24" Widescreen CRT (FW900) From Ebay arrived,Comments.

yea, definitely rarer these days. For those who are curious, the IBM P260 seems to be very similar, if not identical to the P275, other than supporting a bit less bandwidth. ANd P275 is a rebranded CPD G520.

Hard to find a reliable souce for what the rebrand of the P260 is. I dug up an old forum post claiming it to be the Sony CPD-G500, but those specs don't match up (the G500 has 0.23 mm pixel pitch, while G520 has 0.24 mm).

A lot of visual cognition labs used the G520, and I know for a fact that some of them are being used in 2019 (you can do a google scholar search to verify this).

So there may be a few pulses of these tubes for a while to come, hard to say more than that though without more info.

So I'm not sure whether the price for the P260 is exorbitant or not. I'd say that if it were in very good condition, it could be rare enough to be a justified price, but again, who knows what these labs will sell em for during any such pulses.
 
I do have a P260, I can testify it has nothing to do with a P275, it's just another G500 clone with a few weird resolution presets, a slightly modified A board with a DVI-I plug, and the IBM massive square plastic case. ;)
 
I do have a P260, I can testify it has nothing to do with a P275, it's just another G500 clone with a few weird resolution presets, a slightly modified A board with a DVI-I plug, and the IBM massive square plastic case. ;)

The P260 and P275 have very similar specs, with the exception of the bandwidth difference. It's like the P275's younger sibling.

And yea, I think you're right about it being a G500 rebadge. I looked at more official documentation, and the pixel pitches match between them. Cnet incorrectly reports the G500 pixel pitch as 0.23 mm, whereas it should be listed as 0.24 mm.
 
Our monitors getting some attention from Digital Foundry



I honestly dismissed CRT as toy for a bunch of retro geeks. After watching that video, I was blown away. Even for a modern game like Control, the game was said looked nicer using 768p than a 4k LCD!

So where does this leave us? Have we really taken that far of a step back going LCD? GPU manufactures are pumping out 10+ teraflops graphics cards designed for higher and higher resolutions with support for more advanced AA when a better experience could be had using a much cheaper card and a quality CRT. It kind of feels like PC gamers were sold out in the name of 'progress'.
 
Awesome video. I've replied to John Linneman's twitter thread (first time using twitter lol).

I want to make sure they see this tube after a proper WinDAS WPB adjustment :)

If anyone has some more direct way of contacting them, let me know!

You can message him directly on Twitter, might be more chance of him reading it. I have sent him a message to check out this thread.
 
I honestly dismissed CRT as toy for a bunch of retro geeks. After watching that video, I was blown away. Even for a modern game like Control, the game was said looked nicer using 768p than a 4k LCD!

So where does this leave us? Have we really taken that far of a step back going LCD? GPU manufactures are pumping out 10+ teraflops graphics cards designed for higher and higher resolutions with support for more advanced AA when a better experience could be had using a much cheaper card and a quality CRT. It kind of feels like PC gamers were sold out in the name of 'progress'.
Actually, people were just fooled by marketing. It's big, it heats, it's a flickering crap that kills your eyes (and seal babies), throw it away and buy our new fashion super flat LCD ! *

* We do not guarantee our new fashion super flat LCD to provide a quality display and we actually only care to sell that shit because it's cheaper to manufacture and allows to cut logistical costs.:wacky:
 
could not agree more with you, Strat_84

i remember back in the 90 - early 2000s when CRT monitors were the norm, back then when going to shop a new CRT monitor for gaming, it was really hard for me to see the difference between models image quality - performance related since all had excelent viewing angles, excelent latencies, excelent blacks, excelent motion clarity, excelent colors, excelent non native multi resolution image quality, clear text clarity, so the only diferences i noticed was screen sizes, max refresh rates and max resolution support.

i remember when the LCD tech started to emerge, their massive flaws were instant notable, however back then, i was confident that it was because the LCD technology was too new and needed to mature, and i was a fool dreamer confident that in a few years we would see all that godness image quality - performance CRTs had inside a flat monitor, but sadly, about 20 years later CRT still are the less flaw tech image quality - performance related tech.




now monitor manufacturers sell the idea that you need a diferent monitor to achieve a particular thing:

-a very high refresh rate monitor for best latency - motion clarity up to 240 + hz however, still not as good clarity as CRT even at 240hz!! the CRT can achieve those at a much low refresh rate, and at the expense of those high refresh rate monitors having mediocre color, poor viewing angles, blacks etc.

-sell the idea to need a IPS monitor to achieve better viewing angles color quality, at the expense of poor blacks, vertical viewing notable color shifting not so good latency, motion clarity, etc.

-sell the idea to need a VA panel for better blacks but still not as good s CRTs at the expense of not so good latency, motion clarity, etc

-sell the idea to need OLED for best blacks at the expense of not so good motion clarity, limited resfresh rate, even more prone to screen burn thatn CRTs are, etc.

-sell the idea to need strobing for CRT quality motion clarity, even when that strobing is confirmed to have worse notable flicker than CRTs at lower refresh rates and alter image brightness, so that most manufacturers decided to only allow strobing at refresh rates up to 85 + hz and lock brightness control leaving the image either too bright or too dim when strobing.
 
guys...
is this site legit?
http://www.tamayatech.com

seems like they have lots of refurb'd trinitron displays for sale
(in search bar, type trinitron in description and 5000 for max price to filter out the out-of-stock displays)
 
guys...
is this site legit?
http://www.tamayatech.com

seems like they have lots of refurb'd trinitron displays for sale
(in search bar, type trinitron in description and 5000 for max price to filter out the out-of-stock displays)
I tried buying stuff from them before. They don't remove old listings. So you might ill get an email stating something is out of stock
 
Wow...some great coverage there. I appreciate the practicality of having dual LCD panels at work, but am so grateful to still have an FW900 anchoring my home enthusiast machine. Hope it lasts a bit longer or more please...
 
Seems like my FW-900 have died. It worked during the morning but once i got home it wont start. It makes 3 attemps to light up. Then the light goes from green to orange.
 
Seems like my FW-900 have died. It worked during the morning but once i got home it wont start. It makes 3 attemps to light up. Then the light goes from green to orange.
It's very likely it's not dead, it just requires some healing. ;)
Given the problem description, I'd think about bad solders on the G board, probably preventing one voltage line to work. You can try to give a couple of slaps on the right side of the monitor. If it works, it'll be required to open the monitor and reflow those solders with a solder iron for a more durable fix (monitor disconnected from power supply and discharged of course).
Is the orange light steady or does it blink following a specific parttern ?
 
It's very likely it's not dead, it just requires some healing. ;)
Given the problem description, I'd think about bad solders on the G board, probably preventing one voltage line to work. You can try to give a couple of slaps on the right side of the monitor. If it works, it'll be required to open the monitor and reflow those solders with a solder iron for a more durable fix (monitor disconnected from power supply and discharged of course).
Is the orange light steady or does it blink following a specific parttern ?
The orange light is steady. The only thing that could have happened when i was away was dust and a cold room.
 
The orange light is steady. The only thing that could have happened when i was away was dust and a cold room.
It doesn't need something to happen for a solder to fail. Sometimes it isn't done properly and it take years of slow deterioration before the solder is actually gone. Bad solders were especially common when manufacturing processes were switched to lead-free alloys.
 
o2Km97x.jpg


:D
 
thursday night i went to check the two goodwill's around here. found absolutely nothing interesting. came home, checked craigslist. accidentally typed fw900 instead of "crt monitor" (at that point i would have been happy with any decent crt). there was a single post in milwaukee area. email'd the guy, who sent lots of detailed pictures. it's in decent condition, only flaws are scratches to ag film and slightly cracked base.

drove 4hrs saturday to go get it and then 4.5 hours back. about 8hours driving in rain. was not fun. totally worth it. i figured i might not have another such opportunity in years.

getting it out my car was a royal pain in the ass. and since the base already has cracks i didnt want to make it worse, so i avoided using the ground for leverage when rotating it from face down to upright. anyway i got it inside, and as i was putting it on the counter my left hand slipped and the thing almost dropped. fortunately i managed to push it up on its side.

oh it's manufactured nov 2003. is it one of the least old units i guess?
 
thursday night i went to check the two goodwill's around here. found absolutely nothing interesting. came home, checked craigslist. accidentally typed fw900 instead of "crt monitor" (at that point i would have been happy with any decent crt). there was a single post in milwaukee area. email'd the guy, who sent lots of detailed pictures. it's in decent condition, only flaws are scratches to ag film and slightly cracked base.

drove 4hrs saturday to go get it and then 4.5 hours back. about 8hours driving in rain. was not fun. totally worth it. i figured i might not have another such opportunity in years.

getting it out my car was a royal pain in the ass. and since the base already has cracks i didnt want to make it worse, so i avoided using the ground for leverage when rotating it from face down to upright. anyway i got it inside, and as i was putting it on the counter my left hand slipped and the thing almost dropped. fortunately i managed to push it up on its side.

oh it's manufactured nov 2003. is it one of the least old units i guess?
Believe so. I think they disappeared from regular retail in the first half of 2004...
 
indeed. i may have gotten really really really lucky. sharpness is great corner to corner. it's still warming up right now so i'm not sure how the black levels are. unfortunately i'm running off my laptop (intel gfx) + an adapter right now, so i'm stuck with quite awful 60hz flickering (i assume CRU and whatever won't help because i'm limited by the adapter?)

i'm not sure whether this unit has ever been calibrated or adjusted in windas. (the port in the back is still covered and doesnt look like it has been opened before)
 
I wonder what percentage of FW900 owners have ever connected a service cable to their port.

CRU should help if your adaptor supports the clock rate to drive the tube at higher bandwidths (assuming the GPU also has a high enough bandwidth).
 
i didn't try very hard, but i couldn't get it to work. i think my laptop's gpu has enough bandwidth (internal display is 3200x1800) but the adapter simply does not like to take custom resolutions...

i guess i'll move my desktop from office to home later this week. originally i was planning to do a new build based on 3950x, but now that's gotta wait until november

on 29/88 brightness/contrast, black levels are usable but not too great right now. otherwise the colors and white point are (to my eyes) perfect.
 
When I ran my FW900 through my laptop, it was really finicky to get it to work. I had to do some stuff using the Intel HD Grpahics Control Panel as well as in CRU, and it was hard to get it to work (it would sometimes undo itself after a windows 10 update, but that hasn't been a problem for a while).
 
"Initial Setup Panic? "Image Restore" to the Rescue!
When you first unpack and power up your monitor, do not worry if black levels and color are way off. Let it warm up for about 30 minutes. After thirty minutes in the powered-on state (don't let the monitor enter "sleep" mode), the "Image Restore" option becomes available under the "Expert" and "sRGB" color settings menu. Set your preferred color temperature in the Expert area and then activate the "Image Restore" option. Your colors should then "pop" into place. Edit: its also good to turn up the monitors Brightness setting before running Image restore, For example I normally run mine at around 25 but before running Image restore Ill turn it up to 50, Then back down after running it. Doing this normally gives the brightness setting a wider range, especially if you're currently having to run the monitor at a low brightness setting to achieve good black levels."

Some folks have had luck with this over the years...
 
i mean that i don't recall that we ever figured out what precisely it does (what parameters are adjusted).
i guess i'll fiddle with it a bit before doing a calibration in windas

spacediver do you still recommend the same software (irfanview and hcfr) as in your guide for white point balance?
 
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Image Restore/Color Return function doesn't do/modify anything. You can check two saved DATs before and after the procedure. They're identical.
 
image restoration function according to the service manual:

Clipboard01.jpg


in my FW900 i do notice that image restoration corrects the black level drift i notice over time, also according to that manual, that function could lose ability to perform that function as the tube ages, so maybe that fuction not doing anything on some monitors could be a indicator of how much the monitor has been used as well.
 
i mean that i don't recall that we ever figured out what precisely it does (what parameters are adjusted).
i guess i'll fiddle with it a bit before doing a calibration in windas

spacediver do you still recommend the same software (irfanview and hcfr) as in your guide for white point balance?

Yep, and the links to the latest versions in my guide should still work.

One note: in my guide, the line that reads:

dispcal -m -qm -J -F -v3 -g2.4 -f1 -k0 -A16 mylutname

should instead read:

dispcal -m -qm -J -F -G2.4 -f0 mylutname

It's been a while since I've experimented with this stuff, but I used this latter set of switches a few months ago during my last calibration and it worked well. Feel free to read through here and experiment though.

And be sure to test your LUT bit depth (instructions here)

 
image restoration function according to the service manual:

View attachment 188876

in my FW900 i do notice that image restoration corrects the black level drift i notice over time, also according to that manual, that function could lose ability to perform that function as the tube ages, so maybe that fuction not doing anything on some monitors could be a indicator of how much the monitor has been used as well.

Yes, I know that piece of information. On my 3 CRTs, one Dell P1130 (over 13000h of usage), and two GDM-F520 (9000h and 5000h respectively) I don't see any change in the picture after performing Image Restore / Color Return.
 
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