Humbug, I say.

[unixronin]

Visible flyback lines on vorlon's Sun GDM5410 monitor today.  This is not a good sign.  Both of my monitors, it seems, are on their last legs, and there isn't really spare cash in the budget right now to replace them.  (Technically, there's cash in the bank, but I don't want to cut into it until we have to.)

We have one spare GDM5410 upstairs in storage, but I'm not convinced it's in much better shape than this one is.  They both seem to have the same problem — severe loss of screen saturation, requiring turning contrast all the way up to get any kind of decent saturation at all, which then forces turning brightness all the way down to have the screen not be washed out.  I suspect it's a design flaw on this monitor series, which is a terrible shame, because the completely flat (horizontally and vertically) CRT is the best I've ever used as far as image quality and lack of glare, and unlike an LCD, it continues to look good at resolutions which are not exact power-of-2 divisors of its native maximum resolution.

Comments

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

Green cathode problem most likely. I never have gotten a straight answer from a Sony rep.

Doing the trick mentioned earlier will destroy that for a time but can also destroy the cathode if it's a full on short. I"ve doing it several times. In one 32" set it fixed it perfectly for two years. In one smaller set that had a full short which activated the safety it did nothing. In another the green was terribly weak. Those are three examples. In most cases it fixed it for a few months. Two years is an exception. The ones that didn't work with had been severely used in bars where they were used 24/7.

Have you seen the Sun branded monitors recently? Would the be as good as yours would if new?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen current Sun-branded monitors. Both of these are Sun monitors OEM'd for Sun by Sony. Sun calls the GDM5410 something like 'Sun 21" FD Monitor'. The most recent Sun-branded monitor I've seen is the 24" LCD that's, oh, probably a 7-year-old model by now.
(<python>It's verra nice.</python> I wish I had one. Or two. Or three.)

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

I looked at Apple's recent one and it's stunning. It costs more that all the electronics I own.

I'm using the 3000:1 LG and am very happy with it but it does have some differences compared to a CRT. I thought it was picky on settings but there's an autoset feature that actually works. Time will tell how long it lasts.

I bet it doesn't bet the Viewsonic I had, that one still has a good picture tube and all I need to do is replace some capacitors if I get really motivated.