On Wed, 2005-05-11 at 07:55 +0200, als at thangorodrim.de wrote: To be fair, it's seriously quick on large images with multiple bit depths though (say, digital camera sorts of resolutions and above). It's probably efficient on memory usage for those types of images, although I've never checked... We used to regularly chuck 10k x 10k pixel images at it and apply various transforms, and it was *way* quicker than anything else we could find on the market (free or otherwise) at the time. Hopefully one day they'll modify the code so that images with 8bpp or less are handled more efficiently for certain operations (probably controlled via a command-line flag) Each to their own :) Usually I'll just use my favourite thumbnail viewer to browse / read - I just find it handy to be able to quickly deal with individual pages rather than something encapsulated in another file I suppose. Plus of course I use Linux on the desktop and all the Linux PDF viewers are crap :-) cheers Jules

Tony> Not having got a GIGI (hint :-)), I've not tried anything, but Tony> I would be suprised if it worked with either of the first two Tony> -- I would guess the GIGI uses US TV scan frequencies. Correct. It was designed for the DEC VR241, the same color monitor that the Pro series uses. Those have RGB inputs, sync on green, US TV scan parameters (timing and line count). paul

I wondered about that, but I thought it was such an obvious choice that Witchy would have mentioned it if it was a recomended monitor. From what I remmeber there's a switch on the back to select between sync-on-green and separate (composite) sync. The VR241 is, of couree, a Hitachi chassis. A rather unpleasant design, actually. The PSU is driven by the horizotal oscillator, via a winding on the flyback IIRC. Of course the PSU powers the horizontal section. To get it started, there's an astable on the mains side of the PSU that's disabled after a short time, by which point the horizontal side should have got going. So for the PSU to work, the horizontal section -- the most unreliable part of any monitor -- has to be working too. Debugging it is a right pain -- I found that the hard way. Oh, and the deflection driving IC, vertical output stage, etc are part of a thick film hybrid module on the scan PCB. Oh well... -tony

At 08:15 AM 5/12/05 +0100, you wrote: matching color monitor at the time. I had a GiGi a few years back. I ran it on a VR241 and it worked well. The same VR241 served me well on my Amiga and various other home computers for a couple of years before it finally died. It may even still be here somewhere, by the time it died I'd picked up various other monitors so I never attempted to get it running again.

[VR241] Well, put it this way... It's my least favourite monitor to work on of all the ones I have worked on. I susepct I'd like the 110V version of the original TRS-80 monitor even less (it has a live chassis.....) but fortunately i've only ever had to work on the 230V version which has a step-down isolating transforme in it. -tony

I have no problem at all with the VR201. It's a pretty standard and simple design. Actually, it's very common. Many mono monitors do the same thing. OK, the mains PSU may be intenral, but it's common for said PSU to give out one voltage at around 12V, to use that directly to run the CRT heater and some of the low-level circuitry, and to get the other voltages from the flyback, which in turn is powered by the 12V supply. The IBM 5151 does this, so does a little Zenith MDA monitor I have (but that has the craziest PSU I've ever seen [1]). The IBM PortablePC has a 12V-powered monitor. KME (Kent Modular Electronics) made a mono monitor that ran off 48V. It was used, with slight differences on the PERQ 2T1, where it ran off the 55V output from the main PSU via a linear regulator, and on the Whitechapel MG1, where it ran from the 24V PSU output via a step-up switching regulator (no, I am serious, and that 24V output was used for nothing else....) [1] A free-running chopper driving a transformer producing about 18V. This is half-wave rectified and brought down to 12V with a linear regulator. This combines the reliability of a switcher with the efficiency of a linear ;-) When mine blew up spectacularly (shorted turns on the chopper transformer, took out most of the primary side components), I replaced the whole mess with a normal mains transformer. It was actually smaller..... Oh yes, that linear regulator takes its referencee not from a zener or an IC regulator, but from the green power-on LED... -tony