as I recall the SGI monitors were actually the pinnacle of Sony Trinitron CRT tech, rebadged, and connected using a 13W3 analog video link. Similar to the very high end Sun at the time. As neither SGI or Sun actually made CRTs, they went with the state of the art from the world's top CRT maker. Might have been some mitsubishi diamondtron in there too.
In 1995 I think there were 16:9 aspect ratio japanese model TVs but I am not sure about monitors, might have been more like a 4:3 1600x1200 display.
>In 1995 I think there were 16:9 aspect ratio japanese model TVs but I am not sure about monitors, might have been more like a 4:3 1600x1200 display
Nope, it was definitely 16:9, but I was mistaken, it was an Intergraph[1], not SGI like I originally thought, but still connected to an SGI workstation.
Just look at this beast[1]. Also, the monitor is in the photo as well :)
There's a semi-easy way to spot a Trinitron if you knew where/how to look for the tell. There were 2 horizontal lines that were shadows from some bit of wiring that could be seen when viewing the screen when certain images/patterns like solid colors were displayed.
I had a Sun workstation with a beast of a 19" Trinitron CRT in the late '90s in my apartment (working remotely for a California startup) and remember it fondly. The lines you're referring to are called "damping wires" in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_grille
Of course, the final-gen Trinitons (circa 2000 onward) had truly flat glass, so there was no tell-tale curvature to look for.
And once Sony's patents started expiring, there were competitors like Mitsubishi's Diamondtron displays with glass shaped like Trinitrons. I'm not sure if they had the two horizontal lines like Trinitrons.
I remember that shadow! FWIW it was just one line in smaller Trinitrons, and it was located 1/3rd of the way from the top or bottom edge rather than in the middle.
Apple mounted the Trinitron tube upside down compared to other vendors, so that the faint horizontal line would be in the bottom third of the screen rather than the top third.
You could also "overclock" them to run at higher refresh rates (frame rates, hz) depending on the resolution. The top CRT's were blowing away LCD's for many, many years. Good color, higher refresh, good dynamic range, etc etc. Those 21" CRT's were massive but I held onto my second hand one for as long as I could. I remember getting the VGA adapter for the Dreamcast and it looked damn good on that CRT!
I still remember buying a dirt cheap SGI monitor back in the day. But it took a while before I figured out how to mod the cable because of sync on green.
Fixed Frequency, crafting an X mode line on a cheap 14", no text readable during boot, fingers crossed if X came up ok, if not, swap monitors, boot with "init=/bin/bash" and goto 1...
The SGI monitors were 4:3 but I don't recall the resolution. I do recall that they were beasts, weight of a small elephant and a not dissimilar size - you needed to pull your desk away from the wall to get any kind of distance to the screen.
Over time their timings would drift and you could never get the entire screen completely sharp.
I just finally gave away a 17" Trinitron SGI monitor when cleaning my office.
That thing was a tank! I bought it at a CG house bankruptcy sale in the 90s for $2k, which was less than half the going price at the time.
But you're right, it weighed a ton. It did need periodic degaussing. And when a communication company half a mile away put in some satellite uplinks, I could see when there was heavy communication traffic by a slight color shift on one side.
Degaussing buttons were common on high-end CRT displays. They were always that fun!
In the mid-2000s, I worked at a place where we had several "decommissioned" Indys living a second life as Apache servers for some of our hosting clients - not uncommon in those days. We had one of the big 19" 4:3 CRTs on a KVM, too, and its weight put a noticeable if graceful curve in the MDF desktop on which it stood.
There was a time I had a 20” Apple behemoth on my desk in the open plan office. Degaussing it made the image on every monitor within 3 meters curl up in magnetic agony.
In 1995 I think there were 16:9 aspect ratio japanese model TVs but I am not sure about monitors, might have been more like a 4:3 1600x1200 display.