About 2 week ago, I got back from my grandmother's countryside house where I have the HP A4032A (Sony Trinitron M41KKA16X) 17" CRT monitor so I finally had some time to play around with it (I've been there without internet for 2 weeks - and I survived!
). It turns out, that monitor is not locked at 800x600 resolution as I though. In fact, I ran it all the way up to 1280x960. According to monitorworld.com, the max resolution for this monitor is 1280x1024. I didn't try it that high though, since it's a 4:3 monitor. There wasn't a point to it anyways - the monitor became very blurry just at 1280x960, but that's due to horizontal convergence issues, though, so I don't blame it. After all, I bought that monitor used about 5 years ago (it cost me all of 50 Euros) and the condition I got it in was far from perfect - there are 2 cracks in the plastic casing near the rear and also some spilled coffee in that area. Moreover, this monitor was built in 1994/1995 so who knows what it has gone through. I wouldn't be surprised if I am the 3rd or 4th owner. It's made in Japan, though, so it will probably last for quite a while.Unfortunately, this monitor has many other problems besides the convergence (which all I can do about is adjust it so that it's either good in the center and really bad in the corners or blurry in the center and less blurry in the corners. The top-right corner is always pretty bad, though. This problem is less evident on lower resolutions.)
One of the other major problems is that it has uneven brightness - it's normal on the left side but gets progressively brighter towards the right and then for the last 2 to 3 cm on the right, it gets back to normal. There are also two light vertical lines - one about 1 cm thick on the left side (about 8 cm from the left edge of the screen) and one slightly curvy line, less than 1 cm thick but to the right side of the screen (same distance from the edge). You can see it on the picture I attached. It's actually worse than the picture shows, but my camera isn't that sensitive. I tried degaussing it both with the built-in degauss and manually (using 2 magnets on a drill), but that did not have any effect on the issue. So I wonder if it's the caps in the signal board or cheap BNC cable parhaps. The BNC cable looks nice and thick but I don't see any inductors on it on either end. Any ideas?
Among other issues, the top-left corner (and only that corner) of the screen is slightly curved in. It can't be adjusted.
The brightness also changes at different resolutions - at 1024x768 it looks much brighter than at 800x600 and 640x480 (therefore I have to change the brightness when I play games).
And the tube has a slightly reddish tint, even at the brightest (bluest) color temperature. This I've corrected through the ATI Catalyst adjustments, though. But I guess the tube is just getting a bit tired now. It's still plenty bright, nonetheless.
And last but not least, I still can't get the refresh rate to go higher than 60 Hz. I don't know if this is because I'm using a BNC cable or what, but it's very annoying. I think it has to do with the fact that the monitor cannot get recognized in Windows. When I click on the scroll-down menu for the available refresh rates, I get everything from 40 Hz interlaced to 200 Hz (and I get this on all resolutions I've tried). Moreover, I get every imaginable resolution available in the settings tab - so obviously Windows doesn't know what monitor it's outputting to. I tried setting the monitor as Plug-and-Play rather than have it appear as a Default monitor, but that made no difference at all.
So basically I'm stuck in 60 Hz mode. That's actually the biggest annoyance because my eyes get tired much faster. The flicker on this monitor isn't as bad as on other monitors (probably longer phosphor persistence), but it's still quite noticeable. If I could get this issue fixed, though, it would be a very fine monitor. In fact, even with all of these issues above, I still like it very much. The contrast on this Sony tube is, so far, one of the better (if not best) I've seen. I can turn down the brightness so the black appears truly black, and yet the white will still be blindingly-bright. It makes even old games look very nice as if they had HDR.
Like Th3_uN1Qu3, I'll probably be running this monitor for the next 10 years as well.
Here's a picture of it running:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...7&d=1315008911
Attached Files
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