Why did people buy the Apple High Resolution Monochrome monitor?

well hello everyone and welcome back to Adrian's digital basement 2. on today's video I'm just uh gonna talk about this monitor sitting on top of my Macintosh 2ci when you look at one of these later macintoshes like this Macintosh 2ci here with the Apple extended keyboard you think of color and expensive and fast and Powerful all the things that Apple wanted you to believe back in the day when this was a contemporary computer I remember at the time when the Macintosh 2 was out I really wanted one for myself I had been using my parents Macintosh SE for a long time it's a computer you've actually seen on the channel here before because I still have that computer and I've worked on it I couldn't afford one of these the family couldn't afford one of them and at that point I was in high school already and I was working after school and I was earning my own money so I was trying to buy my own well better computer and the Macintosh 2 CI specifically which I think came out around 1989 1990 well that's right about the time I got my job in high school this machine was just astronomically expensive in stock configuration it has 25 megahertz 68 or 30. it has color video output you know it's a really quite a good machine and I really do love of the Macintosh 2 lines I actually don't have any except for this one I've had other ones come through the basement over the years two sis and stuff like that that have passed on to other people because it's really the 2ci that I absolutely love the most now I kind of got enough on a tangent here but I think where I was going with this is originally when this machine was out well all the Macintosh 2 lines their big claim to fame over the older Max was that they were color and everything before that like the Mac SE Mac plus et cetera et cetera those were all monochrome only with no color capability at all the se30 which came out later around the same time as the Mac 2 line could support color through a complicated add-on board situation but obviously the internal monitor was strictly monochrome just one bit monochrome like all the previous compact Max so with the Mac 2 the 2ci the 2x2fx is a whole bunch of mac twos they made a whole slew of these machines they were all color and that was their big claim to fame but one of the things about the Macintosh 2 line is that at the same time it came out VGA was also a thing that IBM released VGA will first mcga and then VGA soon after that or I think actually vgm had to come first mcga was in parallel either way that's standard with that high density 15 pin connector which you may know today because uh well you can still find monitors everywhere with it that standard was pretty ubiquitous and there were VGA monitors that you could get pretty inexpensively and I bought one of those I got it from the back of a catalog it supported 640 by 480 also 640 by 400 and it could do 800 by 600 but only at like 56 Hertz so it really didn't look good doing that it would flicker quite a bit but I used that monitor for years and years and years in fact because I couldn't afford the Mac 2ci AI even working at a computer store where I could get like better pricing through our wholesale connections I ended up buying an Amiga 2000 and with my Amiga 2000 I bought the Commodore flicker fixer I don't remember the exact part number but it was a board plugged into your Amiga and then it gave it VGA output so you didn't have to worry about all the Flicker and I used that same VGA monitor which I had bought earlier because I was using that with like old PCS I had cobbled together like I don't know 36sx or whatever it was I used that VGA monitor on my Amiga for many many years it was later into the 90s where I upgraded to a 17 inch monitor I think it was like a hand-me-down that I got from someone else or I don't remember exactly how I got my hands on it but it was second hand or used but it was nice to have that larger real estate and it supported higher resolutions and then you know I think I bought another monitor after that anyways point being Macintosh 2 line you always thought about color monitors but the problem was is that Apple's color monitor that they saw soul to go with the Mac 2 line was this really good quality high resolution well I mean it was 640 by 480 but it had a very low dot pitch so it had very good Clarity it was a Sony Trinitron based monitor now it looked very much similar to this one if we move the camera over here you can see this monitor sits very nicely on top of the Mac 2ci here well the original Apple color monitor 13-inch was designed for the Mac 2 Mac original Mac 2 and then there was a bunch of other computers including the 2ci came out later but everyone always paired it with that Apple color 13 inch monitor but it was very expensive but good quality so at least you were getting something good for your money but unfortunately you couldn't easily just hook up a cheap VGA monitor well you probably could to be honest but one of the things is is the Macintosh this Mac at least has built-in video that outputs at 640x480 so the same as the PC is capable of but it does it at 67 Hertz if I recall it's 67 Hertz that's just off the top of my head so that's faster than original VGA standard which is 60 hertz meaning that very basic bare bone monitors like that one I had that first one I bought I don't think would even support 67 Hertz later ones absolutely but it seemed like I mean most people that I knew that could afford a Macintosh 2 machine always paired it with that very expensive Apple 13 inch RGB monitor that was a train Tron based now I don't know top of my head how much that monitor costs but I have to imagine it was pretty expensive because besides that one apple also released this Monitor and the thing about this one is its monochrome so it looks very similar to the Apple 13 inch color monitor it's got the same like design language that was first introduced in the Apple 2C I don't know what this is called and you know matches this Mac 2ci perfectly but also you could pair this with any other Macintosh and yeah the fact that they had to have a budget monitor it's kind of bewildering it a little bit because I have a feeling and I don't know for sure but I have a feeling that this monochrome monitor was probably as expensive as plenty of comparable VGA color monitors that if people buy Max had just used instead it was like a little adapter to go from the um non-standard 15 pin connector Apple used to the standard VGA connector then they would have a good color screen and they wouldn't need to go with monochrome now this monitor for instance is the subject of this video is about this Monitor and I've talked quite a lot already about it here but I don't know if this thing works it was given to me it um may be completely non-functional I'm not sure I'm going to go through the effort to repair it if it doesn't work because like I said it's a monochrome monitor and originally the person gave it to me thinking oh well it's unknown if it works if it doesn't work you know maybe I could use this CRT the CRT in this thing would be of course a white phosphor because that's what Apple was doing with their monochrome stuff all the way back to the original Mac 128. let's flip this around because on the back I mean it's funny it looks just like that the color one it's monochrome and I know I've seen these in the past I've I just haven't seen one in person so if we look at the back here Apple high resolution monochrome monitor we have a video input connector there's a security thing here so I know you plug the little thingy in there and you don't steal it we have a power input and then you have the power switch can you imagine the power switch being on the back of an Apple device like that at this point pretty hilarious the design was though that you would plug the power cable from this into the back of this computer all the Mac twos and up had a soft power on function and a pass-through power connector that we would then turn on the attached monitor or whatever else you had attached so I think the idea was you turn this on and then you didn't touch the monitor after that and the pass-through on the power supply would turn on the monitor we have a little door here which I'll pop open with a screwdriver I bet there's little controls or something on the back of this yep we got some controls so I don't know geometry controls for the monitor because this is not any kind of like multi-sync multi-standard monitor it's fixed frequency meaning it only supports one resolution I think 640 by 480 the same as the color monitor these would just need to be adjusted one time and that's it on something like a VJ monitor like this one right here which assuredly I could plug that into this Mac and that's that's from the 90s as well and that thing does support all sorts of different frequencies and refresh rates so that surely would work with this Macintosh but of course the circuitry in there has to be able to handle all these different video modes and that means the scan rates are different and all that stuff well this monitor it just doesn't need to do that because it's a fixed frequency now in addition to the back there is also some controls on the side here we have brightness and contrast just those two controls this is in the same exact position as the Apple 13 inch color monitor the Sony one I was talking about which looks pretty much the same as this these are the two controls that you have on that monitor and that is it I think it also has a few controls on the back the color one just like this one does here but like I said it's also just a single fix frequency doesn't support anything else besides 640x480 so that's all you're ever going to get out of it now this monitor here is in pretty nice cosmetic condition I must say there's a little bit of yellowing as you can see the computer has a little bit of yellow in it as well the keyboard here is probably the least yellowed of all of these things but if I hold that up to the monitor you can see it's a little yellow but to be honest it looks worse in the camera than it actually is in person and I don't know recently I retrograded something in it it didn't come out well it was just a single key from a keyboard but it got kind of splotchy so I'm certainly a little bit hesitant when things are like minimally yellowed like this like uh just leave it there's some scuff marks and stuff on this thing I mean who knows how well this is treated over the years but I do not see any obvious signs of burning the CRT lives in good shape I mean there's some kind of a speck of junk on there I don't think that's a scratch or anything that comes off but yeah I want to see if this works and let's take a look if it does at the clarity of this thing and try to figure out like why would someone want to use this over the color monitor obviously it would have been cheaper but perhaps there are other things about this monitor that make it better than the color monitor as well and potentially more advantageous to use all right first things first I haven't used this Macintosh in a while so to be honest it may not be working properly I don't know you know you never know when you have vintage computers stuff can break just sitting there on the Shelf it's been upstairs in my office so it's not like it was uh you know stored in a bad or non-climate controlled environment but you never know okay the power cord is in I'm just going to leave the monitor unplugged for now let's see if the mac turns on excellent it does this thing's been recapped I used I think I used tantalimbs or ceramic Caps or a combination of both on the motherboard did that a long time ago but as far as I'm aware this thing has been working ever since I'm going to power it off though before it boots up any further make it a cord and plug in the monitor now it's totally my assumption this monitor is going to work without any issues you know Apple stuff it was expensive and it was pretty well designed I don't know who made this for them I don't think Apple designed any of their monitors himself they always like outsourced it to someone else obviously the industrial design was something that they had their hands in but the actual Electronics in here you know might have been Samsung or who knows who designed it could be Sony for all we know as well all right so this is plugged into the wall directly I don't have it connected to the computer yet I'm just going to hit that power switch let's watch for the green LED okay I heard high voltage come up and we have a green LED so I'm going to say everything is working so I'm just going to power that off and I'm going to grab the interface cable to connect it to the built-in video on this mac2ci alrighty so the monitor is now connected to the computer I'm gonna power the monitor on First and allow it to warm up I may turn off the studio light that's over here because it's uh definitely the phosphor color on this is pretty light in other words we're not going to see very good contrast especially if it's been well used and it's kind of dim but the lights on I don't feel any static on here but I could hear the whole high voltage when it powered up let's turn the computer on I saw a flash it's a good sign now the Mac 2ci can only output 64.480 that's it doesn't support anything else though the motherboard the onboard motherboard video later Max could support High resolutions there's actually a video card in this Mac as well plugged into that you can change the resolution and stuff but 99.9 sure that this monitor is fixed frequency and does not support anything else besides that 640 by 480. while we wait for this to boot up because this Mac takes a long time to boot because it has a lot of ram in it there were other monitors later that Apple released that were much less expensive the Mac LC of course came out the low-cost one which had a little 12 inch kind of low resolution monitor 512 by something or other that was much less expensive hey there we go we got an image and so far so so good all right there it is booting up I'm gonna turn off the light here all right so what we're seeing is some kind of artifacting on the camera because like I said this is not running at 60 hertz this is running at 67 Hertz now let's see about the controls on the side of the monitor now I cleaned this monitor up a little bit it was really filthy so let's see what's what here so this top control has a detent I'm turning the top knob here it's pretty dim right now oh no it gets pretty bright okay so the top knob is the brightness control and ideally you want to turn the contrast down and we're going to turn the brightness up all the way and now I can start to see that there's some light showing through on the raster here so you want to kind of turn this so that goes away okay and in the middle detent that is gone now the contrast knob is all the way down now and we have no image but as we turn it up that's a bit scratchy the pot but yeah that's not bad and not bad at all that is quite usable that CRT is not completely worn out now we do have some geometry issues over here over here is sort of curved outwards I might be able to correct that inside the monitor there's usually some little magnets that you can turn around the deflection yoke to correct some of the corner geometry keep in mind that the controls that are on the back of the monitor do not control the geometry as in like the corner Distortion it will be like vertical size linearity horizontal size you know stuff like that these types of things you need to use magnets to fix and of course because it's not a color CRT it's monochrome you can use magnets around the deflection yoke and you don't have to worry about it upsetting the purity of the color which is what would happen on a color CRT but yes lots of monochrome CRTs around the deflection yoke you'll see these little magnets that are kind of oddly shaped on little posts and you flip them around you can turn them around and they will adjust the corners this thing is really looking pretty good I am quite pleased by that actually now if we go to monitors here let's uh zoom in a little bit on this I'm trying to figure out if I can change the shutter speed in a way that will make this less annoying to look at unfortunately I've just fiddled with the shutter speed on the camera and nothing I really change it to seems to really make a difference it's kind of annoying to look at in any setting so I apologize for that I'm shooting at 60 frames per second but the shutter speed is really what's inter interfering with the way the camera is capturing the screen also this blue color you're seeing here just has to do with the white balance of my camera mainly the phosphor color on Apple CRTs including the original Max is quite bluish now to your eyes it doesn't look as blue as it does in the camera I'll probably try to color correct it here to make it look a little bit more realistic but there are different color white phosphors and other monitors from other manufacturers like IBM used a more yellowish or amber color phosphor so it's still white but it had more yellow component this has a very blue tint to it even compared to everything else down here in the basement now you may be noticing here that it says that this thing is running in 256 colors but indeed it is not so if we switch this to Gray now we do see that this supports a nice 256 Shades of Gray which is pretty nice actually I mean that's a a nice capability of this monochrome monitor over like the Macintosh SE for instance that natively would not support any kind of Shades of Gray again there's like an option board you could buy that's extremely rare I think there's a replica now that lets you do this on the internal CRT on that but otherwise no you could never do any kind of Shades of Gray on any monochrome CRT this means of course if you run something like photoshop on here you're going to have the ability to have at least really nice monochrome Graphics I mean look at that that looks quite nice now here in Photoshop I just did a simple gradient from black to white the video card on this machine has a capability of eight bits per Channel and I'm pretty sure this monitor is probably connected to the green output on this thing so you have a total of 256 Shades of Gray possible I am noticing a little bit of softness around the tools here and a little bit of sort of bleeding that's going on I have a feeling that's actually not the Monitor and that is the cable I'm using I am using a pretty cheap 15-pin cable to connect this monitor up to the mac and I really should be using the higher resolution or higher quality Apple cable that they made which will probably have little coax wires inside of it for each of the channels well if you had a monochrome monitor you probably got a cable that only had the green pin connected but it would have a little mini coax wire in there just for like better high bandwidth capability the wire I'm using is just like a cheap mono price type cable and yeah while it passes through all the signals because we have a good image here it is resulting in a little bit of softness I think I have some of those apple cables around but I don't remember where they are I haven't seen them in a little while but I think this same problem exists if I try to use this particular cable oh my screensaver just started on my Apple 13 inch color monitor because I happen to have one of those as well all right for a size perspective this monitors viewable area is not even 12 inches it's about 11 and a quarter inches that's pretty small and apple was really big on the whole 72 dots per inch thing I don't think this monitor is going to be able to do 72 dots per inch it's actually going to be a little bit higher resolution because of that smaller size the 13 inch monitor that was originally sold with Mac 2 running at 640 by 480 the viewable area resulted in 72 dots per inch now let's talk about the pros and cons of this monitor well one of the pros one thing going for is obviously it's going to be cheaper than the color monitor so I guess that's good if you don't care about color and you're fine with a monochrome but then I think one of the biggest cons for this is it's not in color and I mean you'll want color monitors you have a Mac too you spend all this money on this expensive Mac too and all you're getting is well you're getting Shades of Gray but it's still a monochrome screen like that's kind of bogus you want color because that's the whole big deal about the max now I think there's a possible Pro and I was talking to some of this monitor that they mentioned that they thought might be a reason why someone would want this since it's a monochrome screen it doesn't have a shadow mask of any kind that means that each pixel displayed on the screen as a little dot doesn't have potential Moray patterns or any aliasing or anything going on that means that you could ultimately have a Sharper Image now the thing is if this were able to display 1024 by 768 on this little screen you'd have a really high dot per inch display that would have no issues with the shadow mask causing the loss of clarity because of course each Little Dot on the screen doesn't have anything blocking it you're just looking directly at the phosphor but the truth of the matter is this is only 640 by 480 and while it's a little bit smaller than the 13 inch color monitor Apple used on that color monitor a really good quality CRT from Sony well Sony used it but I mean they probably specked it out that has a very very fine dot pitch meaning that that color monitor has no trouble resolving every single Pixel on the 640 by 40 image because that dot pitch is such a low number remember with DOT pitch the smaller the number the closer to zero it'll be like something like 0.28 or 0.31 the closer to zero the higher Clarity the monitor has the higher ability it has to resolve each of the displayed pixels each of the dots that's a pixel on the screen and when you look at the white color here or any of the shades it's just solid of course there are still scan lines though so you still have lines it's not like you have a perfectly solid white image you have the scan lines there but at least it's not broken up by the aperture Grille on the Sony monitor or a shadow mask on a more conventional CRT now I suppose another thing we can consider is that this monitor is a bit smaller and it is a bit lighter it's certainly easier to move around the color monitor is really really heavy it's full of metal in the chassis and stuff this thing is not super light either but it's also not super heavy either so I suppose that is definitely a pro as well I think this particular monitor existed around the same time the Mac 2 came out I'm not 100 sure on the whole timeline thing but I think this was early on later Apple had another version of this monitor that was actually a full page display and it actually used a very tall CRT that was oriented 90 degrees it wasn't any wider than this I think it was about the same width as this if you sat it on top of a Mac 2ci like this but it was much taller and that allowed you to look at a full page of text without having to zoom in and out constantly or scroll around a lot of people use macintoshes for desktop publishing early on there were programs like pagemaker and stuff like that and I think that full page display would have been pretty helpful for people who really wanted to be able to look at a whole page of text without having to keep scrolling around certainly on a monitor like this you'd have to zoom way out and then you would see it in the center here and you would be able to read all the text so the full page display would be pretty handy and to be honest when I used to work in the office a lot before the pandemic I had a couple LCD monitors on my desk and one of them which was 16x9 I actually oriented 90 degrees just to the side of my main larger Monitor and that allowed me to look at a full page of text as well and I really really liked that particular configuration but Apple was doing that really early on with their full page display I'm not sure if they originated it but other companies like radius and some of the manufacturers made video cards for the Mac they started selling those monitors as well really early on there were companies that were selling 21 inch CRTs monochrome like this but 21 inches and the design of those was to run 1024 by 768 so that's 72 dot per inch or roughly that and you could get two full pages on there like A4 or us letter paper on the page side by side or of course a single in the middle if you wanted to so that was what you could have before they came out with those weirdly safe CRTs to do just a single full page so with the pros and cons discussed I have a hard time believing that anyone would buy this monitor for any reason other than it was cheaper yes they could try to justify that you don't have the shadow mask and they could say I'm only doing monochrome work like maybe desktop publishing But ultimately I have a feeling those people would have opted for the color monitor say this monitor were the same price as the color one no one would have bought this they would have got the color monitor every single time unless we're talking about that full page display or you know one of the other ones but in this exact size like this one is I guess like 11 and a half inches so I guess this could be called the 12 inch high resolution monochro monitor I just I struggle to believe anyone would get this over the color if the price were the same but this being much cheaper a lot cheaper I have a feeling the screensaver has a very short timeout doesn't it keep having to wake that up I think with this thing being a lot cheaper that's pretty much the only reason why people bought this thing and again I kind of have a hard time believing that if you could spend as much money as these computers cost back then that you couldn't just get the color monitor because you're already splashing out a ton of cash I'd love to hear from people who are more experienced with the whole Macintosh 2 ecosystem who could tell me how common are these monitors to be out there in the wild and that maybe you know computer labs and colleges and stuff were filled with these things I'm just trying to quit this here don't save I don't know I was pushing the wrong button uh you know they were filled with these and you saw tons of these because maybe that's just something I just don't remember but I remember the computer labs I saw at school as I was going to college around the time the Mach 2 line was out and all the Mac twos I saw always had the 13-inch Apple color monitor paired with it I don't remember ever seeing something like uh a VGA monitor like this paired with a Macintosh maybe Apple just had people believing that you couldn't use PC monitors on Macs and I know like early on like I said you couldn't but later absolutely all of these monitors pretty much are all gonna work on these in fact later video cards that go in here in fact I have one in here I could feel the card that's in here I don't know who makes it has the the Apple 15 pin connector but I have some other new bus Which is the type of cards that go in here video cards that have VGA connector on them so you could just plug in a normal VGA monitor into those and they totally work so anyways yeah it's just kind of a curiosity this monochrome screen and um well I kind of like it I don't know there's something about it it's sort of cool just because the image is really clear I just would have to open it up and uh try to fix this geometry issue and then of course use the proper cable so it's not so kind of bleedy and um with the ringing and fringing that's happening with this cable but yeah no it's it's kind of neat it's kind of a neat monitor let's see what happens when I turn it off what's this uh collapse look like oh that's boring it just goes black anyhow so there it is that's the Apple monochrome high resolution color display designed for the Macintosh 2 line of computers cheaper option better option what do you think I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below so that's gonna be it for this video thumbs up if you liked it subscribe all the usual YouTube junk and a huge thanks to my patrons I'll put their names over on this side uh thanks to them they support the channel it really means a lot to me they get Early Access videos plus behind the scenes and other stuff like that that's cool if you want to come become a patron there's a link in the description you can do so there so that's it stay healthy stay safe I'll see you next time bye

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement ][

Views: 20,510

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Id: HFB-M6PP8w8

Length: 27min 46sec (1666 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2023