the late 80s, all the cheap monitors were amber and it cost more to get green.

Though if I remember correctly, the Amstrad available in Germany in 1985 had a lovely crisp white on black display which was the best display I had seen until monochrome VGA or the awesome Radius line became available. Early color VGA monitors were saddled with some poor dot pitch choices that sometimes gave me a headache which wasn't resolved until about 1991.
 
krebizfan said:
Early color VGA monitors were saddled with some poor dot pitch choices that sometimes gave me a headache which wasn't resolved until about 1991.
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The worst was the Tandy VGM-220 -- a color VGA monitor with a 0.52 mm dot pitch and no anti-glare coating on the CRT.
 
vwestlife said:
Many color EGA and early multisync monitors could switch between full color, green monochrome, and simulated amber monochrome modes, because these monitors could also be driven with MDA, Hercules, and EGA monochrome video signals. Others didn't give you a choice of color, such as my Mitsubishi AUM-1381A Diamond Scan monitor -- if you feed it with a monochrome signal, it automatically switches into simulated amber phosphor mode.
Click to expand...

The NEC Multisync II has a white/green/amber text color switch on it. Works in all TTL modes, not just MDA. A bit stripped down from the original Multisync, which offered many more settings via dip switches. I seem to recall it offering colors like cyan and magenta.
 
vwestlife said:
Many color EGA and early multisync monitors could switch between full color, green monochrome, and simulated amber monochrome modes, because these monitors could also be driven with MDA, Hercules, and EGA monochrome video signals. Others didn't give you a choice of color, such as my Mitsubishi AUM-1381A Diamond Scan monitor -- if you feed it with a monochrome signal, it automatically switches into simulated amber phosphor mode.
Click to expand...
I'm with you -- early multisync is my fave, too. Easy, versatile, sharp & crisp and you only need one to plug into any video card. :) I have two of them in my computer lab.
 
In 1984 when I bought my first computer, amber monitors were being touted as easier on the eyes than green on black or white on black.

I did a search to see if I could find any validation on that point and found a Google preview to a book "Visual ergonomics in the workplace" by Jeffrey Anshel. On page 29 of this preview, the author states that each color has it's pluses and minuses but in the end it is unimportant compared to other factors such as contrast polarity and resolution.

http://books.google.com/books?id=bx...v=onepage&q=amber monitors ergonomics&f=false
 
What was the horrible screen that the Compaq Portable III used? That seemed all red (not amber) and was ok for a while but I wouldn't want to use it for extended periods of time.
 
I wonder if cost played a role as well. It seems like most of the name brand computers (IBM, Apple, Tandy, Compaq, etc.) used green phosphor monitors, while the amber monitors were more likely to be found with no-name clones.
 
Maybe they like to provide the green ones because a lot of the boxes were used to connect to the company mainframe as well, and that way it kinda looked like a proper terminal.
patscc
 
A little digging shows that amber probably made the splash when Far East manufacturing geared up. You could, for example, get DEC VT220 terminals in amber, green or white phosphors, Wyse offered the WY60 (but I don't hink the WY50) in the same choices. ADDS, IBM, etc. all had similar choices. So the trend dates to the early 80s at least.

I'm not sure about the 1970s, however. The 1977 Ball Bros. OEM kit info shows only P4 (white) and P39 (green) phosphors being available.
 
Talking out of my arse but could a reason behind green be military use? One not to damage your night vision (although amber I believe is also night vision friendly.. certainly anything but white) and I can't remember (I always remember it incorrectly) which color of light travels the least distance. You ex-military folks would know, I just remember my dads flashlights all having the color filters (looking at a map in the dark with red? green? and I thought it was also to reduce the visibility of your flashlight to the enemy).

Could just be because the original stuff was green though so they just kept it similar to the other military system radar colors. Someone else already pointed out the extended glow time that I think green phosphorus had since the refresh/scan rate wasn't that high in a lot of systems. That gave SpaceWar ships their cool little gas trails on the pdp-1 lol.
 
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