Opinion on a certain CRT VGA monitor.

[JBueno MD]

Hello fellow shmupers! I come to you to beg for your help and technical expertise. You see, I just found that locally someone listed two 21 inch Sun GDM5410 CRT professional design monitors for sale at about $35 a piece, and wanted to know if anyone has used those for gaming and what your opinions are about this model or SUN monitors in general.

More info about said monitor here: http://www.computerdisplays.co.uk/21%20 ... %20gdm.htm

For reference, I would be using it mostly for Xbox 360, maybe a bit MAME and when I get proper cables eventually Dreamcast STGs. I am currently gaming on a IBM CRT E74 17 inch monitor from around 2002 which I received for free a few months ago, and it has served me perfectly so far but I wouldn´t hesitate to change it if the monitor in question does look better, which I expect it to.

Here are some crappy cellphone pics of my current monitor running the Xbox Espgaluda II port, set to 640x480 via official MS VGA cables, with no intermediate video processor.




I would greatly appreciate any advice and feedback from you fine gentlemen. Any suggestions on how to improve the setup are welcome as well.

[njiska]

I haven't used them for gaming, but in general Sun monitors are very high quality. I've used a couple over the years as regular PC monitors and one as a Video Editing Monitor. They all preformed masterfully. Do you know if these models are VGA or Sun cabled?

[JBueno MD]

I haven't used them for gaming, but in general Sun monitors are very high quality. I've used a couple over the years as regular PC monitors and one as a Video Editing Monitor. They all preformed masterfully. Do you know if these models are VGA or Sun cabled?

Apparently, it comes with a SUN to VGA cable, so I could connect the 360 VGA cable to it via a mini gender changer as I am right now. Thanks for the quick feedback!

[gray117]

Should work fine - no worries. The build quality should ensure they've retained very decent geometry/convergence. As mentioned their colour reproduction is likely to be the real winner.

As with many trinitrons you can probably see the 2 horizontal wires; it'd be interesting to note whether these are simply always visible at all resolutions and/or whether they managed to reduce the visibility of these .

Standard def tvs don't typically show up these wires due to the vagaries of low resolutions and pixel/scanline glow.

The wires are the only thing you could possibly criticise any pro high def trintron for... and to be honest when I said 'clearly' that's when I'm thinking about staring at photoshop etc... maybe if the contrast/brightness is turned up a bit you'd never notice them even if you could just make them out - you'll probably still be getting better color reproduction than many other monitors...

... Do feedback - I'm only going from memory and I'm kind of curious how these sun monitors in particular look...

[JBueno MD]

Thanks for the insight gray117. I don't think visible wires would really bother me that much, if at all. I am mostly looking into this monitor for its supposed great color accuracy and size, since it would be a good upgrade to what I already have.

By the way I've received word from the seller, it seems he only has one left, and he mentions that this one has seen more use than the one he sold, and while colors still look great it would benefit from a calibration, which I have no idea how to do. At least the man is being honest.

I think I am going to go ahead with the purchase, but I still need to see it in person. Expect some pics in the following days if I go through with this.

[njiska]

For the price you can't go wrong. Just so long as it has the SUN to VGA adapter as those are a bit of a bitch to come by these days.