What was the largest 4:3 monitor, period?

[hunterjwizzard]

Spotted this mamajam while thrifting. I'm terrible at judging these things but to me that looks north of 23". But the "are you kidding me?" $40 asking price made me leave it behind. It looks like an early flat panel TV. I did not check it for a VGA port.

 

[rmay635703]

Spotted this mamajam while thrifting. I'm terrible at judging these things but to me that looks north of 23". But the "are you kidding me?" $40 asking price made me leave it behind. It looks like an early flat panel TV. I did not check it for a VGA port.

Should have grabbed the model #
but yeah, Aquos 4:3 was never bigger than 20”, the big bezels just make for an optical illusion and that was a very expensive TV back in ye olde times. Even I was perplexed having lived in the early 2k’s with the why would I pay that for 20”?

There is a very rare 23 ish inch 4:3 LCD panel made by Samsung, sadly everything over 20” gets increasingly rare.

The funny thing goodwill and saint vinneys is they claim to not accept electronics, yet despite that they seem to usually have a small selection that is a mix of broken and overpriced.

Monitors tend to be more reasonably priced, TVs not so much. No idea what the random reasons are that they won’t accept items similar to what’s on their shelves while also selling it.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

If its an actual goodwill-branded thrift store, they have different collection locations with different rules, all of which goes to a centralized processing facility to be sorted and priced. So its easy for your specific store to have a "no electronics" rule, while the drop off location 5 blocks away takes everything.

The particular store I found that in used to be pretty good about pricing things. I picked up a 32" TV over there for $20 a while back, which I might have paid for this silly thing. I visited another thrift store that same day with some optimistic notions about the value of gently used electronics.

 

[RetroRow]

If its an actual goodwill-branded thrift store, they have different collection locations with different rules, all of which goes to a centralized processing facility to be sorted and priced. So its easy for your specific store to have a "no electronics" rule, while the drop off location 5 blocks away takes everything.

The particular store I found that in used to be pretty good about pricing things. I picked up a 32" TV over there for $20 a while back, which I might have paid for this silly thing. I visited another thrift store that same day with some optimistic notions about the value of gently used electronics.

All of the thrift stores will take offers if something isn't moving. Usually not on clothes, but other stuff certainly. It's just not advertised just be prepared to walk and come back a week later.

On topic, Cornerstone made a 20" .21 pitch 2D CAD monitor with a max official resolution of 1600x1200. It could be over driven to 2048x1536. At 1600x1200 it was 85hz, 1024x768 was 100hz so it was already a very capable tube.

To overdrive it I used a matrox 2000 and the resulting refresh was something weird.

The resolutions offered for any monitor are built into window's Monitor.inf and its sub monitor inf files. I copied out the official spec and then used the matrox card as the second monitor to determine the new settings. The official matrox driver has an advanced tool that let you diddle the pixel clock and signal polarity settings for the monitor atrached to it under win98se, however once created the inf worked under 2000. I don't see why it wouldn't work on a more modern video card provided it could generate the signal specified in the inf.

 

[rmay635703]

All of the thrift stores will take offers if something isn't moving. Usually not on clothes, but other stuff certainly. It's just not advertised just be prepared to walk and come back a week later.

On topic, Cornerstone made a 20" .21 pitch 2D CAD monitor with a max official resolution of 1600x1200. It could be over driven to 2048x1536. At 1600x1200 it was 85hz, 1024x768 was 100hz so it was already a very capable tube.

To overdrive it I used a matrox 2000 and the resulting refresh was something weird.

The resolutions offered for any monitor are built into window's Monitor.inf and its sub monitor inf files. I copied out the official spec and then used the matrox card as the second monitor to determine the new settings. The official matrox driver has an advanced tool that let you diddle the pixel clock and signal polarity settings for the monitor atrached to it under win98se, however once created the inf worked under 2000. I don't see why it wouldn't work on a more modern video card provided it could generate the signal specified in the inf.

I had a large cornerstone monochrome screen like that, wish I would have kept it.

 

[vwestlife]

Zenith had some 27" System III CRT TVs with a VGA input that supported up to 800x600, however I believe they simply had a built-in VGA to composite/S-video converter, thus the image quality wasn't very good.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Zenith had some 27" System III CRT TVs with a VGA input that supported up to 800x600, however I believe they simply had a built-in VGA to composite/S-video converter, thus the image quality wasn't very good.

If we're counting 4x3 TVs as long as they do higher than 480i/p resolution then it's worth considering that there were a number of 4x3 CRT rear projection TVs that were sold from the 1990's into the early 2000s that were sold as "HD ready" and supported higher resolutions, although exactly *what* they supported varied. I want to say at least some of them were basically multisync monitors that could lock onto a fairly flexible range of resolutions in order to be ready for "whatever" HD TV actually turned out to be when the standard was finalized, but I'll also admit that my knowledge of this area is entirely second/third hand.

(Digging around I did stumble across a review for a fairly late Hitachi model that supported 1080i, but would automatically *only* scale it letterboxed, not fill the whole height of the 4x3 screen with it... which would seem to rule it out from consideration.)

Of course if we count projectors then the sky's the limit, sizewise. Lecture halls and other venues started getting multisync projectors in the 90's that could do better-than-TV resolutions the size of movie screens.(*)

*Edit: Actually, I *have* a perfect example in my possession. (Although I say "have" with a big asterisk; it's somewhere in the garage, I haven't powered it or the Indy it came with on in 20 years, and it was pretty flaky even back then, so I'm not going to pretend it still works. If I ever dig it out I should probably offer it to a good home) The SGI Indy Presenter:

It's a 12" 1024x768 TFT display that lets you pull the back off it (The hatch is a big white frosted piece of plastic with a mirrored back to act as a diffuser for the side-lights used in direct-view mode) and lay it on top of those old-fashioned overhead projector that all the old people in the room still remember from school. SGI's marketing material said it was good for up to 35 FOOT displays. Which seems optimistic, but why not.

Edit 2: ... Kind of crazy this came out in 1994. Also crazy: it cost just shy of $10,000.