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

Diamondtrons are known to become blurry with old age, especially in the corners. I've seen a few of them behaving this way especially with increasing resolution/frequency. My guess is that the issue comes from the electronics and the aging of some components. I'm not sure if it can be entirely fixed with settings.
My 2001 diamondtron 2020u with a lot of use still display high resolutions extremely sharp, so that's not true for what I've seen. The thing is that this 2070sb is almost new, it has only 2500hrs on his tubes and was made in 2005, it should be on his prime. It's not like it's all blurry, it's really sharp at 1600x1200@85hz, but having the 2020u side by side makes me realize that it's not as good as it should.
 
Now that you talk about it, I've seen the issue on IIyama HM204DT (2003 or newer) and Mitsu 2070sb. But I also had once an older IIyama A201HT which I think didn't have that kind of problem. The building year might have something to do with all this.
 
Indeed, this unit was also made in china (instead of japan, where belongs the 2020u ). I think it was in this thread where I read about the best years of production for the fw900, the later the worse.
 
The HM204DT was still made in Japan. But I know for sure there were a few low quality components inside.

For example I found some 10nF ceramic capacitors of the lowest dieletric quality and with original tolerances of -20/+80% in the horizontal scan circuit of a HM204DT. Total crap, and yet maybe not 10% cheaper than good quality ones. Recently I measured 2 of them in the 10-40pF range ...
 
Hey, guys, was referred here from shmups forum. Anyway, I recently acquired a GDM-W900 and the picture is positively beautiful, however I have a GTX 1080 and...yeah, they axed Analog support with that.

I purchased a DisplayPort to VGA Adapter by a brand called Cirago, but although 1080p looks fine, 1920x1200 looks blurry and terrible. Also, in 1080p mode I have to deal with tremendous black bars which make things hard to see.

So my question is, what is a good DisplayPort to VGA Adapter that I can use to get beautiful picture quality at 1920x1200 60hz resolution? Thanks.
 
Hey, guys, was referred here from shmups forum. Anyway, I recently acquired a GDM-W900 and the picture is positively beautiful, however I have a GTX 1080 and...yeah, they axed Analog support with that.

I purchased a DisplayPort to VGA Adapter by a brand called Cirago, but although 1080p looks fine, 1920x1200 looks blurry and terrible. Also, in 1080p mode I have to deal with tremendous black bars which make things hard to see.

So my question is, what is a good DisplayPort to VGA Adapter that I can use to get beautiful picture quality at 1920x1200 60hz resolution? Thanks.

Ok, correct me if I am wrong, from what I pulled is that the gtx1080 does not have Ramdac. It is what allows the video card to convert the signal to analog. The reason the image quality is questionable at 1920x1200 @ 60Hz is because the recommended resolution is 1920x1200 @ 85Hz and because that adaptor probably is nowhere near the ramdac speeds you would find built into a video card at 400MHz.
http://www.microdata.odessa.ua/docs/SonyFW900.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMDAC

A few years ago when I had a FW900 I was looking at trying AMD video cards but pulled out because the current lineup at the time no longer had ramdac. I looked at adaptors and the MHz was so low that anything above 1920x1200 @ 60Hz was not possible. AMD did away with it around 2012, So at the time i decided to go with a 970gtx.

a) If you want to truly the most out of it you might have to downgrade your card to get the most ramdac clock speed. I think the 1070 might still have it but be careful because sometimes they accidentally list misleading specs since it used to be standard equipment for a long time.
b) Another option is find an adapter with decent ramdac speed.
c) Maybe you have enough Ramdac but you might need to adjust focus and other setting using one or a combination of the following. Sony WinDas, 2 adjusting the pots using the a skinny screw driver through 2 small gaps on the top grill. at one resolution and refresh might look fine but at another it might need adjustment.

Sorry if it's not informative enough, i no longer have a fw900. Best of luck.
 
Ok, correct me if I am wrong, from what I pulled is that the gtx1080 does not have Ramdac. It is what allows the video card to convert the signal to analog. The reason the image quality is questionable at 1920x1200 @ 60Hz is because the recommended resolution is 1920x1200 @ 85Hz and because that adaptor probably is nowhere near the ramdac speeds you would find built into a video card at 400MHz.
http://www.microdata.odessa.ua/docs/SonyFW900.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMDAC

A few years ago when I had a FW900 I was looking at trying AMD video cards but pulled out because the current lineup at the time no longer had ramdac. I looked at adaptors and the MHz was so low that anything above 1920x1200 @ 60Hz was not possible. AMD did away with it around 2012, So at the time i decided to go with a 970gtx.

a) If you want to truly the most out of it you might have to downgrade your card to get the most ramdac clock speed. I think the 1070 might still have it but be careful because sometimes they accidentally list misleading specs since it used to be standard equipment for a long time.
b) Another option is find an adapter with decent ramdac speed.
c) Maybe you have enough Ramdac but you might need to adjust focus and other setting using one or a combination of the following. Sony WinDas, 2 adjusting the pots using the a skinny screw driver through 2 small gaps on the top grill. at one resolution and refresh might look fine but at another it might need adjustment.

Sorry if it's not informative enough, i no longer have a fw900. Best of luck.
Thanks for the help, I think it's just the adapter because I plugged it into my Intel HD Graphics 4000 and the 1920x1200 resolution looks beautiful on it. I'm using a cheapo DisplayPort to VGA, so I'm figuring I just need a solid adapter.
 
Do you have the w900 or fw900? There is a huge difference between them. The w900 is a non flat crt, limited to 96khz horizontal refresh rate. You're limited to 1920 x 1200 at 76 Hz
https://www.cnet.com/products/sony-gdm-w900-crt-monitor-24-series/specs/
I hope that you're only using the monitor for gaming, otherwise your eyes are going to have a bad time dealing with 76hz for normal use.
The Geforce Pascal series dropped native analog output. The most powerful consumer gpu that still supports it is the 980ti, although in the professional market the quadro m6000 (most powerful card atm) still supports vga.
Search in this thread "Vcom adapter", that could possibly solve all your problems and it is not expensive.
 
Regarding AMD the last and most powerful GPU still having a DVI-I output is the R9 380X (that's a bit newer than the year 2012 I read before ;) )
 
Regarding AMD the last and most powerful GPU still having a DVI-I output is the R9 380X (that's a bit newer than the year 2012 I read before ;) )
I guess I am off. When I was shopping for the 290x those cards did not have any ramdac. I know microcenter misleadingly listed the 290x with it but it did not have it. They must have brought it back on the 380x.
 
You're right, the 290X don't have it. Neither do the 390X. They started removing the analog outputs on the highest end GPUs but kept it for less powerful ones. At least for some time. Now even DVI-D outputs start to be removed.
 
If I could divulge the names of all the movie/TV stars. famous musicians, producers, and movie/TV directors that have bought Sony GDMs monitors from me thru the years, all of you guys will flip and most likely would not believe me...
 
If I could divulge the names of all the movie/TV stars. famous musicians, producers, and movie/TV directors that have bought Sony GDMs monitors from me thru the years, all of you guys will flip and most likely would not believe me...

What's stopping you? Why is that information confidential?
 
Since its becoming more and more difficult to find high end videocards that are able to output an analog signal is there a way to run two graphics cards of the same brand and use one for processing and the other to output the rendered graphics through the vga/DVI-I of the other card? Or is there a good Digital to analog converter that is able to output at 85hz or higher?
 
Since its becoming more and more difficult to find high end videocards that are able to output an analog signal is there a way to run two graphics cards of the same brand and use one for processing and the other to output the rendered graphics through the vga/DVI-I of the other card? Or is there a good Digital to analog converter that is able to output at 85hz or higher?

At the moment, you can't combine two different types of graphics cards for most games (almost all). However, DirectX 12, and maybe Vulkan, are changing that with explicit multi-adapter. It is only in a few games right now, and it's hard to say if it will become more common in the future.

As for the converter, it depends on which resolution you want to do 85hz at. 4K? No. 1024x768? Yeah, pretty much all of them. 1600x1200? Only a few, you can read about them in the last 20 or so pages of this tread.
 
At the moment, you can't combine two different types of graphics cards for most games (almost all). However, DirectX 12, and maybe Vulkan, are changing that with explicit multi-adapter. It is only in a few games right now, and it's hard to say if it will become more common in the future.

As for the converter, it depends on which resolution you want to do 85hz at. 4K? No. 1024x768? Yeah, pretty much all of them. 1600x1200? Only a few, you can read about them in the last 20 or so pages of this tread.

Id be looking for one that can do 1920x1200 @85hz, but the weird thing is that with external graphics cards on laptops they are able to output to the laptop screen through pci-express so thats why i was wondering if that could work for desktops.
 
Id be looking for one that can do 1920x1200 @85hz, but the weird thing is that with external graphics cards on laptops they are able to output to the laptop screen through pci-express so thats why i was wondering if that could work for desktops.

Are you talking about something like this? http://www.banggood.com/Mini-PCI-E-...al-Independent-Video-Card-Dock-p-1011222.html
I think on a pc might be doable if you had a motherboard with the socket, or if you had a pci-e adaptor if it existed. It work on the laptop because 1) monitor is digital and ramdac is irrelevant, and 2) because it just extends the socket kind of like e-sata and passes the signal through. Even if you got it that far, on the laptop its just passing the signal to the screen directly and not using the laptops video card ramdac to process the other cards signal, or does it? Does your motherboard integrated graphics have a ramdac? can it output to your fw900 in the first place?

Forgive me if I am providing erroneous information. I am sure other ppl will correct bad info.

I pulled a list of the intel integrated graphics and there's no listing for ramdac specs beyond first gen on this list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_graphics_processing_units that would put it as ramdac only in the first gen integrated (1998-2000) which might have also been the agp era.
I see nothing on amd apu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Unit and I am not sure nvidia http://www.nvidia.com/page/mobo.html they have some antiquated stuff.

They also have these more modern enclosures that connect through either usb 3.0 or thunderbolt. http://gpunerd.com/
 
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Id be looking for one that can do 1920x1200 @85hz, but the weird thing is that with external graphics cards on laptops they are able to output to the laptop screen through pci-express so thats why i was wondering if that could work for desktops.

The laptops iGPU is turned off when you output via PCI-e
 
I have a AMD 7850 right now. Looks like the only mid range graphics card i can get that is able to output a VGA signal that is worth upgrading to is the Nvidia 970 so i think i'm going to do that and figure out a workaround later. If anybody else has any suggestions for a graphics card that has a DVI-I port that has the best bang for your buck, other than the 970, let me know. I just spent 500 bucks to get another FW900 that has only 3 years of use on it (was brand new in box for many years), would be a shame to not be able to use it. I figure streaming from another computer using steam for gaming will get better over time so hopefully, or there will be other software where i can have a powerful gaming computer and just stream to a client pc over gigabit that will be connected to the FW900.

Me and my roommates have been talking about chipping in to make a crazy powerful gaming multi-client virtualized "server" and just have low power client pc's. They've done things like that on linus tech group with their 7 gamers one CPU video and such.
 
Guys do you know if there's a service menu for the GDM W900? I kinda wanna make mine brighter since it's a bit faded.
 
Guys do you know if there's a service menu for the GDM W900? I kinda wanna make mine brighter since it's a bit faded.

You need WinDAS and a usb - ttl cable. If you have a colorimeter you can follow the white point balance guide, and if you don't, you can use the technique in this video to manipulate the variables directly, though you'll have to figure out which variables to change and to what values.

Also, have you tried an image restoration?
 
Respect for privacy. I wouldn't want people divulging that they calibrated my system either without my knowledge or consent. I don't know - maybe I'm just weird like that. :D
Nah, you're not weird, and famous people are definitely more that way than not. I'd have to wonder which actors it is that have the time to indulge their CRT hobbies and whether they've seen this thread.
 
does anybody have a copy of the modified windows 7 64 bit gdm-fw 900 drivers anywhere?

I lost my backup :(

I am going to store it in my dropbox, if any of you have it anywhere.

Also, would these drivers help on using gdm-fw900 as extended desktop monitor?

When I start windows 7 now (without the good driver) windows does not recognize my monitor, and I got to click 'detect monitors' in resolution window each time I start my monitor. If not, the screen defaults to default driver, with crappy resolution.
 
People will still pay $500 for a working FW900 today? Geez, I need to get mine fixed already!

As it stands, though, I'd already have to pay about that much just for a replacement D board from the only source I know of.

If push comes to shove, we might have to learn how to do component-level repair on these things and refurbish the boards ourselves, kinda like what people do with old speaker amps/receivers. Hopefully, the electronic components that are especially prone to failure in FD Trinitrons aren't out of production by now...
 
Since its becoming more and more difficult to find high end videocards that are able to output an analog signal is there a way to run two graphics cards of the same brand and use one for processing and the other to output the rendered graphics through the vga/DVI-I of the other card? Or is there a good Digital to analog converter that is able to output at 85hz or higher?

There used to be software that would allow you to hook to your motherboards ports (so if you had vga on the mobo you could use it) but render from the graphics card. Lucid Virtu MVP, but it appears abandoned now.
 
If push comes to shove, we might have to learn how to do component-level repair on these things and refurbish the boards ourselves, kinda like what people do with old speaker amps/receivers. Hopefully, the electronic components that are especially prone to failure in FD Trinitrons aren't out of production by now...

Yea, would be cool to rebuild those things. We have the schematics, and the transistor names, etc.
 
If push comes to shove, we might have to learn how to do component-level repair on these things and refurbish the boards ourselves, kinda like what people do with old speaker amps/receivers. Hopefully, the electronic components that are especially prone to failure in FD Trinitrons aren't out of production by now...
It depends on the component.

Very specific ones like integrated circuits or FTBs are extremely hard or impossible to find, usually classified as obsolete and not produced anymore. However, for example I managed to find someone selling the RGB amplifier I was looking for in China. Probably pulled out of discarded devices. I gave it a try but I'm still uncertain about the shape of what I will receive.

But when it comes to more generic ones like capacitors, resistors, diodes or transistors, you can always find equivalent components through specialised electronic suppliers (Mouser, Digikey, Farnell, Radiospares for example).
 
It depends on the component.

But when it comes to more generic ones like capacitors, resistors, diodes or transistors, you can always find equivalent components through specialised electronic suppliers (Mouser, Digikey, Farnell, Radiospares for example).

Yeah i know for "broken" Lcds just swapping out 10bucks in caps will usually get them working again. I figure with failed CRT's capacitor ageing also plays a big role in their failure.
 
However, for example I managed to find someone selling the RGB amplifier I was looking for in China. Probably pulled out of discarded devices. I gave it a try but I'm still uncertain about the shape of what I will receive.
Ah ah, I received the package. :)

The good news is, there are still genuine ICs around and the ones I was looking for. The bad news is, that Chinese seller is a liar.
These were supposedly tested and working ICs, actually they must be pulled off boards, cleaned a bit and sold like that. Out of 3 ICs: One has a dead green output, another has a blue output in a worrying shape, only one seems to be good and working. Need to solder it to confirm.

I wasted an entire day figuring out how to test and find what was wrong with this crap ... :facepalm:
 
Ah ah, I received the package. :)

The good news is, there are still genuine ICs around and the ones I was looking for. The bad news is, that Chinese seller is a liar.
These were supposedly tested and working ICs, actually they must be pulled off boards, cleaned a bit and sold like that. Out of 3 ICs: One has a dead green output, another has a blue output in a worrying shape, only one seems to be good and working. Need to solder it to confirm.

I wasted an entire day figuring out how to test and find what was wrong with this crap ... :facepalm:

damn, that is an interesting mix of good and bad news. Thanks for taking the hit. Is this for your diamondtron? If your red tint issue is caused by what you thought it was (the RGB amplifier), will one working IC fix it? And just to be clear, an IC is an integrated circuit, and the RGB amplifier itself is an IC right?

p.s. had a fun time bringing this through the airport in Washington DC last weekend as I was heading back to Toronto:

2yngf89.jpg
 
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