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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

Nice! Pet peeve of mine:

>"A side note: The screen looks amazing, I was blow away with the crispness of the 1280x1024 resolution on this monitor. I really wish it was just a bit smaller."

1280x1024 is the wrong resolution for a CRT, someone is sure to correct me but I have never seen a 5:4 aspect ratio CRT of that size. It is likely 4:3, so the resolution would be 1280x960. Or the next step 1600x1200.

Yet 1280x1024 was a really popular resolution on CRTs for some reason. 17" and 19" LCDs were the only real displays that had a 5:4 aspect ratio, at least in "modern" times.

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I had several IRIX machines as my desktop workstation. They were 1280x1024.

Eg, https://sgi.neocities.org/oldindex.html comments "And everything looks pretty good on my 1280x1024 monitor." https://www.acc.umu.se/technical/hosts/irix.html shows several 1280x1024 machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution#SX... comments "Super XGA (SXGA) is a standard monitor resolution of 1280 × 1024 pixels. This display resolution is the "next step" above the XGA resolution that IBM developed in 1990. ... SXGA is the most common native resolution of 17 inch and 19 inch LCD monitors. ... The 1280 × 1024 resolution became popular because at 24 bit/px color depth it fit well into 4 megabytes of video RAM."

I didn't do much with Suns but http://unixhq.com/websgt/ultra1.pdf comments about the Ultra 1: "Creator - Accelerated 24-bit 2-D/3-D graphics and imaging with 8-bit overlay plane,high-speed convolution, rotation,panning, zooming, color conversion, up to 1280 x 1024 at 76 Hz, stereo 960 x 680 at 112 Hz"

I remember 1152x900 being the standard Sun resolution, that may have been before the Ultra though.

> 1280x1024 is the wrong resolution for

Nope. Fairly standard for SPARC systems, going back to (at least) 1992:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_10#Graphics_suppo...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_20#Graphics

* http://www.sunhelp.org/faq/FrameBuffer.html#SX

If it's the same 21" Sun that I had back in the days the native resolution is indeed 1600x1200. Sony Triniton tube, those screen were fantastic.

Mine could even do 800x600 at 160Hz, my first experience with high refresh rates. Felt like I could grab the windows and pull them out of the screen.

Given that it's a CRT wouldn't it be max resolution instead of native? The 800x600@160Hz would also be driven natively I assume.

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