I'd argue it wasn't the high price or size which kept them from being used on the desktop. It was their absolutely terrible contrast and response times. You'd tolerate that on a portable as you had no better option but on the desktop there was no way people would put up with washed out displays and trails when you moved the mouse pointer. LCDs started to take over when the image quality and response times improved enough.
I dunno about these, but the later Studio Display (with the acrylic feet) is _still_ a good display. It's CCFL backlit, instead of LED, which is just the reality of what was being done at the time it was released. But otherwise, it looks really nice even today. Apple chose their panels well.
That "no flicker" Jobs was advertising in that keynote speech was one of the big advantages of LCDs over CRTs. If you spent hours sitting in front of a 60 Hz CRT, the flicker would strain your eyes after a while. You could mitigate the effect by increasing the refresh rate, but in places like schools and offices they were often set to 60 Hz and you couldn't change it.
@@GraveUypo I always ran my displays at 85hz or higher. I had a NICE 21" Trinitron that would do 1600x1200 @ 85hz, and you could drop the resolution a bit and get over 100hz... I wish I never got rid of that monitor.
@@volvo09 I'm afraid you're remembering a different timeline. If you had a 21" Trinitron with 16x12 at 85hz in 1999, you were on another level of special. There weren't too many graphics cards in 1999 that could manage that, even in 2D.
I have one of the blue and white versions I used as a secondary monitor with my blue and white G3 for many years. When I bought it, it did not include the power supply. I found one from a seller in the UK on eBay. But it works perfectly fine because it’s multi voltage. Something you missed about the original dark blue model: it used the old Apple 15 pain video connector versus VGA.
I used to go to computer fairs in the early 2000 and to see computers playing crystal clear DVDs on LCD screens used to blow my mind. I used to think it was amazing to see so much detail in movies I usually see on a crappy crt tv on VHS. It felt like the future.
@@anon_y_mousse Depends on the video. I still have some original DVD material in MPEG-2, and they're decent on my 1080p TV, though a bit softer. And the interlacing can be eliminated with the right filters.
@@negirno Yeah upscaling has gotten pretty good, and there were some decent resolution DVD's. Though I'd still prefer proper progressive scan video. Even 360p is better than the 480i they used on most DVD's.
@@anon_y_mousse Umm DVD isnt interlaced, thats using the composite video output that causes that, DVD is a progressive format, the Garbage comes from being taking a digital signal converting it to analog to go through composite then back to digital for the TVs internal circuits to create the progressive image
@@compzac No, the actual video on the disc was more often than not interlaced. It didn't have to be and there were exceptions, but in most cases it was. They encoded a lot of discs that way and playing it on a computer still proves it. No need for a TV or any other equipment.
I use the blue and white LCD every day. I love it - you can sense the Apple quality in it even 20 years later, it's just an absolute joy to use. The image quality is fantastic, miles better than any other 90s panel (except for Apple's own CRTs).
absolute bs. it has a contrast ratio of 200:1 and 180 cd/m2 of brightness. do you realize how pathetic that is? it also has ALL of the other shortcomings of early LCDs on top of that. optional wall of text further explaining how this isn't a good screen by any standard: the specs not good at all. Current lcds hover around 800 to 1000:1 contrast for common IPS panels, for reference, and is still garbage contrast. Suggesting it would be better than CRTs with their pretty solid contrast ratio (despite the elevated blacks due to the screen being dark gray, not black) is just laughable. brightness wasn't AS horrible, but still wasn't really that much of a selling point over CRTs, as they topped around the same brightness. (for reference, a modern average cheap lcd has ~300cd/m2 currently. Normal LCD HDR tvs can go up to ~1500) the response time was so slow that you'd have a large trail on any moving thing, and you couldn't read ANYTHING when scrolling, you had to stop fully for a whole second for the display to resolve a readable screen of text. colors were dull and inaccurate. Viewing angles were absurdly bad, to the point that looking from a normal distance one eye would never be seeing the same colors as the other, so there was that annoying impression that the screen is buried under a thin layer of oil or something. now, in contrast, CRTs do not have any of those problems. they have effectively zero response time so zero blur, you can read even fast scrolling text. their image is COMPLETELY solid and uniform (old lcds almost have a "paper-like" quality to the image), they even have built-in "measures" against persistence of vision blur (caused by lcd's non-strobing lights). the biggest problem is that they have a bit of a "glow" on stuff, but that's nothign compared to the terribly uneven mess that lcd backlights were then (honestly, still are NOW!), and the pixels are not as defined as on an lcd (though that can actually be seen as an advantage, the image looks way less "digital", much more natural. Oh yes, the "flicker" issue too, but you could completely eliminate that by running the screen at 85hz, and mitigate 90% of it by running it a 72hz point is, ANY crt is miles better than it, and there were plenty of equivalent lcds at the time too, also better ones. stop being a brand fanboy. it wasn't good at all even by the standards of the time, which is why there was so much resistance to adopting lcds (also due to the price) for pretty much a decade after this.
@@GraveUypo specs aren't everything, sir. I'm not sure what your point is, but throwing a bunch of numbers at me doesn't invalidate my opinion. I've used CRTs and LCDs, and compared to them, this monitor is extremely crisp, bright enough (too bright is painful to look at anyone), and looks great. And no one looks at a monitor like this from a 175 degree view, that's obviously not its intended use.
Again, the mid-late 90s was arguably the most exciting time in home computing. It also was way more expensive then than it is now, although we'll see what happens once we fully re-emerge from this "chip shortage".
History always repeats itself and noting is ever new under the sun so..We are going through a nostalgic phase for the 90s which were some of the best times
I really miss this era in computing. I was in High School, and it seemed like every year, technology was improving exponentially. I wish I could have afforded some of the tech, but all I could do was dream. It doesn't seem like technology is advancing as fast these days, as it was back then. Maybe it's my age, but there's much less wonder and excitement.
My dad took one of those home for his PC. I liked it. Using analogue input and all, but it was nice for reading and little strain on the eyes. Sure wasn't a gaming monitor but it did the job. It was hefty too
I wish I still had my high-end 21-inch CRT, loved the image from RGBWB-5-BNC, the Cost is insane now. So much better than LCD the last high-end studio grade crts.
Thank you, so much for this "Blast from the Past". While, I hated the design of all the CRT iMac models, I fell in love with the "Blue and White" G3 Tower and its matching LCD display at first sight. If, I recall correctly, there was also either a 17-inch or 20-inch "Blue and White" version as well (with an equally sky high price tag). But, the only place that, I have even seen the larger model was in the movie "Bridget Jones Diary" where, in the office the lead actors are going back and forth using electronic computer messages (smile...smile).
I had the original dark blue one and paired it with my Motorola StarMax 4000 mini tower clone. Paid full price for it too. I got a big leather Targus bag that fit it and brought it to work with me everyday and used the kickstand. That thing was awesome. Wish I still had it.
@@anon_y_mousse neither. Traded the rig for a PowerBook 2400c with 80 mb of Ram and a SCSI CD ROM. I miss that machine too. Arguably the guy I traded with got the better deal.
@@gwgtaylor I've never heard of anyone trading machines. Maybe I'm a packrat, but I keep everything, even when it breaks. Though, now I'm curious what happened to the PowerBook? Did you trade it too? And to who?
@@anon_y_mousse replaced the PowerBook with a G4 tower and the blue and white studio display actually. Sold the PowerBook to a guy in my office who wanted his first Mac to mess around with.
I remember being mind blown by that LCD monitor, it was going to be the future for computer displays and they were right that LCD was going to kill off CRTs!
Back when I was collecting these I somehow managed to obtain an example of all three, including the original dark blue one. That one looked the best of the three IMO because of its dark bezel, the others having white. The panel quality had been improved slightly in the later versions though, they were brighter. Just one year later you could pay significantly less for a better quality panel, which shows how rapidly this stuff was advancing at the time.
All flat panel displays these days are still fixed pixel size. It has lead to the necessity of applications supporting a variety of resolutions because forcing the monitor into one will result in an image drop, because the monitor has to scale the image, and that won't change because it's an integral aspect of the tech. That said, it's less of a problem on modern displays if you use resolutions that fit the proper integer ratio, so something like 1080p "2k" looks pretty ok on a 2160p "4k" panel.
@@duckyatsea While it's true that nobody really refers to 1080p as "2k", that would be literally 7 times more accurate. 2560 is closer to 3k than 2k. It's a stupid convention, don't perpetuate it, just call it 1440p. This has been a public service announcement.
I got this exact matching monitor in 2000 with my dual G4 tower and I used it for maybe six months and I just wasn't very satisfied. These LCDs were still in the infant stages of development. But compared to oh say a Sony Trinitron, the sony crt still looked great with a much brighter image quality. After six months of using it I decided to spend almost as much as I spent on the darn computer for a really high-end matching Sony Trinitron CRT. Even the easel style cinema displays were sub optimal in my opinion. However when they came out with the aluminum Cinema displays, now those things were amazing and I still use to this day two 30 inch aluminum cinema displays hooked up to my Mac Studio with an adapter and those things are still beautiful in 2022. It literally still blows my mind.
Not sure about other people but my first flat display was the iconic DELL with the silver stand back in 2004 with the matching Tower keyboard mouse and speakers over here in Algeria Africa specifically Apple was never a big thing until around 2010
When i worked at a regional newspaper/media as it-tech in 2000, i saw these Apple displays in action and even a 20th anniversary mac was used by the vice president of the company. The people who made the layout were not very fond of the LCDs because the color was either too exaggerated or too weak and the resolution was low. The photography people even dismissed TFTs altogether as something that will never catch on in the professional space. From their perspective TFTs were just a niche product with probability or looks in mind. The complete lack of color calibration tools for these displays was testament to that at the time. Contradictory to the lack of professional usability was the price. Typically more expensive than a professional CRT but lacking the color purity and color matching the CRTs offered as well as often having lower brightness, TFTs had a hard time transitioning from the 'portability' and 'looks' niche. In 2002 the first usable TFTs for professionals became available at exorbitant prices. But costs for switching were dropping fast and especially professionals began to notice a shift in image quality. In 2005 professionals began to switch to TFTs with the exception of video editors because the relatively low resolution (CRTS often supported 2K or even greater) and low possible frame rate of 60hz was limiting the usage. The CRTs had some niches (medial for example with extremely high res grayscale CRTs) until the 2010s when even these were mostly replaced.
Loved the G3 and G4 color scheme. Not many know but the G3 and G4 tower cases like these had interchangeable case parts. I got a g3 case and took thw smokey clear components and slapped ‘em in my G4 tower. Looked slick with the grey parta and smokey clear.
*Other manufacturer make desktop LCD monitors before Apple* "...eh" Apple comes out with an LCD monitor: 'OMG.... SUCH innovation... An LCD monitor?!?! Apple is the best!'
Dang... Starting while I was a college student in the late 90s, I got into the buy/sell/trade fun with Apple Computers, Displays and accessories. I did make a few bucks "moving" Macs, etc on the re-sale market. Finally graduated and moved on to a real day job and left it all behind. I had so many "unusual" Macs move thru my hands including quite a few G4 Cubes along with the "pillow" Performa 6400/6500 towers (but no TAMs 😞). Naturally, I wished I would have kept a couple of the rarest examples....but hindsight is 20/20. Anyway, I now happily sport an M1 Mini plus a clutch of iPads, iPhones etc...time marches on.
I'd love it if another monitor display that took inspiration from this beautiful display were released. I don't think I'd be able to afford even a retro one like this!
If you want to show how bright a monitor is, you turn the lights up not down. Even a faint monitor looks bright in the dark. But only a really bright monitor stays visible in overwhelming light. And the dumb audience was even applauding
I remember seeing the first LCD and thinking how cool it is. Then I sat left of the person using it; I saw almost nothing because viewing angles were horrible.
I have (at least) one of each of the 15" Studio Displays - but my OG dark blue one is dead. My two B&W Studio Displays both work great. (I have one with the "kickstand" and one with the usual stand.) The graphite and Lucite-ADC also work great.
I had no idea these LCDs were rare. I've had one sitting in my closet for years because I don't have a power supply for it. Now I'm going to either have to look into selling it or buying a power supply
I got one with no power supply, and hacked a PowerBook power brick to power it, since it uses the same voltage and amperage, it just needs a "female port" instead of having a wired male plug.
As a computer service technician in the 1990s, LCDs are the best thing to happen to me during that time when most high performance workstations had been using 21 inch Mitsubishi and Sony based Trinitron monitors which weight a ton! (And they always sat right on top of the system I needed to get to so I could replace the system board or one of the 1.2G SCSI drives inside! (I worked on high performance Digital AlphaStations at the time, some with special 3D graphics cards.)
I bought a B&W Mag G3 when they come out in 1998, a base model G3 300mhz with 64mb ram and 8gd drive, it was expensiveeeee so i bought a CRT for it as the LCD was to much, but i got one years later i still have both in the box in the attic, never knew they worth some money... Good
About a year ago while clearing out my workplace's old storeroom I came accross a Power Mac G3 B&W tower with missing parts as well as one of the original dark blue Studio Displays. My boss had no idea why it was there as they are a business that's used mostly Compaq and then HP PCs even to this day, so with their permission I salvaged it and the Power Mac from the trash pile and took them home. The display is missing the stand however, and finding one has been almost impossible. Would love to find one since it's fairly rare and would be one of the best pieces in my retro computing collection.
There is something more interesting and mysteries of the early lcd screens and computers in general. The lack of perfection or refinement to the technology leads me to feeling I want more but that the technology is good enough.
I had one of the second revisions of these and I actually did use the kickstand. As this point, it was my secondary monitor, so it fit more neatly on my desk with the small kickstand.
I thought the original purple/black model came with a beige power supply instead of black/grey like the later revisions? And that also came with a kickstand, though it was translucent purple rather than white?
I had the dark blue, and the blueberry. The cable on the dark blue was native Apple VGA, and came with a VGA adapter, while the blueberry was the reverse. Eventually, I had to purge my storage. Don't remember if I gave them to a friend or just left them on the sidewalk. They were both about $900 when they premiered.
I still have my original dark blue Studio Display. I bought it instead of an entire computer back when it came out because it was so much better than my problematic Apple CRT. I always thought the bondi blue update was a big downgrade.
I feel like the kick stand setup would work nicely with the smaller mac computers like the G4 cube, as I feel you'd get a sort of "large laptop" like feel and have something a lot more portable if your someone that needed to move around a lot but needs to bring a "full sized" computer with you.
why is there just the one swedish line on the otherwise fully english disclaimer sticker? 'apparaten skall anslutas till jordat nätuttag' (the device must be connected to a grounded mains socket)
Awesome monitors, and I can remember my first LCD monitor was in very early 03 which was a 15in KDS @1024x768 VGA resolution, and some very very tinny built in speakers of which even from my local Walmart store was well over $400, and we sure have come a long way with displays in such a short time, with good ultra thin 1080p 75hz LCD monitors being dirt cheap, and 4K starting to really become more common place. 👍
I bought one one from CDW back in Feb 1999. The $1K price tag was baller status, so said my co-workers in the IT Department where I worked. I used it also for my PS1 console, the composite and s-video were a great plus. As far as ADB goes, those Apple Extended Keyboards were still in high regard for Apple fans, and USB was just on the verge of the "breakout". See what I did there, "breakout"??
I’d love any of those blue and white models. CRT or Studio. I’ve been slowly working on assembling a complete G3 era setup with a PowerMac, mouse, keyboard, and USB floppy. All I need is a monitor and a matching iBook.
Actually that was not the first. The first was a transclucent grey with a DA-15 connector and shipped alongside the Beige G3 DT. Tbe blue one you are showing is a rev b updated for the B&W g3
I wonder whether this monitor's LCD panel inside the chassis can be upgraded to a higher-resolution, say, 1280×960, panel on the same driving-circuitry? I saw someone had upgraded a 17 inch PowerBook G4's panel to one with 1920x1200 resolution
I wonder the same regarind the panel upgrade. I have two of these, the bondi and the graphite, but the picture quality on both leaves more to be desired.
To be fair to the kickstand feature of the 3rd revision, I work in a school district as a tech and one teacher has their monitor setup like that. The built in stand for their monitor isn’t meant to be able to work as a kickstand but you can attach it upside down to make it be like that. It’s hard to describe through text so I hope you can vaguely see what I’m describing.
If I had had one, I would have kept the swivel mount and still picked it up by the handle and take it places. Who doesn't want an adjustable monitor while they're out and about. It would keep down the glare by angling it away from the sun.
hey colin. i got a old rare cassete portable recorder here with a amazing mic. problem is. one channel is not working right. it's like 1/10th the volume than the other channelll.. so far nothing i've done has been able to fix it due to lack of know how on these older decks. where could i get this repaired by any chance? this is a pretty interesting and unique little cassete deck.. pitch control.. manual L and R volume control.. metal support (for recording too) and "only" on 4 AA's.. would be a shame if i can never get this thing fixed..
I debated on getting the old crt or the LCD for my g4 cube. As much as I like CRTs, the sleek LCD was what really attracted me to Mac in the first place
I have a second-gen Apple Studio Display and I have to say it is a wonder in all aspects: computer and video signal and with no clutter. I found mine being disposed of a house and under the rain. It was restored with no hassle and the power brick was rebuilt from an old 20V Lenovo adapter. The only problem I faced with this monitor is, for some reason, it fails when an HP branded PC is connected to it. No image.
I’ve got an original dark blue that I bought years ago from a garage sale for $15. Someone at one point chopped off the VGA cable, so it’s only good to use with the AV input on the side. Also ended up with 2 blue and white models. One with the kickstand and the other with the traditional adjustable stand. The kickstand is curious, and blocks the use of the buttons on the front. It “works” but it’s flimsy. Maybe someday I’ll pickup a graphite to complete the set.
The colours on early apple LCD's were incredibly good considering how AWFUL most lcd's were in the late 1990s-mid2000s. They were so bad you could easily catch out how washed out the colours were, and narrow the viewing angle on camera. Meanwhile I could still use an old 24" acrylic cinema display and be happy with it for browsing the web or basic work, only in gaming and watching movies would i miss a modern VA lcd and it's vastly better contrast.
I understand, look at the Monorail, such a horrific display it had! So washed out! But my dad had a Toshiba laptop, a Satellite Pro 4300 series, i have that laptop now in my possesion, and it has also a horrible display, DSTN wasn't a good technology! Luckely that DSTN no longer exists on the market!
Absolutely! I still use this 1999 Studio Display every day, and it absolutely fantastic. Apple rarely released something with a cheap feeling, and they mastered their first LCDs.
@@DiabloXL69 Yeah, we should thank them, without it, laptops were out of reach for many people, but it's a technology we can leave in the past :) i am not missing it one bit tbo
I wish humanity could just invent CRTs that are as thin as modern displays but have the same picture quality as CRTs. But obviously that can't be done, physics and what not :(
The Radius Artica was a flat panel that also matched this G3 Apple colour design, it would be worth tracking down as a follow up. As a repackaged Silicon Graphics 1600SW it was widescreen 1600 by 1024 and had (at the time) great image quality performance.
I owned both displays back in 2005. I later upgraded to the aluminum cinema display but not before using them on numerous macs at the time. It's true the ADB port was a little strange in retrospect but it enabled me to have not one, but two USB ports available and not daisy chained to my keyboard and mouse. The one thing that always irritated me was how cheap Apple was with the USB hub built in to the keyboard. It couldn't supply enough power to be useful so you could use a mouse but not much else. The white usb keyboard was a huge improvement on that. But the idea was quite amazing. In theory you had a usb port in the back of the computer and one available right at the keyboard. In theory very convenient. Unfortunately my Apple USB keyboard laid in my closet for years because of it's flaws.
I remember my first LCD was so much worse than my CRT in hindsight.. I had a 100Hz CRT 19“ real beauty.. but LCD was sold as a technological marvel and better for my eyes and I was really not tech-savvy as a 14 year old.. games barely hit 100 fps anyway at that time.. I still wonder tho is the crt is what gave me bad eyesight.. nowadays I rock a 55“ OLED@4K@120Hz cause I know what’s goooood :D and all my games reach the 120fps
FPS is a result of your hardware and has nada to do with the monitors themselves, they do quote refresh rate, but thats different than the 120FPS from GTA5 The marvel that LCDs were sold by was that they were easier on the eyes due to the no flicker (which was a lie in hindsight as the backlight will flicker at 60hz or 50hz with regards to the power supply from the wall) but if your CRT had 100Hz refresh rate and was actually running at that then no the LCD would have done little to help, also no the CRT didnt ruin your eyes any worse than any other display technology, yes when they used a lower refresh rate the flicker would make your eyes "tired" but outside of squinting which you would still do on an LCD, that was a myth back then Side note FPS or frames per second, thats just how many frames of the image your graphics card can draw at that second Refresh rate is what the monitor is doing, its how fast the monitor redraws the display so 60Hz 60 times per second 100Hz 100 times per second and so on the two arent tied to each other, the fresh rate will affect how the FPS looks but its not the same thing as a game running at 120FPS on a monitor running at 60 will still look very smooth
