Electronics Design on Humongous Monitors

Before you do that I suggest to familiarize yourself with the MTBF of its bulbs and the replacement costs for bulbs. That's give you goose pimples ;-)

Seriously, we had to replace one of those bulbs at church after just a few hundred hours and it cost a whopping $500.

And where do you place your sketches and stuff like that? Nah, a 21" is big enough IMHO. And I am using a Trinitron CRT which I find to be much better than LCD, at least for now. But with that statement I might have stirred one of the s.e.d. hornet nests...

Might give you neck muscle pain. Flexoral helps but makes drowsy and you need to see a doc for a prescription for that :-)

I use side-by-side 19" ViewSonic VA-912's, left for schematic, right for simulation results.

...Jim Thompson

I keep burning out cheap CRT monitors after 1 year.. And I think the warranty on those were only 1 year too.. So on the last CRT burn out... I switched to LCD without trying to fix the CRT monitor myself.. D from BC

When I had a dual CRT setup it was great.. Till one of my monitors failed... It was like missing an eyeball.. Got dual LCD now...tempted to go for tri-monitor set up.

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Sweet, is that hard to control once you have the two displays operating? Is there special software needed for that or will WinDoze XP do the job. I have a EVGA 7800 Video card with two DVI connectors. Thanks, Harry

How do you do that? My NEC XE21 was ~14 years old when I retired it in favor of the two ViewSonics... it was losing contrast, but was still not in too bad a condition.

...Jim Thompson

Make that four:

Like Jim I also use two monitors in the office, CAD on one and module spec on the other but each has its own PC :-)

Sometimes I am tempted to drag the lab PC in here so I have three, the third for holding open the Mouser or Digikey site for picking parts during the design. But that would start to clutter the desk.

I never had a problem. Ok, the Panasonic before this one gave me the occasional fright by letting off an evil flyback transformer hiss but it kept plugging along. And the hisses weren't accompanied by the ozon stench that TV sets let off before they croak. This Dell here is fantastic, many years old but top performance. My very first real monitor (NEC) lasted over 10 years, almost non-stop. Then its CRT slowly began to fade and Dell took it in for the funeral (recycling program). Guess the cathodes were getting tired. I definitely got my money's worth out of all of them.

XP has multimonitor support. I'm using the analog output for one monitor and digital output for the other. It's an X800 ATI graphics card. You should do better with the two DVI outputs. D from BC

I have two very used IBM P260 (Trinitron) I do not know how I got along with only one before. Like D from BC said, it's like having one eye.

I don't know. Can you? ;-)

Your question made me think of a 54" (or whatever) flat HDTV - anybody working on drivers for those? ;-) speaking of which, a quick google shows me:

I don't know why a TV screen can't be just close as my monitor. :-) ("Don't sit wo close to the TV! You'll ruin your eyes!" - Mom) ;-)

I don't know about XP, but in W2K they both just show up.

In Linux, you have to do a little bit of setup, but it works pretty much the same.

Have Fun! Rich

I bought a refurbished 19" NEC CRT and keep it on a desk.. Never covered the monitor (no top shelf or inside cabinet)...so it got air.. Screen blacked out within one year.. Suspected power supply problem. I returned a Viewsonic 17" that was failing within the warranty time. The replacement worked for about 3 years. Maybe I tortured it with wrong refresh rate? Or it's just bad luck... D from BC

I tried two CRT monitors (of different sizes) for a while. Didn't like it very much. A few years ago, switched to two high-res Philips 20.1" LCD monitors. It's not bad at all, but I think the 1200 pixels I have is about the minimum native resolution to deal nicely with PDFs. A couple of 23" Apple M9178LL/A would be a bit bigger, and more pixels horizontally (widescreen), but the same resolution vertically as I have now, for about $2K US total (3840 x 1200 total display resolution). Since there are two, one might assume that the reliability will be less and the two will probably have to be replaced as a pair at some time in the future. Probably the 30" style would be too big physically for the optimium working distance (54-1/2" wide including housings compared to my present ~40"), but it might be fun to try it. Certainly the 2560 x 1600 (5120 x 1600 total display) resolution would be to die for, at around $4K US total. I sub for even more monitors by having a little HP LaserJet within arm's reach to print out a page or two of data sheets etc. Hmm... do later version of Acrobat reader have tabs? It would be nice to have several windows open into one or more documents just as I do with code.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

It may have been a small electrolytic used to filter the rectified signal from the flyback The filament voltage drops a little when the cap opens, and produces a dim picture.

Resolution is 2660x1600. I actually exposed a latent bug in my PCB CAD program, looks no-one had ever used it at that resolution before!

Keep thinking I need another one next to it though...

No, you just drag a window from the main monitor to the other.

IIUC it's in the drivers installed for the video card.

Right now I have the left monitor as analog, the right monitor is digital.... because I have the left monitor on a KVM.

When I see a digital KVM that suits me I'll have both as digital.

...Jim Thompson

The main reason for big hires monitors would be to simultaneously have many documents and files immediately available.

A 4 x 6 foot monitor at 1000 DPI would not be excessive for serious design work.

Its the resolution, not the size. A bigger monitor will allow you to sit farther from the screen, but beyond a comfortable viewing distance, its how many pixels wide the screen is. If you stretch a detailed drawing out across a large but mediocre resolution screen (a 40 inch LCD TV for example with something like 1200 x 800 pixels), it will still look like crap. Just bigger crap.

Projectors and large flat panel displays with higher resolution than what the market supplies for TV sets get expensive fast.

I have three PC's here at my feet all on a KVM, two desktops and my laptop, but only the left monitor is switchable between the three. The right monitor stays with the PSpice machine simulation output.

I switch to the left machine for e-mail, SED, browsing, etc., while waiting for simulations to complete.

Unlike the usual featureless PSpice, mine automates many repetitious required user inputs and then sounds-off when the display is ready for viewing ;-)

...Jim Thompson