What's the deal with broadcast monitors?

[iddqd]

While we're at it:

PVM=?
BVM=?

[kgc210]

Without getting too technical a BVM normally has higher TV lines (resolution) than the PVM.
They also tend to have removable modules for different inputs. Later ones can input HD content etc

[Photon]

What kgc210 said. They also tended to be quite a bit more expensive back in the day

B=Broadcast
P=Professional
VM=Video Monitor

For Amiga you don't want to too high line count since your needs are "240 line". You want a beam width close to PAL line count.

What you want in a monitor generally (that is to be above the rest) is adjustability (BVM module, CRT TV remote with/without service menu unlock, same for flatscreens if you're that way, pots at the back of an arcade monitor for beam focus, geometry etc etc.

That and a low number of hours (since service) on it is the only important factors really for a picture quality you'll be happy with.

Sorry for "telling you what you want", American style. It's not intentional, too lazy to rephrase. If you know what you want, you know what you want.

[hceline]

Originally Posted by iddqd

Also, some seem to have a parallel port connection, or similar, for computer. I wonder what that might be for. Auto-calibration?

Seems they are Sony's own standard for 25-pin RGB connectors.

Found a adapter for SCART here: https://www.retrogamingcables.co.uk/...cart-converter

[Rochabian]

@kgc210 :

Do you have replaced the fans of your XM29+ ?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by nobody

They have higher resolution than your normal CRT screen which is usually 300 vertical lines. These monitors have 600+ lines.

I don't think that is true ...
There are no "lines" in a CRT - but they have usually a raster, a mask with holes or slots in it to prevent the wrong electron beams getting on the wrong color-dot on the phosphor... the resolution of these holes vary from model to model, but I doubt you would find one that is so coarse that it would be limited to 300 visible lines...

and the above is only true for color CRTs, since black and white don't have a mask...
and it is also not true for Trinitron CRTs, because there the mask is just parallel metal strings from top to bottom.
So these have theoretically an unlimited number of lines.
The only (vertical) limitation here is the size of the spot the electron beam produces on the screen. And that can usually be adjusted (sharpness wheel).

[Fastdruid]

Originally Posted by Gorf

and the above is only true for color CRTs, since black and white don't have a mask...
and it is also not true for Trinitron CRTs, because there the mask is just parallel metal strings from top to bottom.

Also the LCCS!
Which is a fascinating unique and unusual television.

[ Show youtube player ]
https://www.earlytelevision.org/jvc_tm-l450tu.html

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Fastdruid

Also the LCCS!
Which is a fascinating unique and unusual television.

[ Show youtube player ]
https://www.earlytelevision.org/jvc_tm-l450tu.html

Thanks!

didn't know about this technology - the modern one I mean.
(I now I do want one of these in large )

[aeberbach]

Originally Posted by donnie

how good is the amiga monitor compared to say an 50hz sony trinitron?

Sorry to say it does not compare well. The Amiga does what it is supposed to do well but the Trinitron was always the Rolls Royce. A Trinitron is sharper, flatter, larger, usually has many more input options, but also much heavier, more expensive.

[aeberbach]

Originally Posted by Gorf

I don't think that is true ...
There are no "lines" in a CRT - but they have usually a raster, a mask with holes or slots in it to prevent the wrong electron beams getting on the wrong color-dot on the phosphor... the resolution of these holes vary from model to model, but I doubt you would find one that is so coarse that it would be limited to 300 visible lines...

and the above is only true for color CRTs, since black and white don't have a mask...
and it is also not true for Trinitron CRTs, because there the mask is just parallel metal strings from top to bottom.
So these have theoretically an unlimited number of lines.
The only (vertical) limitation here is the size of the spot the electron beam produces on the screen. And that can usually be adjusted (sharpness wheel).

Lines does not refer to the holes in the aperture grill (regular screen) or shadow mask (Trinitron) but the number of times the electron beam sweeps across the screen. This really is a measure of screen quality and one used in discussing TV standards since Farnsworth decided that the way a tractor went up and down a ploughed field might be a good way to draw a picture on a screen. The dot pitch is how the resolution of the shadow mask is measured. But because this is all analog it does not alias or matter quite as much as we might expect, it really means better and sharper edges on text etc.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by aeberbach

Lines does not refer to the holes in the aperture grill (regular screen) or shadow mask (Trinitron) but the number of times the electron beam sweeps across the screen.

ok - that was clear.
but that depends on the signal und what range the monitor/tv can accept.

This really is a measure of screen quality and one used in discussing TV standards since Farnsworth decided that the way a tractor went up and down a ploughed field might be a good way to draw a picture on a screen. The dot pitch is how the resolution of the shadow mask is measured. But because this is all analog it does not alias or matter quite as much as we might expect, it really means better and sharper edges on text etc.

exactly - hence my comment ...

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by aeberbach

Sorry to say it does not compare well. The Amiga does what it is supposed to do well but the Trinitron was always the Rolls Royce. A Trinitron is sharper, flatter, larger, usually has many more input options, but also much heavier, more expensive.

I'm not sure what are you comparing here. Trinitron TV tube? Or a PVM?
Even if it's the latter, the difference wouldn't be of "Rolls Royce" magnitude, at least not when we are talking about everyday use and things that really matter.

[aeberbach]

Donny said "how good is the amiga monitor compared to say an 50hz sony trinitron?"

When a big Trinitron was top of my shopping list I was writing C code - it certainly was the top of the line (at least until the Apple Cinema Display came out) and it certainly mattered, even if the refresh rate was 50Hz rather than the 75Hz it usually did. I would have been about half as useful writing code on a 1084S as I was on a Sony GDM520.

As much as we might have loved the old Amiga monitor it was a toy and built to a price.

[dreadnought]

Would you really be half as productive? If so, then I'm glad that most Amiga devs had lower requirements

There's no denying that top range Trinitrons were beasts, but in everyday reality, apart from tasks which would have really benefited from their specs (CAD and other such gfx-y things) the difference for normal Amiga user wouldn't be so big. Games would probably look actually worse, unless it was possible to display scanlines on these monitors too.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Would you really be half as productive? If so, then I'm glad that most Amiga devs had lower requirements

There's no denying that top range Trinitrons were beasts, but in everyday reality, apart from tasks which would have really benefited from their specs (CAD and other such gfx-y things) the difference for normal Amiga user wouldn't be so big. Games would probably look actually worse, unless it was possible to display scanlines on these monitors too.

Back in the day it was considered an advantage to get rid of these bad scanlines

but it is actually possible to have (faint) scanlines on a Trinitron if you set the sharpness to max.
(same way you can see them on a b/w monitor...)

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Back in the day it was considered an advantage to get rid of these bad scalines

Haha, never. I remember distinctly feeling superior to my sheepish-looking PC friend when we were comparing 1991/2 games. Scanlines and the inherent TV pixel softness were the equivalents of early antialiasng and made games look much better.

(of course soon the tables have turned and it was me being sheepish when he got the likes of Wolfenstein & Doom running, but that's a different story)

[Jope]

Whoops, I just educated myself about TV Lines. Here it is for everyone else:

https://andynumbers.wordpress.com/20...out-tvl-count/

The more TV Lines the better. :-)

I think this one was a 600TVL BVM I took this picture from.
http://jope.fi/bvm2.jpg

It's "enough" for the Amiga's 640 mode, about two to three phosphors per pixel.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Jope

Whoops, I just educated myself about TV Lines. Here it is for everyone else:

https://andynumbers.wordpress.com/20...out-tvl-count/

The more TV Lines the better. :-)

I think this one was a 600TVL BVM I took this picture from.
http://jope.fi/bvm2.jpg

It's "enough" for the Amiga's 640 mode, about two to three phosphors per pixel.

Thanks for that link! That was finally helpful.

So we are indeed talking about vertikal "lines" here and not horizontal!

(Sadly this article is mixing things up again, when It talks about scan lines and overlap ... that has nothing to do with the vertical line count)

[dreadnought]

"TL;DR: the higher the TVL count, the sharper your scanlines are going to be.

So the important question here, is how sharp do you want your scanlines to be when you play your retro games? Do you like the scanline effect at all? Some people hate it. If you’re one of those people, you might be better off buying a consumer TV that has component inputs, or modding a consumer TV for RGB input."

This sounds confused. Obviously, you can still see scanlines on both RGB and even composite consumer tubes, at least the newer ones from around 2000 onwards (maybe the older ones too). And it's less about "sharpness" and more about separation.

Another thing about the whole pro monitor craze is that the better hardware does not necessarily mean better IQ. Games were not designed for pro monitor with their extreme pixel and scanline separation. Why would any artist want big vertical black lines in the middle of their drawings?

The key here is subtlety, and this is why I stick to consumer TVs. I have one newer and well preserved Trinitron which has a very high separation factor, and I find this slightly irritating in 240p. The magic anti-aliasing and dithering effects which benefit games visually are somewhat eroded, and the whole IQ a bit jarring (still awesome though, of course). I can imagine that on a pro monitor it'd be much more pronounced. If the prices for PVMs were on a saner level I would perhaps get one, because it could work well with some sources, such as 8-bit micros or Workbench, where scene complexity is lower and they actually could look better this way. Overall, it's a personal preference (which is where I agree with the author) and nothing set in stone.

As it is though, and quite often happens on the net, the my-scanlines-are-thiccer-than-yours thing has exploded and went to stratospheric levels of hype, hence the PVM pursuit obsession. Many newcomers now think that the only way to enjoy retro games is to own one, or that they guarantee the "best" IQ, while in reality both notions are rather misguided (especially the former).

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by donnie

but how is the quality of the 1084s vs pvm?

About the same as a bottom-end 1980's PVM or a good quality TV. A lot of people used 1084s in cash-strapped student video studios etc because it's a decent monitor that could be bought second-hand cheaply. The cost-reduced 1085 variant is more like a crap consumer grade TV, using a CRT like you'd find in the discount brands of televisions.

The multisync/bisync monitors that could still do 15Khz tended to have way better dot pitch. For instance the Commodore 1942 has a PVM-grade CRT in it, yielding a far sharper picture. It's decently high quality for a pre-Trinitron-patent-expiry spherical CRT. The 1960 is also pretty good.

Still not as good as a Sony PVM-14M2U, but a 1942 can at least play in the same ballpark in terms of image resolution.

A good way to test is to put your display in ECS/AGA superhires NTSC mode. Say 1280x400. Keep your standard 80-column (now 160-column) font. If your text is still crisp, then it's a good PVM-grade display.