IBM P200

[jaslr]

I have purchased a 'mother of a monitor' - the IBM P200 fairly cheaply of a local dealer.

I have 2 questions:
- does the .31 dot pixels mean that it's worse quality than a .25 monitor?
- there are 2 horizontal lines on the monitor one about a third of the way down and another about a third from the bottom. They aren't very noticable, I only noticed after the third day I had it. A friend said that it's a feature that good monitors have (I forget the reasoning...), my question is - is this true? or have I been nabbed by an impulsive purchase? Is this monitor crappy already?

Regards

 

[GoSharks]

Smaller dot pitch 0.25 is better.

What you are seeing is normal for all aperture grill monitors. Aperture grille CRT’s uses a set of fine vertical wires called an “aperture grille” instead of a steel shadow mask to separate the R, G, and B electron beams and force them to strike only the appropriate colored phosphors. This is why aperture grille monitors are only curved in one direction, as you can imaging bending fine wires over the vertical distance of the screen would be almost impossible so they are stretched over a frame shaped like a cylinder. And yes, even most of the flat aperture grille monitors are curved on the inside.

These vertical wires are very susceptible to vibration (same as guitar strings) that can cause the screen to become wavy a common problem on aperture grille monitors. If you give an aperture grill display a light tap, you will be able to see the effect of the wires vibrating.

To counteract this problem, the vertical wires are held in place with two horizontal damping wires. These are the two horizontal wires that are always visible when using applications with black characters on a white background. These are not a defect, without them the slightest vibration would have a negative affect on the screen. The lines you see are the shadows cast by these fine wires.

Jim Witkowski
Chief Hardware Engineer
MonitorsDirect.com

<A HREF="http://www.monitorsdirect.com" target="_new">MonitorsDirect.com</A>

 

[jaslr]

Thank You so much GoSharks, I now understand and can rest easy that it's not a defect. You are a wealth of information.