Why you NEED a cheap 15" 4:3 LCD

It’s no secret that the majority of then items I show  come from thrift stores.  The ones I go to have different colors of price tags and every day one or more colors have discounts on them which I think is just their ploy to raise prices across the board and hope you’ll shop more often to try to get those discounts but in some cases it can work in your favor such as with this HP monitor which had a price sticker of $5.99 on it but it had a 75% discount so I got it for $1.60 I also got this Sony Digital8 Handycam which did not have a discount on it but even at the full price of $9.99 that’s a steal compared to what these things sell for on eBay and it works perfectly -- it even came with a free tape in it.  But you may ask even at that price why bother getting this tiny little 15-inch monitor when I have a perfectly good 19-inch monitor that you often see in the background of my videos? 

Well, there’s a couple reasons why I think this will be much more ideal as what I call a utility monitor than that one.  First of all its a lot smaller and lighter so I can easily pick whereas this one is not only a lot bigger and heavier it also has this fancy articulating and swiveling base which means trying to pick it up is always going to be a two-hand job and this monitor has both a VGA input and a DVI input, which you may not think is a downside but the problem is it always defaults to DVI so whenever you first turn it on it wastes a couple seconds checking the DVI input to see if anything’s there before it switches over to VGA and that can be a big problem when you’re first turning on a computer and you want to go into the BIOS setup or the boot menu and you don’t know which key to press to do that because every computer is different this monitor often has such a long delay before it shows anything on the screen that it completely misses out on whatever BIOS messages the computer is showing and the first thing you usually end up seeing is when the operating system starts loading as I’ll demonstrate with this computer I’ll turn it on and there should be a BIOS screen showing up about now but you’re seeing nothing on the monitor until it finally wakes up and you saw it just flash there for a brief second, too quick to see what it was telling you and now it’s already booting into Windows.  

So if I wanted to get into BIOS setup or use the boot menu it would have been too late.  It also has an annoyingly long delay whenever switching between text and graphics modes such as Ill demonstrate when I switch over to a full screen DOS prompt I don’t know exactly how long that is I’ll time it in the video and put it in a subtitle but that’s a pretty long delay and especially if you’re using older DOS games and software which are constantly switching between text and graphics it gets to be rather annoying to have to wait through that delay again especially if the program is showing something very quickly once it switches modes and you’ll miss out on it.  

And also although this is obviously not a widescreen monitor it’s also not 4:3 aspect ratio it’s actually 5:4 because it has a native resolution of 1280x1024 so if you’re using it at its native resolution everything looks fine now if I switch over to a 4:3 aspect ratio resolution such as 1024x768 you can see everything is slightly vertically stretched just enough to be noticeable and annoying and although this is not nearly as bad as seeing a 4:3 image stretched out to widescreen it’s still not ideal.  And also for the purpose of a utility monitor where you’re testing out and setting up various systems on your workbench I think it’s really helpful to have a monitor with built-in speakers which this one does not.  

Obviously these are not going to sound that great but it’s better than nothing and it’s a lot more convenient than having to set up separate speakers I also like how it has a built-in power supply so all you need is a standard computer power cord you do not need a separate power brick unlike a lot of other monitors the model number is HSTND-2A02 and it was made in October 2005.  

And just to confuse you in addition to the model number it has a model name of VS15 and I don’t know if that was somebody’s idea of a joke or if that’s just a very unfortunate Chinese company name.  And also after I took off the price sticker I noticed it has a headphone jack on the front there that’s really convenient and unlike some really cheap LCD monitors I’ve seen where the base is completely fixed on this one it does tilt.  But before I get too far in praising the virtues of this monitor I better make sure it actually works, so I just connected the power cord and now I’m going to plug it in and we’ll see what happens... 

I saw the power light come on for a moment and then it disappeared so hopefully it was just it going to sleep so now Ill press the power button Ah-ha! no input signal, recommended settings 1024x768, check video cable and its already showing a test pattern so it is working so I connected it to my computer here the monitor is on but it’s in sleep mode right now so when I turn on the power to the computer I’ll see how long it takes to react see, that’s a lot longer showing the BIOS messages than the other one.  It was long enough for me to see it said press Del to enter setup which the other one went by in such a quick flash I couldn’t see that and those are the monitors built-in speakers -- not great, but

good enough for testing a computer.  

And there it is at the Windows desktop let me do the auto adjust thing and there it is.  It looks fine.  Its correctly showing its maximum resolution of 1024x768 although I think it actually can go up to 75 Hz but I don’t know really what difference that would make compared to 60 Hz since it’s an LCD monitor so it’s not like its flickering like a CRT would so I usually just leave it on 60 Hz and that’s fine.  

Now let’s go to a DOS prompt and see how long that takes to show up...still a little bit of a delay but a lot quicker than that other monitor and notice it’s also not shifted off to the left which is another common problem I see a lot with LCD monitors many of them tend to cut off the first or two columns of text in text mode but this one obviously is not even though I did not do the auto adjust in the text mode I’ll do that now and that looks fine.  

It looks nice and sharp -- I know it’s especially on the higher resolution monitors they tend to over-smoothen text mode because I’m always used to being able to see the individual pixels in text mode so on some monitors which overly smoothen that out it just ends up looking a little bit too blurry but this one looks fine now I connected it to my vintage Tandy 1000RLX so I can test out the lower-res graphics modes here’s 320x200... there’s 640x200.

There’s 640x350... and there’s 640x480 and also 40-column text mode works fine if you’re wondering if the monitor will accept a 15 kHz video signal without the use of a scan doubler the answer is no.  I have it connected to my Tandy 1000RL right now which is outputting a CGA signal, and the monitor does recognize the signal and turn on, but all you get is a black screen.  

But if I restart the computer in MDA mode we do get a video image, but it’s very smeary and the monitor displays a constant warning that it’s not using the correct resolution so you can kind of see what the computer is displaying but obviously this is not a usable image if I go into the menu here and go into information it actually does recognize the signal the computer is putting out it says 18 kHz horizontal, 50 Hz vertical which is what MDA and Hercules use, so it does recognize the signal; it just can’t display it properly now I’ll play a couple of short video clips and I’m sure you’ll be able to tell that the built-in speakers are really not that good but again just for testing computers it’s good to have built-in speakers at all even if they don’t sound that great Ed: Windows 7 sucks.  I have Windows XP running on it now.

It was successful!

Yes! Eyeball, eyeball... Linus: Why would you even write this? off-camera: You love consoles. Linus: I did happen to buy an Xbox One this morning, though. Yeah! So I don’t think he even knew that. off-camera: I didn’t know that. Linus: He’s just putting things... putting words in my mouth.

Well, I’ll put something in your mouth! off-camera: Oh dear! and I like that its silver because I think that’s a good compromise color that won’t look out of place of either an older beige computer or a newer black computer so I think now I a great time to pick up one of these little 15-inch 4:3 aspect ratio LCD monitors while they’re so cheap or maybe even free if you know someone who has one they’re not using anymore because you never know when their value might start to increase again after all it wasn’t too long ago that Pentium II and III computers from the late 90s were just considered to be worthless old junk and now they’re often selling for several hundred dollars on eBay!

Linus: All right guys, that’s it for Netlinked Daily.  Thanks for watching me talk because I love hearing the sound of my own voice....Really!?