Lazy web request:
I bought myself a 19″ widescreen monitor Tuesday night after a medium amount of research. I was fairly certain that my 12″ PowerBook could handle it with its DVI output, but I had some concerns about the couple year old PC.
Turns out the PC worked out far better than expected. I get a great widescreen effect and legible at 1280×768. Something like this was my aim.
But it isn’t working well on the laptop. It might work ok with non-mirroring but that stuff is odd and would take me a while to get used to it if I even wanted to. I only wanted simply to use the monitor as a main monitor for the laptop on occasion.
The best pictures I get are at 1344×840 and at 1440×900 (which is the native resolution of the monitor). But neither fills the monitor. See the photos at those links.
The PC is feeding a regular RGB input and the PowerBook is using the DVI input. Switching between them is a bear right now, but things could be improved, or a different monitor could make it easier. The controls on this monitor—to put it simply—suck. But it is cheap and looks ok, I think. It looks a little less sharp with the PC than the CRT did, but I have working room. With the Mac, it looks better, if only I could get it to fill the screen (and at a correct perspective).
I kept reading how much more productive larger and/or widescreen monitors make one, and this 12″ screen on what is my primary computer is certainly not productive.
Maybe I’m being stupid about something, maybe it’s working like it should and I’m just clueless, maybe I need a new driver [but I tried researching that for the Mac and didn't get very far], maybe ….
And when using the DVI input there is no control to expand the image in all directions from what I can see. So. The answer isn’t that simple, at least.
Any suggestions?
Oops. It’s a Westinghouse LCM-19w4.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Kurt // Dec 2, 2006 at 12:00 am
Ok, I poked around and maybe you already saw this, but in message #37 over in this thread, the guy mentions that Westinghouse only supply a VGA cable, not a DVI cable. Are you using the adapter with the stock VGA cable? I haven’t played around with DVI so I may be missing something, so if I’m asking an obvious question ignore me
2 Mark // Dec 2, 2006 at 9:39 am
Hi Kurt, I need to go back to the poking around myself–this time for troubleshooting info vs. purchase info. I figured I’d post this in case anyone had any useful knowledge without all of the searching.
I did know that I needed a DVI cable and ended up going to 3 places, starting with where I bought the monitor, before finding one that was almost affordable.
I could maybe see spending $80 on a cable for a $3000+ TV (if one were to spend that on a tv), but $40+ for a cable for a monitor that cost under$180 is asinine.
I don’t know much about DVI either, except that the cable is seriously shielded. But I am using the supplied VGA cable from the monitor to the PC since it only has that kind of connector. I guess I ought to try it with the VGA from the Mac, too, although that defeats much of the purpose.
I appreciate your looking! Maybe I’ll just have to work with the non-mirrored extended desktop thing to see if I like that. But this is one of those tech situations where it’d be really nice to have a “tech tutor,” someone who already operates like this and can quickly and accurately summarize the how/why/when/critical thing to know in under 15 minutes including showing me how to do useful things in this mode.
It will take far longer than that to look around the web and/or in the couple books I have about the Mac. I guess I’ll start with the books again, but they just generally show how to do tricks with multiple monitors; not why vs. why not.
3 Mike // Jan 14, 2007 at 12:46 am
Howdy!
Just browsing and found your blog. My sister got the exact same monitor a month or so ago — Just trying to find her drivers for it (which sounds like your dilemma eariler).
Did you find any? (if so, send your findings care via my e-mail :D)