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As a kid I was so excited when dad would bring home a color monitor. We could finally play sim city 2000, too. And now people are excited many years later for
by kzrdude 6y ago
As a kid I was so excited when dad would bring home a color monitor. We could finally play sim city 2000, too.
And now people are excited many years later for a new kind of grayscale monitor :P
- benjarrell 6y agoI always heard everything old will be new again growing up, but as I age is interesting to see it actually happen.
- sunshinerag 6y agowhy? was there a epaper kind of display whenever you were younger? or are you comparing this to monochrome light emitting displays?
- tom_ 6y agoThe Atari ST's late 80s monochrome CRT looked a bit like an eink display, with no discernible flicker even at 72 Hz. It certainly looked very different from a 72 Hz colour CRT displaying a monochrome image. I think it used a different type of phosphor.
- icedchai 6y agoYou’d need much lower than 72 hz for you to notice flicker. Regular VGA was 60 hz. Amiga interlace had noticeable flicker with an effective rate of 25 to 30 hz.
- steffan 6y agoThis is biology-dependent. With CRTs, I could detect flicker all the way up to 85Hz* (where it vanished for me). Made it a real pain to find a good monitor. * Hitachi 21" CRT which seemed enormous at the time
- icedchai 6y agoYou are right. Perhaps I should've phrased it as "most people need..." The Amiga interlace flicker was bothersome to me. When I got an Amiga 3000 with the built in deinterlacer / flicker fixer, it was like night and day...
- Dylan16807 6y agoIt's missing a single feature. That's a really low bar for old being new again.
- treeman79 6y agoIt’s easy on the eyes. Really big deal for those of us with poor eyesight due to Nerve, muscle, or dryness Issues
- tyler109 6y agoYes it's really a life saver for many of us
- konjin 6y agoI don't need color for code. I need high resolution and to be able to stare at it for hours on end. Right now I get around this by having an ambient light sensors adjusting my monitors but it's buggy and error prone. I look forward to having a red light setup for night coding like my father had for his photography dark room.
- ketamine__ 6y agoHow is the refresh rate? Is this monitor different than my experience with the Kindle?
- cnasc 6y agoI think the video in the post would let you compare for yourself
- scoot 6y agoSkip to 4:04 for the display of video on the monitor.
- Ancapistani 6y agoHonestly, that’s amazingly good.
- aidenn0 6y ago
- sixothree 6y agoMy first VGA monitor was a bit of an oddity in that it was completely grayscale (a very nice white too). I don't remember the circumstances of how I got it but I didn't spend as much time on the computer at home back then. So it didn't really matter as much. When VGA itself improved enough to buy my first color VGA monitor, it was a bit of a let down in that the sharpness was a definite step down from that monitor.
- bitwize 6y agoVGA monochrome was popular in like the early 90s as an affordable way to get high res VGA without shelling out for the then expensive VGA color monitors.
- dunnevens 6y agoI'd sometimes put my early 90's Mac into grayscale mode. In my case, it was because my Mac only supported 8 bit color, but in grayscale, the shading was much better. 8 bit grayscale was the equivalent of 16 bit color in terms of clarity. Removed the dithering or weirdness in certain images.
- macjohnmcc 6y agoI loved the old flat crt grey scale vga monitors
- GordonS 6y agoHaha, so true! As a kid, I remember how excited I was when we upgraded from CGA to EGA, let alone VGA or SVGA, and now I'm practically drooling over how amazing my eyes would feel from staring at a monochrome e-ink display all day! I'm sounding like an old man now, but as an 80's kid I couldn't dream of the tech we have available today. We were all imagining flying cars and the like, but in many ways what we have, and so available, is much more incredible. Back on topic though - if the resolution and refresh rate really are as good as shown in the videos, then as a developer, this would genuinely make a huge difference to my working day. My eyes are practically begging for it! Unless there are markets I'm not seeing, this is undoubtedly a niche product, and I'm very pleasantly surprised that a company has invested to bring it to fruition. I haven't been this existed since NVMe, and I hope this thing ships soon so I can find out how much it costs and read reviews!
- iso947 6y agoFirst colour monitor I had was orange, light orange, dark orange and very dark orange - a CGA laptop from my dads work. I remember Railroad Tycoon Ran with option 5,1,2 but Civilisation would have to wait a few years for the full blown desktop 286 (12Mhz, 1M ram and a full 40MB hard drive!)
- root_axis 6y agoWell people would prefer color if they could get it, every techie in the ebook world is wistfully awaiting the day that a high quality color e-reader is released.
- baybal2 6y agoI am at dismay how few high resolution grayscale LCDs are left there, let alone good reflective ones. Now, they actually cost more than 20 years ago.
- jimktrains2 6y agoWgat was used in the olpc xo-1? The reflective mode looked really, really nice.
- twirlip 6y agoThe Pixel Qi transreflective LCD. By Mary Lou Jepsen. I recall being able to easily read websites in direct noonday sun.