Got myself a fw900 in good condition, what a beast!

[Anar]

Finally got my hands on a sony gdm fw900 unit. I drove 800 kilometers for mine (400 kilometers both ways). It was a local pick up type purchase. Paid 120 euros for it. The seller told me he had calibrated the unit using Datacolors Spider 4 Elite, to show true colors. He told me he was using the monitor for color corrections. Not sure what that means. But I guess I could not have hoped that a FW900 owner would leave it stock anyway. ) I just hope that it has not shortened the life of this CRT monitor. I brought it home and cleaned it (only externally). It seems to work fine. Physically it looks like a new unit. I don't know how much life it has got left though. Anyway, what do you think? Was it a good purchase? I bought it mostly for gaming.

 

[Archaea]

No. CRTs hayday is past. I honestly wouldn't take that for free.

Gsync or Freesync on a IPs or VA panel all day everyday.

I don't want to return to the headaches and eye strain of my CRT experiences.

But hey. If you enjoy it. Good.

 

[Meeho]

No. CRTs hayday is past. I honestly wouldn't take that for free.

Gsync or Freesync on a IPs or VA panel all day everyday.

I don't want to return to the headaches and eye strain of my CRT experiences.

But hey. If you enjoy it. Good.

Are you missing /s here?

IPS/VA vs the FW900, aaahahaha!

 

[vegeta535]

I can't honestly see how people still buy into these Sony Monitors. Sure 15 years ago they were the shit but I don't see how they can compete to any high quality flay panel monitor these days. But hey if you enjoy and think all that effort was worth it then more power to you.

 

[exlink]

I'd try one for free if I was given it.

But pay 150 euro and drive 800 kilometers for it? lol no.

 

[Big[H]]

I used to have the fancy Sony monitors like this, and Mitsubishi and Iiyama and such. I wouldn't even take one for free these days, just not worth it to me. Too heavy, too much heat/power usage, noise, geometry issues among other issues, etc. I enjoy the GSync monitors they have today with 144/165 hz.

 

[NamelessPFG]

Hey, as long as the flyback/D board doesn't blow like mine did, I'd say it was worth it. The FW900 is the Holy Grail of CRTs, after all, and it still wipes the floor with pretty much any LCD I've laid eyes on.

I only switched to an Eizo FG2421 because my Sun GDM-5410 looked like it was gonna join the FW900 in the CRT afterlife soon, and I had to prepare for the eventuality that I'd have to move to a newer graphics card that would no longer have VGA output. Too bad current DisplayPort to VGA adapters suck; they can't handle the pixel clocks your typical 400 MHz RAMDAC can pull off, and the FW900 is most certainly capable of tapping into that once you ramp up the resolution and refresh rate.

I would love for nothing more than to LCD to just die off overnight so OLED can take over as a flat-panel technology that deserves comparison to top-tier CRTs, but that isn't going to be happening for a while.

No. CRTs hayday is past. I honestly wouldn't take that for free.

Gsync or Freesync on a IPs or VA panel all day everyday.

I don't want to return to the headaches and eye strain of my CRT experiences.

But hey. If you enjoy it. Good.

If you got eye strain out of a high-end CRT, you're using it wrong. Ramp up that refresh rate to 85 Hz or more, and the flicker goes away to my eyes. As a bonus, the motion clarity gets that much better! Besides, you could hit up to 144-160 Hz on a FW900, depending on what resolution you go with.

Speaking of which, the only way for crappy LCDs to even approach CRT motion clarity is to, quite ironically, start strobing like one - hence the push for all those LightBoost hacks, the FG2421's "Turbo240" mode (really just 120 Hz strobed), ULMB on the current crop of G-SYNC monitors. All competent VR HMDs strobe, too; you might notice the 60 Hz flicker in a Gear VR.

 

[Odellus]

I can't honestly see how people still buy into these Sony Monitors. Sure 15 years ago they were the shit but I don't see how they can compete to any high quality flay panel monitor these days. But hey if you enjoy and think all that effort was worth it then more power to you.

you can't see how people buy into decent resolution, high refresh rate, no input lag, virtually no motion blur, high contrast ratio monitors with no backlight bleed or glow? what?

 

[KazeoHin]

you can't see how people buy into decent resolution, high refresh rate, no input lag, virtually no motion blur, high contrast ratio monitors with no backlight bleed or glow? what?

That also requires a steel reinforced desk with at least a square yard of empty space...

 

[misterbobby]

I assumed this was a thread somebody necroed...

 

[Meeho]

It doesn't have one of the largest and longest running threads here for no reason. Most have forgotten or haven't ever seen a high contrast, deep blacks, 0 input lag, high motion resolution and sharpness picture. There is still no other display technology that combines all of those, unfortunatelly.

 

[MistaSparkul]

It doesn't have one of the largest and longest running threads here for no reason. Most have forgotten or haven't ever seen a high contrast, deep blacks, 0 input lag, high motion resolution and sharpness picture. There is still no other display technology that combines all of those, unfortunatelly.

The Dell OLED strobes but it's 60hz so it looks disguisting whether its single or double. Once we get a DP 1.4/HDMI 2.1 version that can do 120hz+strobing then we will have a technology that combines it all. Assuming it has low lag of course.

 

[Zepher]

My friend had an SGI branded one, it was nice, but to me it just didn't look as sharp as a good LCD. Black levels were amazing on it.
His developed an issue after a static discharge from a lightning strike in his backyard, can't remember what the issue was but he used it for a few more years before going to a Dell 24" IPS LCD monitor.
A couple of years ago I sent him a link to the 34" Dell curved ultrawide, didn't think he was actually going to buy it since it was $1300 at the time and he would need a new video card, GTX285 doesn't support 3440x1440. He bought it along with a GTX750 and has been very pleased with it.

The old CRT monitor weighs 90lbs or so .

 

[Meeho]

It's not as sharp for text but has a sort of natural AA that makes it great for games.

 

[spacediver]

My friend had an SGI branded one, it was nice, but to me it just didn't look as sharp as a good LCD. Black levels were amazing on it.
His developed an issue after a static discharge from a lightning strike in his backyard, can't remember what the issue was but he used it for a few more years before going to a Dell 24" IPS LCD monitor.
A couple of years ago I sent him a link to the 34" Dell curved ultrawide, didn't think he was actually going to buy it since it was $1300 at the time and he would need a new video card, GTX285 doesn't support 3440x1440. He bought it along with a GTX750 and has been very pleased with it.

The old CRT monitor weighs 90lbs or so .
View attachment 25956

That's not an FW900 rebrand, that's a W900 rebrand. FW900 is in a completely different league.

 

[NamelessPFG]

An SGI rebrand, huh? I wonder what workstation model it was paired with. Getting my hands on some Silicon Graphics hardware is one of my later collector goals, but the second-hand prices are too high unless you want to go for lower-end stuff like the Indy as opposed to something beefier like an Octane, Fuel or (if you can find one) Tezro.

Sharpness is admittedly not a particularly big advantage of CRTs, especially if they lose focus and convergence (hello, chromatic aberration!), but a typical aperture grille set (Trinitron, Diamondtron, etc.) comes startlingly close to flat-panel clarity as long as you're not exceeding the grille pitch. And as mentioned above, it's sort of like natural anti-aliasing, without any performance penalty involved!

Then there's the matter of CRTs not having native resolutions to begin with, so they sorta preserve their sharpness at lower resolutions while LCDs look awful trying to rescale such a res to native, barring the decent ones with 1:1 pixel scaling if you don't mind potentially significant letterboxing. It's a pretty big deal if you want to lower the resolution below your usual desktop res for performance reasons (something people used to do a lot until LCDs became common), or if you want to use the same display for older computers made when CRTs were still dominant.

 

[Odellus]

That also requires a steel reinforced desk with at least a square yard of empty space...

and? some people value image quality over convenience, and the FW900 still has better overall image quality than everything else. whenever OLED becomes cheaper to make and brands come out with ones with high refresh rates and some kind of reduced motion blur tech, then will be the time to finally move on.

 

[Crosshairs]

There is still not a single other monitor out there that can compete with a properly calibrated FW900 , if you have a good one and it's set up properly, it's pure heaven..

 

[rabidz7]

There is still not a single other monitor out there that can compete with a properly calibrated FW900 , if you have a good one and it's set up properly, it's pure heaven..

A few CRTs, particularly the GDM-F520 outspecs the FW900 but it is fullscreen.

 

[mathesar]

A few CRTs, particularly the GDM-F520 outspecs the FW900 but it is fullscreen.

I've heard the F520 was very unreliable but don't have any solid proof, I was interested in buying one shortly after the FW900 but could never find any for sale, the F520's .22mm pitch rating was certainly intriguing.