I just got a new Samsung SyncMaster 213T LCD monitor, on sale locally for $739 with a $100 mail-in rebate (better deals can be found on line, but I like instant gratification). 21″, 1600×1200. Same diagonal and resolution as the Nokia 445Xi CRT it replaced, but much easier on my eyes since I can position it further back on my desk.
I think when I bought the Nokia over ten years ago the price was around $1800, and at the time I justified it by expecting that it would be a good monitor for many years. And in fact, it has served me pretty well for all that time, though it’s gotten a little bit touchy about turning on properly in recent times. My friend Steve bought a 445Xi not long after I did, and his is starting to do that too. In fact, I liked the Nokia so much that when I saw a stack of factory-refurbished ones in Microcenter in Denver for $200 in December of 2003 I bought an extra one to have a spare. Anyhow, the main drawback of the 445Xi, as with any large CRT monitor, is that it takes up a huge amount of desk space.
My vision isn’t quite as good as it used to be. I can’t easily focus on things relatively close to my eyes any more. With the Nokia on my desk, the keyboard barely fits in front of it, and lately I’ve had to sit further and further back from it, which is a real nuisance. Otherwise I get eye strain very quickly. Because of this, I haven’t spent much time on my personal projects lately.
With the Samsung 213T, I can easily have the monitor face 18 inches back from where the Nokia face was previously, which is much more comfortable and avoids eye strain. Since it’s an LCD, it also isn’t subject to the moire patterns that CRTs display when pushed close to their limits. I used the Nokia at 1600×1200 resolution. It was capable of more, but at that resolution it was not possible to completely eliminate moire patterns from a dithered gray desktop.
My first LCD monitor was a 14″ Panasonic AL-D40 purchased as a grey-market import before LCD computer monitors became commercially available in the US. I bought it at the Sunnyvale T-Zone store (RIP). T-Zone is a Japanese chain, so the store carried quite a variety of items not normally available in the US. That’s where I got my Japanese Toshiba Libretto 50 laptop, six months before the US model was available.
Anyhow, on the Panasonic, there was only an analog VGA input, and the auto-setup feature didn’t do a very good job of getting the pixel timing and phase configured. I was able to do slightly better with the manual controls, but never got it perfect. So one of my requirements for a new LCD monitor was a digital (DVI) input.
My current video card is a Saphire card using a Radeon 7000 chip. I bought it because it was inexpensive (under $40), and because ATI had better open-source 3D support for X (Linux) than NVidia. However, it does not have a DVI output. I’m currently using it with the Samsung, and it works fine.
When I first booted Linux using the Samsung LCD, each time the video mode was changed (during the boot process, before the final X video mode), the monitor displayed a message stating that the video resolution wasn’t optimal. Pressing a button on the monitor makes the message go away. But I was surprised to find that even once X started, using 1600×1200 resolution, I still got the message.
The picture was quite good, though not perfect, and running the auto-setup improved it somewhat.
Eventually I figured out that they really were serious that the maximum supported vertical refresh rate is 60 Hz. For the Nokia CRT I was using 75 Hz; on the CRT anything less than about 65 Hz resulted in a flicker I could see out of the corners of my eyes. With an active matrix LCD, though, the refresh rate can be much lower without noticable flicker. I changed my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file monitor sectoin to say “VertRefresh 50.0 – 60.0″, restarted X, and that made the monitor happier. I’m somewhat surprised that X was not able to determine the monitor characteristics automatically with DDC.
Now that I’m using 60 Hz refresh, the auto-setup did an excellent job. It’s still not absolutely perfect; the dithered grey of scroll bars sometimes shimmers. I expect using the DVI digital interface will fix that.
The Samsung will pivot into either the landscape or portrait orientation, and comes with Windows software to support that. Since I don’t use Windows, I searched for information on how to do the same thing with X. As it turns out, this uses the X Resize and Rotate Extension (RandR). There’s a command line utility “xrandr” which is used to control it; without arguments it will list the resolutions, rotations, and reflections the X server claims it can support. The X.org server does support the RandR extension, but the Radeon driver will only allow it to change the display resolution, but not rotate or reflection, at least with the Radeon 7000 chip. Maybe with newer chips it is supported? I wasn’t able to find much information on it even with Google.
I shopped online for an ATI-based card with a chip no newer than the Radeon 9200SE, which is the last ATI chip for which open-source 3D acceleration is available. (C’mon, ATI, get with the program again, please!) I ended up ordering a refurbished OEM 32M Radeon 9200SE card with DVI output for $40.60.
Newegg offered to ship the package to me by Fedex Saver shipping for the princely sum of $1. Fedex picked up the package from Newegg in Santa Fe Springs, CA on Friday, took and took it to Los Angeles. Early Saturday morning it arrived in Oakland, then was sent to Portland, OR. I find this amusing because Oakland is only about 40 miles from the destination. But Fedex has it scheduled for delivery on Wednesday, so I’ll just be patient. For $1, I can’t complain.