On Sun, 6 Dec 1998, Chris Frost wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > I know this is /way/ off topic, sorry if it offends anyone in advance. > > I'm thinking of buying a CTX PL9 monitor (19", [EMAIL PROTECTED]), what are > people's feelings towards ctx or this monitor in paticular? I'm a student > on a budget and this will be my monitor for the next 4/5 years so I just > wanted to make sure I was making a good decision before I bought one.
I was lucky - I bought a CTX PL9 monitor, and when I got home and opened the box, I had a CTX VL950. It has a larger viewable area (I measured) and some slightly better specs. (I forget the details now.) I did *not* bother to correct the mixup. I've been very pleased with it. The picture is clear aand sharp, the color is nice (of course, I'm mildly colorblind so take that as you will) and I have had no problems with it. I did some vidmode hacking with X and got it to do some... "unusual" modes, which it accepts happily. (I have an old S3 video card w/2MB of RAM, so mode hacking is necessary to get decent performance.) I got [EMAIL PROTECTED] in 16bpp, and [EMAIL PROTECTED] in 8 bpp. One nice thing about the monitor is that if you give it a video signal that's beyond its capabilities, it'll refuse to display it instead of burning itself out trying. :-> One thing I noticed about the specs: The manual claims it has 135MHz bandwidth, and [EMAIL PROTECTED] capacity. This doesn't work - you need at least 144MHz of bandwidth to get 1600x1200x75 pixels per second to the screen, and this doesn't count the guard times - I figure you'd need at least 150MHz to get [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you really need or want ultra-high video modes, you may want to look at other monitors. The best my card can do is 135MHz, the same as the monitor's rated bandwidth. At that speed, I did get 1600x1200... at 53Hz. Painful to use for any length of time, and I can tolerate more flicker than most people. This is why I have that 1416x1062 mode, at least I get a decent refresh rate. I have no idea what the monitor would look like with [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sincerely, Ray Ingles (248) 377-7735 [EMAIL PROTECTED] "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do you blow your whole leg off." - Bjarne Stroustrop
