The worst VGA monitor ever made - Tandy VGM-225
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- Опубликовано: 2 окт 2024
- The monitor that was so bad, it may have led to Tandy's downfall as a computer manufacturer. Built for Tandy by Samsung, the VGM-225 (and almost identical VGM-220) has a very grainy image due to the coarse 0.52 mm dot pitch of its picture tube. It's OK for most games, but not for reading fine text.
Correction: The Secret of Monkey Island was a Lucasfilm game, not a Sierra game.
The VGA240 utility for switching the VGA refresh rate from 70 Hz to 60 Hz:
www.vogons.org...
Modern Classic's video about Tandy 1000 computers:
• The Tandy 1000 - a for...
TJBChris's video about the Tandy 1000RLX:
• Tandy 1000 RLX/HD: Che...
1987 Tandy 1000TX commercial:
• Radio Shack - Tandy 10...
1991 Tandy 1000RL & RLX commercial:
• Radio Shack - Tandy 10...
1991 Tandy computers commercial:
• Radio Shack Tandy Comp...
#crt #retrogaming #septandy
This is just like the modern projector market today! There are so many cheap projectors that claim to be 1080p because they can accept a 1080p signal, but are in reality somewhere between 160p to 960p depending on how cheap and crappy it is.
How true, how true. Walmart had an RCA projector for like $50.
I was curious so I bought one and it wasn't bad but it wasn't good either and it was nowhere near HD resolution.
Even if a cheap projector has an actual 1080p chip it will still look bad because they use cheap plastic lenses.
A genuinely good 1080p projector with a precision glass lens will produce significantly better detail than a cheap 4k one.
Never judge a projector based on specs.
I worked with a computer recycler and used business projectors werent worth enough to bother reselling. I brought home a Dell DLP that looks decent, think it does at least 1080p, but only worth maybe $60
@@Zebra66 exactly. I’ve switched to a 77 oled for my home movie viewing but I still have and use my Panasonic ae4000 from 2011. Sharp 1080p with pretty good contrast and color reproduction means it’s still usable today. Infinitely better than the $100 microprojectors.
@Cowclops I got a $30,000 Barco 1080p projector with a $9,000 precision lens for $1,000 on eBay. 10,000 lumens and it's noticeably better than my $5,000 4k JVC.
DLP doesn't degrade and it looks amazing. It's a way better tech than LCOS or LCD.
I've learned that you can not have high contrast without high brightness.
And most projectors that claim high contrast are simply dim and sacrifice shadow detail for blacks (you can't actually use).
Now Oled is in a league of it's own. Once they make an affordable 150" oled I'll never use a projector again.
I worked for RS for almost 6 years, ending my career as a store manager in Pacific Beach, California. It was during the high point in computer sales. I could see the competition building & our quality dropping, so I went to seek my fortune in other ways. I, like you loved Tandy products. But by the 1990's there was little left to love. Except for the Sensation. To little to late as the saying goes. You definitely called this product correctly. Good job!
Tandy was really amazing during their high point. In a lot of small towns, Radio Shack was the only computer store. I remember saving up for a Sensation, but I ended up with a Compaq Presario by the time I had enough money saved.
Did a little googling, and the Sensation was way overpriced, given what that $2200 got you. Maybe $1,000.
By 1995 I was running a 486dx2-66 with 8Mb ram homebuilt that I spent a lot less than $2200 building.
My love of Tandy computers runs deep. Here is just some of my Tandy Computers. ruclips.net/video/MIWmac6ttjE/видео.html
By the 1990s, RS started going from being an electronic enthusiast's store to a cell phone store. Downhill from there. Really sad.
@@Caseytify It's difficult to get the timing right when you research the Sensation. Actually RS tried to piggyback off the success from the Sensation 1, by making 2 upgraded versions. By that time RS was betrayed by Microsoft. And the end was near. It's a complicated story. Maybe I will do a video on just what happened. But have no doubt when the Sensation 1 came out there was nothing else like it. RS had invented something they thought they could control. The Sensation was the first ever Muti Media computer & sold out every unit made in less then 3 months.
Another fun Tandy 1000 RLX fact! The 40MB hard drive it came with is the Seagate ST351A/X - the last stepper motor hard drive ever made, and the largest 8-bit IDE drive ever made. To save cost, the drive also stored its internal BIOS on the platters themselves, and setting the jumpers wrong wipes the BIOS out, bricking the drive permanently. Working ones can fetch a pretty penny online (lots of dead ones available, though).
Luckily I bought a few of them before their value started to skyrocket.
Oh. sounds like a challange for someone to make a restore device lol.
Does anyone remember calling an 800 number to have dip switches faxed to you? 😊
@@Yourthoughtsplease Yes, the Tandy FaxBack service.
I hated this limitation. I filled up the 40MB drive quickly, and found I could not upgrade.
The limitation had to do with the Tandy 1000 RLX being what I called a "fake AT". Prior to the AT, PC and XT motherboards did not support hard drives without an add-on controller, which provided its own BIOS. IDE drives did not require a BIOS, as AT computers had IDE support in the BIOS on their MBs.
The RLX 1000 did not have BIOS support for IDE drives. But Seagate made two IDE drives with onboard BIOS, a 20 MB version and a 40 MB version. That was something else that made these computers and hard drives unique.
Your comments at around 15:00 were *exactly* my experience as a kid in the 90s: I grew up *hating* Tandy computers. Every time I tried to use one -- even just at Radio Shack -- I would get a headache, super quickly. 30 years later, I realized that it wasn't the computers at fault, and was just Tandy being cheap with their monitors.
With the argument being - they were cheap. For many people it was the choice between no computer, and a computer that gives you headaches.
I personally had an Amiga without a flicker fixer 😂
@@graealex Strip Poker on the Amiga running interlaced HAM mode images.. happy days xD
@@QuadTubeChannel Exactly. Internet porn in the early days. Flickering, pixelated and not revealing much...
It's really not Tandy being cheap, it's people being cheap. They liked Tandy machines because they were cheap. That cheapness came at a cost. That cost was Tandy computers were junk and they were non-standard.
The positives that you see with Tandy machines is because the machines were close to 10 years newer than a 5150. It's easy to forget that by the time the T1000s were selling really really well, the PC was already years old. They were generally lower speced than any other PC on the market other than other 5150 clones.
@@graealex Not if you knew where to look. You can download thousands upon thousands of scanned images on BBSs. That's why gif got so popular.
Interesting how the tables have turned, displays back then couldn't keep up with video cards... modern video cards are now borderline melting themselves to keep up with modern displays.
In 1982 video cards could only do bi-color on the best CRTs. And for TV CRTs they did deliver color at VHS resolution, not what the mask did allow.
Modern GPUs often come from the factory quite a bit bigger and beefier than they need to be. My 3050 while being a dual slot card, could easily be half the size it is and the card never goes above 50c ever. They have to get to around 100c for temps to start throttling the GPU.
So many cards today are overbuilt to look more impressive than they actually need to be.
My mother's PC featured a 0.51 dot pitch. It was UNWATCHABLE! IIRC, I tweaked the focus just to blur those garishly sharp lines!
I collect old pcs from before i was born (im 14) mines features a 0.56 dot pitch i could actually see pretty well
@@Supervisor360 large dot pitch looks worse the smaller monitor you have. just like 720p on a phone is much clearer than 1080p on a wall-sized tv
I most certainly remember flipping through PC catalogs back in the day, and them listing the various monitors they had available, along with their dot pitch. I learned early on about dot pitch and how a smaller dot pitch yielded a much higher quality image.
My experience was with the IBM PS/2 line of monitors, I had an 8512 which had a .41 dot pitch, but was a 14" monitor. I also had an 8513, and while that was a smaller monitor at only 12", it had a .28 dot pitch. Much higher quality image. Nevertheless, I ran the 8512 for years, most notably connected to an IBM PC/AT 8MHz model with VGA graphics. And my findings were exactly the same as yours, horrible for Windows and most things, but acceptable for DOS games, which I spent a lot of time playing back then.
Dot pitch really made a difference for more demanding stuff at higher resolutions. Even as time marched on and I started working on PCs, I could tell who knew what they were buying based on their monitor. I also can't even tell you how many people were running their Super VGA monitors at a low resolution at only 60Hz, usually with their monitor on the tilt/swivel stand pointing as high up as it could. I set a few of those people straight and they would often comment when they saw me again how much better their monitor was since I "fixed" it.
The 8513 was a very nice little monitor, I was MORE than willing to tolerate the 12" size!
I actually love this look on the low-res games -- I've always enjoyed the way a CRT can turn dithered graphics into a color cascade. But yeah, completely agree on the text. Thank you also for explaining dot pitch in a way that really explains why some CRT televisions also look horrible for certain use cases!
You reminded me about soviet monitors. Especially about their CRTs. They got much sharper picture than TV's CRTs. So those guys who got connections to production were replacing such CRTs in TVs to get better picture. I did it as well)
Clever!
Back in the day I used a Commodore RGB display as my TV by hooking it up to my VCR and using that as the tuner. Much better image quality than the TV I had at the time.
@@Deinonuchus Newer dealed with Commodore monitors. But I guess their CRTs were much similar to soviet ones from Электроника МС6106 and Электроника ВТЦ-202. They used 32ЛКД-2Ц tube with better resolution ability. Besides sharper image they got post-glowing. So it reduces flicking effect. I still use them for my retro projects and sometimes put video from VGA in 16 kHz mode. And picture is much different from regular CRTs. Eyes are not getting tired of it. I started describing that project on one of my RUclips channels. It is in Russian but one day I will translate it and upload to my channel.
@@fixitalex привет, а можно ссылку на канал?)
My first tv as a kid was a vcr connected to a RGB display my parents used for a Atari computer
11:30 Did you just refer to Monkey Island as a *Sierra* game? Heh. Anyway, it's so weird. With the terrible dot pitch, it almost looks like a PC-88 game or something along those lines. The pixels look extended somehow.
(Also, having grown up on a PC Jr, I get so much nostalgia from that three-voice sound chip.)
Was looking for this comment.
pc 88 games have some crazy dithering.
@@soberlife Just curious, are you related to Dustin?
The pixels are extended and always were, because 320x200 res games have pixels that are slightly taller than square.
I can relate to this, we used a CRT display until as late as 2011 (I think?) and for some reason I thought it was cool to run it at high resolutions, which can make pretty much any monitor look like this. After a while you get pretty good at making out the text, but it was far from ideal. Pretty nostalgic though, really makes me appreciate the 1080p and 4k displays in modern devices. Funny thing is, people are trying to emulate this look on modern screens these days.
Indeed, I was still using a decent-sized CRT monitor until 2009. You _could_ run it at higher resolutions, but I never ran it higher than 1024x768. Much above that, things got too small or too grainy.
My upper secondary school in Sweden had CRT monitors until 2015...I had constant headaches.
I've been using a 19" AOC monitor running at 1600x1200@75Hz until early 2013 and I always thought it looked so much better than LCDs. The image was very clear and the blacks were truly black.
I _think_ it used a flat Diamondtron (or comparable) with very small dot pitch. I wish I didn't give it away.
@@TommyAgramonSeth Yeah, that's how it goes unfortunately! Reminds me of when I had amassed quite the Macintosh collection, but I had to get rid of it. Nowadays, these computers go for quite a bit of money and you can't just go out and buy one for the giggles.
many lcd's make me miss my old crt's though as well.. but they where high end monitors not basic level, let alone trash tier like this and many others were..
i had one that would do 2560x1600@87hz and, text was as sharp as my current 1440p if not a bit better, but, again high end monitors i got 2nd hand, that were genuinely amazing... but its dot pitch was like .19 or lower.. i do agree about lower end crt's though.. some lcd's i have had given to me were on part, running well above the panels native res and poorly aligned with the pixel grid to boot... ugg.. when your eyes start to hurt from trying to read the screen.. thats never good..
It always surprises me that even today, you can spend a small fortune on a PC and the manufacturer will spend the minimum they can on the Mouse, Keyboard and Monitor. The three parts of the computer you will be dealing with most. Thankfully, I built my own PC, and so do have an excellent keyboard and trackball (don't really have room for a mouse), a fairly decent 4k monitor.
Couldn't agree more, I spent four hundred bucks on my keyboard and mouse. Seems like overkill but when you use them for 8+ hours a day it really pays for itself. Also one more thing no one considers enough: Your chair! Bad posture makes things uncomfortable fast, so having a nice seat can be a huge upgrade for your PC enjoyability. Office chairs can get pricey for fancy stuff but budget ones are usually pretty solid too
@@GalileoAV $400 isn't overkill, it's insane.
Economies of scale. When you're making 200,000 units, even a $1 savings adds up.
@@Caseytify what?😂 if you use a ice ergonomic keyboard like the ergodox-ez, the 400 bucks are just enough to get the board, the mouse is 3xtra. And if you have 2 workplaces (home/office) like me you need two sets, st least if you want the same comfort and typing experience. And we aren’t getting into expensive keyboards here…
I use an IBM model M keyboard I picked up for a dollar at a yard sale, a wireless Logitech gaming mouse I bought used for $3 (also at a yard sale), a 34" Dell 4k monitor I picked up an estate sale for $50, and a leather office chair I picked up for free by the trash at my apartment building.
They used just ordinary TV picture tube inteded for small portable TVs.
Very much so. And they charged a premium for it too.
@@albear972 Yep, you were just paying for a label and not the product.
TV tubes tended to have small rectangular lines of phosphors. Its more likely either left over CGA or EGA tubes, or new tubes made using the old equipment to meet Tandys requirement of something super cheap. Samsung were making junk to be rebadged by everyone back then.
Were home computers at that time capable of outputting 480i and 240p?
@@-dash I also would think that higher frequency means small angle and long tube
I feel like this is one of your best videos, and I know you have made quite a few. Such an interesting part of history - selecting a new monitor and zeroing in on the dot pitch. It was price vs. dot pitch after selecting screen size once upgrades started for me. My first VGA monitor was a Cordata - likely cheap with terrible specs as I just wanted VGA at the time. I think I may have stashed it in my parents attic a few decades back - it is probably still there. I moved to ViewSonic monitors in 1992 and always tried to keep new stuff at or below .28.
Seriously - great job. Thank you for your hard work putting this together and taking the time to dial-in your camera on that CRT.
I worked for the advertising company that managed RS/Tandy promos for TV and print. We dropped them because of dwindling quality and bad management on their part. But I was always a fan of RS but so disappointed with the way things ended. The downfall was not the blame of the stores but in upper management being so stubborn to keep up with the times. I never used Tandy computers, but respect the legacy. yada yada yada great video - in fact, each one you make is so thoughtful and meticulous. thank you so much. cheers
One big blunder Radio Shack did was when they changed suppliers for their plastic electronics project boxes. The new boxes had new dimensions, which didn't fit any of their prototyping PCBs, the designs for which hadn't been changed since the 60's and 70's. The screw post positions didn't match and for the boxes that had slots to put a board in sideways, the boards were too long or too short to fit across the boxes.
Wow, that is remarkable. They must have had a surplus of tubes designed for CGA monitors, or perhaps television sets. That's like that 5" Radio Shack Portavision I used to have, that had 80 "pixels" going across. Nauseating to look at up close. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't find this monitor kind of endearing in a world of Trinitrons and ViewSonics. Does it accept any SVGA resolutions?
For what it's worth, while the phosphor dots on a CRT can be equated to pixels for calculating the effective horizontal resolution, it can't for vertical resolution, as it's actually possible for just a portion of each dot to be illuminated. They would actually be solid vertical lines (and they are on a Trinitron), if it weren't for the shadow mask getting in the way. So it may be limited to rendering 484 pixels horizontally, but it's a much higher number vertically, limited by the quality of the signal and monitor electronics.
It only supports standard VGA resolutions up to 640x480 at 60 Hz, or 720x400 at 70 Hz.
My first thought was "its a TV tube". Not surplus but cheap because they were being made by the million.
I would say horizontal resolution could still take advantage of partial dots, but not as much as the vertical. Today we might call it subpixel rendering and it's fairly similar to a Bayer filter in cameras. A better way to put this is that the effective resolution for luminance is greater than that of chrominance.
@@eDoc2020 I had the same thought, it definitely does take advantage of it partially but it doesn’t look great, it’s like a semi-transparent screen door is covering the image in a foggy room, it kinda blooms out and fills the gaps but it’s not good looking.
@@MrDuncl Exactly my thoughts. TV over aerial antenna and cable had around 300-350 lines (the "pixels" (there are no pixels on an analog medium) VWestlife counted horizontally). VHS tapes had 220-240. 170 in extended play. Laserdisc had 350-400.
Vertically you'll always get all the lines sharp as the electron beam keeps it correctly at the correct "height" while sweeping the line of picture and only that part of the phosphor glows up
Back in the early-90s when my Mom was a manager for a retail store, we had a Tandy computer at home that she used to type up reports and accounting sheets. I loved it, because a friend of my Dad's installed a bunch of arcade games from the 80s onto it. It's how I got really good at Space Invaders and Pac-Man when I was a kid...so good that I made money off of it, taking bets at the local community center that still had those arcade games in the room next to the bowling alley.
I remember Tandys looking bad at Radioshack back in the day and guessed it to be inferior PC specs. If it was these monitors then they killed Tandy sales.
My memory of radio shack was, it was ALL cheap junk. If something did turn out to be good, you got lucky. Some of that cheap junk was ridiculously overpriced. Always something lacking too. In spite of that, I think the cell phones took over their stores. You couldn't get assistance with really anything else in the store. You could wait forever.
@@pgtmr2713 The radio equipment was pretty top-notch(scanners, AM/FM, CB).
I remember the junk being a RNG of kinda-useful and entertaining -this was before Amazon.
Why y'all usin' all these darn mealahmeeterahs to measure yo' display?
The standard unit round here is Furlongs.
I remember walking into a Radio Shack during the late '80s to early '90s and getting the shakedown like I was at a car dealership or used car lot, the employees would pounce on you to make a computer sale. They were aggressive, sizing you up, and everything. I was always in there to get some kind of audio adaptor or something because I had a TRS-80 COCO as a kid and wouldn't touch their stuff ever again. Very rarely could I just walk in and take a moment to see what was there. I understand it was their job to sale things, but damn, not everyone walking through the door is looking for a computer.
I had an acquaintance that worked at RS in college, and I was amazed at the spiff structure on the items they sold. The employees knew exactly where they money was at and pushed hard to sell those items. (It's probably another reason of many for the company downfall.)
@@Gr8thxAlot Sounds exactly like the Radio Shacks I used to go to back then, they were really aggressive with those sales and they knew their product line.
The last time I was at a Radio Shack was about 10 years ago and the employees were clueless to what they were selling. I was looking for a universal multi-plug A/C power adaptor but the clerk was totally confused and said they've never sold those before, she didn't even ask the manager for help. I just thanked her for her time, went home, and found what I was looking for on Amazon.
I knew she was new because I have bought them from Radio Shack before, not that store, but other Radio Shacks since the '80s.
@@JohnFourtyTwo might not be her fault, since RS goods range getting shorter and shorter.
Welcome to Jurassic Park :)
Wow that monitor is horrible! RadioShack really screwed up with that one.
I still have a working one !!! LOL 32 years later !!
Vertical resolution doesn't work that way for this CRT; the phosphors are basically continuous in the vertical dimension. You can display many scan lines across a single vertical stripe. Yes, there are gaps between phosphors in that direction, but they're only small (compared to the ~80% gaps for the horizontal direction). Vertical resolution is more determined by the three electron beams' focus and convergence.
You would obtain better (horizontal) resolution by increasing the scanning width (and obviously height to maintain aspect ratio) of the raster.
Note that the "digital" pixels won't generally necessarily line up exactly with the "analog" phosphors. In fact, they''ll never perfectly line up due to imperfect deflection linearity. Assuming, here, that you have access to width and position controls (probably internal settings for this set). You will always obvserve a moiré pattern if the video bandwidth and focus is up to it. They may choose to defocus the beam(s) slightly to avoid excessive moiré.
This comment may be of interest to the retro computer scene...
Oh the dot pitches, I remember I was spending a shitload of money on a 14" .28 dot pitch CRT monitor which could run 1024x768 in interlaced mode, though you really thought you needed new glasses when you were actually using that mode. But it made me very happy in the 1990s.
Didn't many of the lower-priced SVGA monitors from the era you're describing only run 87Hz Interlaced, or something like that, when at 1024x768 res.?
My brother had one at that time, and I recall that the flicker in that mode was HORRIBLE and distracting, and maybe there was even an unpleasant noise generated by the monitor?
@@DarronBirgenheier Actually it was actually 85hz, and it worked bery well. Thank you for your time
@@juliedunken1150 Ah yeah, my ViewSonic back then would make this terrible whine noise at 85Hz 1024x768. While friends monitors didn't, it depended on the quality of your tube.
Very nice resolution for the 90s.
@@belstar1128 90's is a long time. by the end of it there were some 2048x1536 on the very high end (like 8k is today), with the "common" highest resolution being 1600x1200
It's a son of a pitch!
Same thing happened on the CoCo 3 realm. Tandy offered the CM-8 monitor which was RGB Analog to match the hi-res output of the CoCo 3. Problem is the 0.52 dot pitch of the CM-8: horrible for the hi-res text at 80x24 and more so at graphics 640x192. Magnavox had the BEST option for many CoCo enthusiasts with the 8CM515, a 0.42 dot pitch monitor that not only could take RGBA but also RGB digital an do base-band video, even had a switch to turn the composite video in to all green - on the 1989 catalog the CM-8 was $100.00 more expensive than the CoCo 3, itself going for $199.95; buying with third parties you could get the Magnavox for around $260.00
The Magnavox Color Monitor 80 is the same thing as the Commodore 1084. They were both made by Philips.
If the monitor doesn't have external controls for it, maybe it has internal adjustments but I would have thought you might be able to improve image quality at least a little by adjusting the vertical and horizontal size to reduce the size of those borders and that would allow more "dots" per pixel. Might only be a slight improvement but would be interesting to see.
yeah expanding the image would make it clearer, but you would lose some detail to overscan
Sloppy advertising and marketing certainly didn't help Tandy (eg airing a TV ad where pincushion distortion is very evident, offering demos of it in stores etc).
Interesting that this uses the slot mask style shadow mask (instead of the dot mask pattern much more common in later VGA monitors). I know that slot mask was the norm in TVs by this point, but it could be a contributing factor to the horrible dot pitch on this monitor. Heck, the CRT used in this could have been shared with 13" Samsung TVs to help bring down the cost.
My thought exactly. That resolution / dot pitch would perform reasonably for television viewing. And CGA was done at TV frequencies too.
484 x 425...
Well, going back to TV frequencies and CGA for a moment, when 484 is divided by 160, it is 3.025. Basically, three color groupings per pixel. When CGA was run in artifact color mode over composite video, the effective horizontal resolution is 160 pixels.
The Tandy 16 color CGA capability was 160 pixels too.
TV signals, when the colorburst is run in full alternating phase, alternating line mode, one gets 320 pixels of color, all lined up nicely with the NTSC color burst.
That CRT, with the horizontal size lined up just right, would deliver a bright and clear TV image. In computer graphics, it is good to about 320 pixels before subtle mismatches between the graphics pixels and the phosphor pattern on the CRT glass.
Above that, and pixels look different depending on where they are lined up, and the one exception would be to run a non standard resolution to line it all up one for one.
I would totally put money down on those CRT tubes were for consumer TV use, and were just overdriven for VGA.
One other interesting bit might be worth a mention here: next comment due to me being on mobile...
I see this dot pitch on some TV / VCR combos.
VHS divides the color signal by two when recording. Commercial units did not do that, and that is why purchased pre recorded movies looked better. The players could play a full color signal, but not record it.
Home recordings were basically 160 pixels of color interlaced, and that tube matches VHS play back of home recordings. It would actually make them look a little sharper due to the tube size and the nice match up of the "pixels" coming off the tape nicely quantizing everything which implies some resolution that is not there otherwise.
I have one and it looks great when used with TV type graphics signals. An Apple 2, or Atari, VHS VCR, MSDOS as the video mentions, all will be just fine.
Last nerdery from me on this, and it is all about brightness. Low dot pitch CRT tubes can deliver a brighter picture, in general.
They got used in arcade cabinets and that is what I plan on doing with mine. The tube is a great match for early games I like, and mine is super low hour. Basically was new in box, opened and used a few times and that's it.
Should be perfect for a cabinet able to deliver the bright images typical for the time.
@@DougDingus Fascinating about consumer VHS VCR's only able to record half the resolution of the color signal. It makes a bit of sense, as I do remember pre recorded studio movies always looked better than any recording you could do yourself on the same VCR you played that movie on, even if you had a clean source. I always thought it was more to do with the pre recorded content coming from a a high resolution professional equipment with 1st gen copy being played with a better signal to noise ratio onto the VHS tape.
However, maybe the other aspect was the color information was full bandwidth being recorded to the tape as well. Color burst information was about 1.5 MHz across. But VHS played tricks and took the color information and recorded it below the video bandwidth in the 630kHz range. I believe this was done to to account for variations in head speed and tape speed that was not always stable, something like a 0.1% difference in speed could shift a single color scan line from red to magenta. By shifting the color burst information to a lower frequency the variation in speed has less effect on the phase it would seem. They also did a phase averaging of the color information that was split between two fields doing what seems similar to how PAL dealt with color phase issues but with half the 1.5Mhz signal in one field and the other half (750KHz bandwidth) in the next field. Then recombining the two halves when everything was upconverted back to what the TV would recognize as a standard color subcarrier. Maybe when you recorded on the consumer VCR they only recorded 750KHz of the full 1.5Mhz of the color subcarrier onto the tape using simplified circuity, whereas the professional VHS machines would have the extra circuity to deal with splitting the 1.5MHz color subcarrier between the two fields. It must have taken a much more precise filtering network if they wanted to record the full color bandwidth.
Professional U-matic tape machines recorded composite video with the color subcarrier left where it was originally generated at 3.58MHz (NTSC), however the U-matic 3/4" VTR had much more precise tape and head speed control and thus could keep the color from shifting hue. So they didn't have to play the game of shifting the color subcarrier below the luminance video information like they did on VHS. Of course this was back in the early 70's, so maybe filtering technology they would have needed was not up to par then in a tape machine within reason. So they just made the head drum speed and tape travel speed much more precise.
As people mentioned here, the problem is, this tube is not PC-monitor grade tube, it’s basically a tube from small color 14-inch TV from that time. Basically, if You hooked up your PC to a 14 inch cosumer TV via RGB connection, the result would be the same.
yep 😉
Oh man that king's quest brought back memories. Back when i was much younger getting my GED & other schooling, my boss and i worked part time out of a local radio shack, and when we weren't doing work i got to play the game in the office. Later got it for my own home pc as well. Fun times.
My first PC was a slightly used Laser 386sx with an equally crappy 0.52 dot pitch monitor. It was as bad if not worse than that Tandy monitor. It was so bad that I figured it had to have a problem with the focus so I pulled the back and adjusted it. It didn't help at all. I lucked out and got a nice Mitsubishi VGA monitor that was being scrapped at work because it had some case damage. The difference was like night and day. Monitors and PCs were so expensive back then, especially when adjusted for inflation that a lot of people ended up with sub par equipment because of these cost cutting tactics. I had a double whammy because in addition to the terrible monitor I had the sx processor. Good times.
I recall when the secretary/receptionist at work got allocated a 17" Sony Trinitron monitor to use. Everyone else in the department was so jealous. You are right about prices. It cost about £700 back when I was taking home about £1000 a month.
The convergence being off definitely isnt helping it either which you can see easily on your close up while booting
I have the VGM 220 that I had since new. I was an employee of RS in central Illinois 1990 - 1995. We had a 4825 and a VGM 220 that was ordered and never picked up. it sat for a year and I bought it for a pittance. I still have both. The big disadvantage of the VGM 220 over the 225 was no stand. So the same crappy picture at the wrong angle. Eventually I upgraded to the VGM-300, which I also still have.
90s malls were amazing
@@babagandu working at RS in the mall paid for my college and beer money
@@Birdman_in_CLE Unfortunately, this can't be done today for collage age kids. They end up with a house size mortgage bill by the time it's all said and done.. I did similar, worked for cable company in their community access department. Took classes while working part time, the job pretty much paid for everything while going to school and I still had extra money left over for my Amiga upgrades.
@@marcusdamberger I know that all to well. I see the "kids" at work with huge debt. When I talk with them about it and compare costs for college back in the early 90s and today it is amazing, even adjusted for inflation. I could get by on 30 hours a week at $6.00 an hour. Pay rent, utilities, tuition, food and even have a few beers. That was about the last time that was possible.
Kudos to you for the clip at 4:56 from The Brokenhearts Club!
Tube looks like a slot mask. Appears they cut costs by just plopping a low end TV grade CRT into that and called it a computer monitor? lol
I wonder what model of TV that tube could be found in. I'm sure they reused existing stock or something.
i sympathize since i had had a similar experience, before the advent of newer PCs, with a schneider euro-at model 40 and its color vga crap it came with around 1990... talking about eye-strain and headaches!
Sadly I was rather too young to experience these computers, but find the story of their metoeric rise and fall interesting as we share a name haha!
thanks for the cool vids man:)
Phosphor dots are NOT pixels!!! Technology connections did a whole set of super long videos about this.
The key here is that phosphor dots need not be uniformly lit. Pixels are always uniform. A coarse dot pitch does give that "looking through a screen door" effect, but the "holes" are not a single solid color like a pixel would be.
Yes, coarse dot pitch sucks, but it's not the same as downscaling the image to a lower pixel resolution.
Omg what a blast from the past. This computer and monitor was my first computer. Which I got for Christmas, 1991. The ram was eventually upgraded. My parents were going to put a hard drive in it and eventually did but for some reason they had to remove it. I forgot what the reason was.
This display is a migraine maker. Even during this video, I found my eyes constantly attempting to refocus the image due to the blur. I usually watch RUclips in full screen, but I found myself much more comfortable outside of full screen on scenes where the image on this display took up the full frame. The experience is a bit like using one of those VGA to composite TV adapters and sitting too close to the TV.
CRTs don't have physical pixels, they only exist in the source's frame buffer before being converted to an analog video signal.
The electron guns paint rows of pixels from left to right and top to bottom.
The image on a CRT is an analog representation of the digital frame buffer.
Dot pitch only affects a CRT's color resolution, not the vertical raster resolution which is an effect of beam spot size, focus, and horizontal scan rate.
This is why monochrome CRTs are much sharper than color CRTs when running at the same raster resolution.
Also 484x425 is the maximum resolvable resolution, meaning that only 484 pixels per scanline, and 425 scanlines, can be displayed without overlapping (or sharing phosphors).
640x480 is still being displayed regardless of the CRT's coarse dot pitch and low TVL count, it just looks blurry due to the overlapping pixels and scanlines.
My god, what a fantastic video, I came here to see someone complain about a monitor and truly learned much more about how pixels on an old crt were affected in so many ways.
Would've been a little better if they could've made the border less wide, but if it was already having issues with stable geometry when it was new, maybe they couldn't enlarge the viewable area any further without it becoming very noticeably distorted.
What people seem to forget is that CRTs are not equal size, so stretching an image would result in a horrid uneven picture. It’s called a thumb rule. This ensures a perfect circle on the screen at all times
@@The_Studioworkshop aspect ratio wasn't what I meant though, and 640x480 is already 4:3 anyway so it'll be able to go to the edges on all sides of a 4:3 monitor while still having "square" pixels. But in this case it's not anywhere close to the edge on any side, and plenty of monitors existed where the image could go to the edge and beyond and still maintain an undistorted image.
@@Aeduo Usually monitors have an adjustment for size, center and pincushion, but I guess this one is too cheap to have those adjustments on the outside and you have to take it apart to access them.
I never used a Tandy even though they were on display for a very short time at our local store. Computers around here were still very much a luxury item that few people could afford, kind of like cellular telephones of the era. I was fortunate enough to have a computer, but it was dirt old by the 1990s. By then, we got another one but even that one was pretty expensive.
This video felt like a nice day with a grandpa just telling you about his interests. You have a nice way of taking that made this video relaxing somehow. Good video.
Wow, that's sketchy. Maybe Tandy thought they could get away with that due to 'Kell factor' (as low as .7 on an interlaced CRT). Taking that idea strictly, the 640x480 VGA resolution would be degraded to 448x336, a perfect match for that crappy dot pitch!
I grew up playing with my grandmother’s Tandy. Of course, I didn’t know what I was doing as I was a kid. I remember printing random things, like clip art of money. I can still hear the loud screech that the dot matrix printer made as the print head made passes across the continuous printer paper.
Monkey Island wasn't a Sierra game. It was a LucasArts game. #SmallNitpick #TandyFan
Dot pitch can't be converted into DPI as simply as you showed in this video, unfortunately. Multiple "pixels" can actually be shown in a single dot - each phosphor dot is not necessarily illuminated evenly. But it definitely still looks like poo on a color monitor when the video resolution exceeds the dot pitch.
Ah yes, my favourite sierra game: secret of monkey island by lucas arts
I appreciate your use of metric
It just made sense to keep it consistent with the dot pitch being measured in mm.
This channel is really Time Travel for technology I don't ever ever ever want to see again. I was so glad when LCD flat screens replaced the CRT in monitors and TVs. Let's give praise and three cheers to the engineers and scientists that saved us from the CRT. Now I can barely tolerate 1024 x 768. All my screens are higher resolution. I don't want to see dots or pixels. Put that monitor in your museum and never use it again except for "Show & Tell". See kids, this is what you don't have to use. 🤣
High quality CRTs still have their uses, but generally I can agree. I once owned a rather cheap 15" CRT that, for some reason, supported 1280 x 1024 but the dot pitch was so bad that anything below about 14 pt font, any font, was completely unreadable.
@@AliceC993 my first computer came with a similar 17" or 18" one, I did run it at 1280x1024 once the Family Computer was newer and it moved to my room. I don’t recall how fuzzy it was but I was like 9 years old and didn’t know much better! Well, I did struggle to read 12pt and had to use Word in 14 or 16. So I guess it WAS bad.
Lets praise the early adopters who spent £500+ on a 15" LCD and then put up with dead pixels which the manufacturers claimed were normal. I came close to paying £650 for a 15" LCD monitor but ended up buying a 17" IBM CRT monitor for £130 new that had a completely flat screen and the most perfect picture I ever saw on a CRT.
@@MrDuncl Yep the late CRT PC monitors of the early 2000s were excellent and I think were in many cases superior t the LCD screens of the same time. Deep blacks and good brightness were not there in LCDs of the time. CRT had both.
super clear 640x480 display
different times lol
I've been working in front of screens all my adult life, and I really wish lcd screens had been invented before I ruined my eyes staring at low quality CRTs.
early lcds werent that much better, such as STN type, i have several old laptops with STN panels
Amber on black 72Hz is the professional choice since 1981. I even like the 350p scanlines
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt i have 3 old laptops with monochrome plasma panels, they're orange on black ..
@@andygozzo72 Oh I did not know that plasma could do pixels small enough. I only knew SD TV 43"
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt these were single colour orange 'monochrome' 640x480, to get colour of equivalent resolution you'd need 3 times the number of pixels
Did you just call monkey island a sierra game? Wuut
Spoiler: Its not a guy with money...
Yup... that's from the first episode of "Some of My Best Friends", a TV sitcom that lasted for one season in 2001.
It is very interesting that we only have the technology now to demonstrate the graininess problem, or more importantly bust old Samsung. They went on to better days thankfully.
Guy With Money?!?! Of course..., and after all this time I thought it was Giant Worm Merkin....
When I first got my Tandy 1000SL I have the Colour Monitor (CGA).. I thought it was faulty due to the amoire.. any time of dots in a checker would make it.
Turns it wasnt a fault but a FEATURE!... great computer.. shocking monitors!
You probably had the CM-5 monitor, with a 0.63 mm dot pitch. The more expensive CM-11 monitor has a much better 0.42 mm dot pitch.
Even with top of the line monitors we still had the moiré pattern on Navy ships due to the degaussing system that was used to demagnetize the hull. Eventually they came out with shielded monitors to overcome this phenomena.
_(LucasArts name shows up on screen)_
"Here's a newer Sierra game..."
@4:20 - So it's a good security monitor then?
"Radio Shack" traded as "Tandy" here in the UK, so all their shops were called "Tandy". A lot of the products they sold were just cheap tat, but they did sell some rather decent "Realistic" CB radios and walkie talkies.
yep, but i loved a lot of their stuff, i had most of the 'xxx-in-one' kits over the years , they were better around 1998ish, i have a catalogue from then when known as 'tandy unlimited' and they stated if they didnt list it, they'd try to get it in ...that was the only place that had the memory chip for a tv i was trying to repair for someone...
Realistic products were on par with name brands found at larger stores.
You sir, are 100% correct. I started a small computer business in 94. I had a customer bring in a similar Tandy monitor. I was slightly unfamiliar with dot pitch numbers but could clearly see an obvious difference in quality. I showed the customer using a different monitor and was able to differentiate the the two. That was my introduction into the dot pitch difference. Thanks for the video.
10:25 - "FOR SALE"
I had this very Tandy and this very monitor and I have to say I *don't* remember it being this bad. Granted, I hadn't seen anything *better* so maybe it was just blissful ignorance. But I also know CRTs go soft over time. Any chance, being an old, old monitor, that this is significantly worse now than it was when it was new?
There were all sorts of things that I miss about old PCs, especially the comfy UI design, but CRTs are not one of them. The refresh rate might be slower on a modern flat screen, but I'll take one any day over the bulk and testiness of a tube monitor.
The resolution of the monitor could be higher than the dot pitch - the dot’s are pixels, they’re just a spot for the electron beam to land on. On this display / chassis, the beam itself seems to have poor focus. It’s possible to only light up part of a phosphor triad.
But the CGA style dot pitch is a cheap out for sure. I had an early PS/2 monitor that had this same bad dot pitch. It had good color too.
Yes, it is possible for the electron gun to only illuminate part of each RGB triad on the CRT, but then you won't get the intended color, so I don't count that. And color CRTs had picture elements (a.k.a. pels or pixels) decades before computer graphics co-opted that term for their own purposes. Just like how the meaning of "default" got corrupted once computers co-opted that term to mean something different.
Although that really is a low dot pitch for a monitor it also seems to be way out of focus, probably done intentionally as an attempt to make it less noticeable and that's the real reason why it is so blurry and unreadable. I remember being able to read text at 640x480 on my tv screen using s-video but not on composite, i'm sure my old TV's dot pitch was lower than of that monitor and VGA is a better signal.
I have a very distinct memory of the worst VGA monitor I've ever seen very clearly (or blurry? lol), it was a Packard bell with the speakers attached to the side. Dot pitch was .33 and it was painful to look at. I can't imagine suffering through.52!!
My favorite monitor ever was my 19" Hitachi CM771 "flat" CRT and it had a vertical dot pitch of .14!!
CRT monitors were reaching there peak just when everyone decided they wanted an LCD complete with super slow refresh rate and dead pixels.
30 years! Better late than never.😁
Another great video but that monitor is awful.
I'm inclined to agree with you about it being Radio Shacks downfall.
Thank you for featuring and linking commercials that I archived! Also love your channel.
3:32 You’re forgetting that this only applies to horizontal samples; the electron beam still turns on and off, and any parts of the phosphor not struck by the beam won’t light up. So it’s more like looking at a high resolution black and white image through a frosted stained-glass window.
I have one or two around here somewhere.Have not pull the set apart to check the CRT part number but they probably used a regular TV CRT in the set.
Same like those Commodore 1700 series monitors.Just a regular TV monitor .Been using them as VCR monitors for years...
The fact that Tandy were in the game from the beginning and got out when they did shows how quickly commoditization and ever-narrowing profit margins, combined with the high-speed pace of technological development eventually made the industry as cut-throat as Calculators and Digital Watches were 1-2 decades earlier. Electronics has always been treacherous that way, at least in the micro-circuit era.
11:17 Did you just call Monkey Island a Sierra game?!
11:15 Secret of Monkey Island a Sierra game?! What bizarro world are you living in?
Lucasfilm... Sierra.. same thing!
When I had a VGA in the 90s, I could adjust the image, to minimise the black borders on the edge of the screen, I think you would get a slightly better view that way. My monitor had dials for width and position. and height and position.
I had a video card, later, where the timings of the signal to the monitor could be well fine tuned, and I made a custom resolution of something like 1024 x 512 for watching video, I had a dvd drive. I squeezed down the image so the black bar space in the image was not processed, so all the compute in the system was used for the part of the monitor that had an illuminated image on it. Then switched the resolution back to 800 x 600 for normal windows programs and expanded the vertical back to normal.
Monitors sure have come along way since those CRTs.
OMG, the moment I saw 0.52mm dot pitch I KNEW the picture would be complete garbage.
I owned the Tandy Sensation! and I believe it came with this monitor. Not the sharpest but man the colors blew what I had previously experienced with my Commodore SX-64.
Actually mine came with the VGM-340 monitor which I can tell you for a fact it wasn't any better than this one.
Also, I do remember my parents purchasing this for me after my birthday which fell on Christmas so I did get the full machine (mouse was separate) including the monitor during their Christmas special.
@@TheGodoychannel The VGM-340 was a Super VGA monitor with a 0.39 mm dot pitch. As I showed in the video, that is the minimum for truly being able to display a 640x480 VGA image.
@@vwestlife Ah I stand corrected I guess it was better. Man your video brings back awesome memories of my Tandy Sensation. Thanks!!
Nice video, i din't though that Tandy would make bad CRTs at all, Also, The Secret of Monkey Island isn't a Sierra game, its a LucasArts one. Still nice video.
Note: Monkey Island is NOT a Sierra game .... it's a SCUMM game!
In particular it is a Lucasfilm Games game.
Heavily inspired by Sierra games, though.
@@vwestlife and makes jokes with Sierra (see: Rubber tree)
Even on the tiny thumbnail that monitor's quality looks bad.
A .52 pitch? TWICE what was needed for SVGA?
It probably looked worse in person than an Apple II 320x200 screen.
That's a CRT used in Samsung TVs. For TV that's enough. The NTSC video signal doesn't do more than 350 distinguishable vertical lines of analog video.
And 525 horizontal ntsc scan lines had 480 usable ones and with over scan there you have the 425.
And don't forget - VGA is NTSC with twice the scan line frequently, making it 59.96p without interlace.
The Secret of Monkey Island was a Lucas Arts game. Not Sierra.
Wow, this video answered so many questions I had when I was a child.
Love this video. I think you conveyed the feeling of anyone who has ever owned one. In the ‘90s, I had a 2500 RSX with this monitor, and it was horrid. My 1000 RLX now has the VGM-220, and it’s good one thing: eye strain. I keep it because it fits the part and says Tandy on it.
we had a 286 with 1Mb, 40Mb and VGA when I was a kid. It costed $1500 instead of $999 , I am very glad my parents made that chocie because our VGA monitor was actually good and could do 800x640 so 640x480 was no problem.
But we didn't have a sound card, I had to buy that myself a year later , and that was a whopping $250 extra (A Sound Blaster Pro clone I think)
0.52mm dot pitch? RIDICULOUS, even for the era. One should not be able to count every screen pixel from an arm's length.
GWM does **not** mean "guy with money." LOL
Similar to the monitor which came with my Packard Bell Multimedia Executive? (PB640, P1, originally 133MHz (I upgraded it). Added that in case anyone wants to look up those machines). 1024x768 but only at 43Hz interlaced.
That display was awful from new! Eye-strain central, trying to read stuff on it.
The newsagents round the corner had an identical monitor & that one looked even worse than mine.
ETA: Don't know what the dot pitch was but it would undoubtedly have been rather coarse, like yours.
I have a 14 inch CVM-54X video surveillance monitor, by Samsung, which was never intended to take anything other than composite/s-video
Turns out the dot pitch is exactly the same, but for 480i or 240p, it's enough.
I do not rule out they were literally recycling tubes from video monitors/consumer TV sets.
POINT FIVE TWO!! WTF?? Ah. Right. Early 90s Samsung, before they started making quality tvs/monitors.
11:16 You call "The Secret of Monkey Island" a "newer Sierra game" despite it not being a sierra game at all. It was made by LucasFilm Games.
That is by far NOT the worst ever made. Screens on Laptops of the day had even worse quality resolution. Trying to play DOS games on those felt like not much of a leap from the 8Bit Home Computers of the day. Come to think of it; There was a company that for a very limited period made a VGA 'Adaptor' and VGA screen for the ZX Spectrum computer and Dragon32. It would be interesting to see how that monitor compares to this Tandy here.
This video needs a Canada's worst driver style intro
I've enjoyed playing around with Tandy mode on DosBox so much if I had the space for it I'd get a actual Tandy
11:15
[Shows Monkey Island]
Narrator: „Here is another SIERRA game[…]“
Me: Oh that’s unfortunate, it was such a nice video until now. *Searches Pitchfork*
HERETIC!
484x425 is awful. I know. I worked at a Radio Shack Computer Center at this time. Oddly, no one ever complained! They were probably just thrilled to have color graphics at all. As I recall from personal experience, it was often the first computer a family ever got; so, they just didn't have a basis for comparison. I sold a boatload of those Sierra adventures, like Kings Quest and Space Quest. All good wishes.
Playing Test Drive on the Tandy 1000 with the horrible graphics displayed on the monitor and the Tandy sound was not a great experience.
It was still much better than the TRS80 and a black and white television with a book of BASIC games to manually type in to play. ... I had the cassette player and cassettes to save games but at 6 years old it was easier to program than to figure out the cassette. The first cartridge game was magical to me.
Well to be frank I’d rather buy something made in Japan because you know the quality will be good. Correct? More accurate than Tandy’s advertising. I remember Radio Shack for their tape recorders and patch cords.
Some things never change i hooked my laptop to my 8 yr old samsung hdtv. Color is meh and text is fugly. TV is great though so maybe my computer and or windows aren't playing nice?
I love that you counted the maximum resolve-able resolution out.. but I wish you would've maximized the raster usage of the tube before you did it.
I think if you corrected the bad default hsize/vsize the resolution it could resolve would be quite a bit higher.
The VGM-200 was our first VGA monitor (still have it), my dad got it when he traded his 1000RL in and upgraded to a 2500XL. We loved it. I had a 1000SL/2 and a CGA monitor in my room and when I’d go to his office and look at his setup the difference was amazing…I felt like the image was painted on the screen it looked so good. I’ve hooked that monitor and 2500XL back up in the past year and can clearly see that the image is not “painted on”. I vividly remember being so amazed by how it looked when I was a kid, crazy how things change.