More Moire on a Gateway EV500 monitor

06 Oct 2005

We picked up a second-hand Gateway computer around the beginning of the year (it’s great build quality, and uses less than 90W of power… but if any of the components in it died we might be a bit screwed! Mind you, at least it has plenty of PCI slots, unlike some.), along with its original monitor, a 15″ Gateway EV500.

I’m pretty sure they were rebadging Sony monitors even when this thing was made, so it’s probable there’s another model number that goes with it, but perhaps not. Basically, I used it because it went with the computer and, at that time, we didn’t have any other spare monitors of any decent quality.

This screen is okay in terms of resolutions/refresh rate support (it does 1024×768 at 85Hz, which is very good for a cheap vendor from the late 90s — and yes, it was cheap — this is a Celeron 400MHz system, though we’ve pumped up the RAM from probably 64MB or (optimistically) 128MB to 256MB to make it usable with XP. It is, however, rather blurry.

Or, was. We acquired it just as we moved into this house, so I didn’t really have a lot of time to spend just setting it up properly… I was trying to get, you know, four other computers and the network setup, whilst working out how to configure the phone system… oh, yeah, and I had to move into my bedroom at some point, too (in actual fact I still haven’t unpacked all the boxes… there is one or two remaining but I know what’s in them and they’re being stored in the bottom of a wardrobe, so that’s okay!)… basically I threw it on the desk and plugged it in, formatted and installed XP, made some trivial administrative software changes (probably via RDC because hot desking is, like, so much easier than turning around and using another KVM setup!), and promptly forgot about it.

So today I actually had to use it for a bit and its blurriness irritated me enough to bother doing something about it. It’s got one of those doors that covers controls and pops open to reveal a rotary switch that doubles as a button, so I did that seeing if there was anything I could do to fix it in there. Alas, no software focus utilities to be found (must poke a screwdriver in the back of it sometime), though, importantly, there are both Vertical and Horizontal Moire adjustments available under the More option from the core menu. This monitor had a fairly significant moire problem (I’m not sure if I’m using that term correctly, though I know the problem was with that), so playing with these settings for a bit made its lots more pleasant to use.

Admittedly, its focus towards the edges drops off fairly significantly, but that could be an unavoidable limitation of the device (that is, it’s a curved CRT display… so the focal length physically does change fairly significantly).