"Signal Out of Range" message on LCD - but showing 15khz picture!

[dandelion]

Hi all,

Have just picked up an aging LCD monitor, a Medion 7514 model. I had little hope of it being able to display native 15khz Amiga output but thought i'd give it a try anyway. On startup I was suprised / overjoyed to see the purple screen and floppy disk animation! But, a floating message soon appeared saying "Signal Out of Range : Set Monitor to 1024x768 60hz". There seems to be no way to get rid of this. Does this mean that the monitor can't display this screenmode safely, and on most monitors this would be blanked out? Can I alter the settings somehow to get rid of this error message? Also - when this error message is displayed I can't access the monitor set up controls. None of the buttons work. I've plugged it into a standard SVGA outputting machine and it works fine, and I CAN access the set up pages. I've tried selecting a 60hz mode (well, it says this is already selected), but it makes no difference when trying again with the Amy.

Any ideas, experiences related to this? Am I damaging the monitor in getting it to display something so lowly as a 15khz display?

Cheers

Dandelion

[amigakid]

Try a scan doubler.  I have never tried to hook an LCD to my Miggy.

[adolescent]

On my Shuttle XP17 I get a similar error when using PAL modes. A quick off/on and the message disappears after about 10 seconds.  Worth a try at least.

[Merc]

Have you checked all the settings on the monitor while connected to a PC for a way to disable that message?  Most LCD's I've seen have that option, but maybe yours is old enough that it doesn't.

[Ami_GFX]

The same thing happens on my LCD monitor with the out of range message floating over the display but, unfortunately, not for native Amiga modes which just give me a black screen with the message. I was looking at an LCD monitor recently which synced down to 24khz but nothing close to 15khz.I will have to keep the brand of your monitor in mind.
   
   The out of range message is in the firmware of the monitor. Since each monitor has it's own firmware, it might well be possible to disable the message. I haven't been motivated to try it on mine since displaying 1024x1280 on a 1024x768 default monitor results in painfully small out of focus text. It might also be possible that the monitor is electrically stressed by the 15khz signal even though it can display it and this triggers the message. You can zap CRT monitors with the wrong video signal but I'm not sure if this applies to LCDs. Crt monitors use high energy levels and dangerous voltages but LCD monitors are low energy devices
   
  I've found the best Amiga resolution on my lcd monitor is 640x480. It can go up to the full 1024x768 resolution but it looks much better at 640x480 and my RTG card does a beautiful 24 bit desktop at this resolution. I've also found that I can get a decent dblntsc 640x400 workbench at 29khz and that I can run Deluxe Paint and Brillance in dblntsc and multisync AGA HAM modes on my lcd monitor which is real cool. Dblntsc seems to work better even though the multisync modes include 640x480. Since you have an A1200, this should work for you. You might have to use dblPal instead of dblNTSC if you have a Pal system.

[zipper]

As many monitors barf at 50 Hz and start just at 56 Hz do try to boot into NTSC to see if it works better.

[Zac67]

The monitor tells you to better use its native resolution since all TFTs can not produce sharp output in any other resolution. I'm pretty sure there's some menu item to get rid of this message.

[Piru]

All the TFT's I've used (4) haven't had option to disable this message. Most have option to specify location of the OSD display, though.

[sir_inferno]

Piru wrote:
All the TFT's I've used (4) haven't had option to disable this message. Most have option to specify location of the OSD display, though.

my eizo doesn't allow you to move the OSD off the screen unfortunately...but my samsung allows me to have 100% transparency lol

[amigean]

On my Shuttle XP17 I get a similar error when using PAL modes. A quick off/on and the message disappears after about 10 seconds. Worth a try at least.

Are you saying that the Shuttle XP17 CAN do PAL resolutions, through the 15-pin VGA connector WITHOUT a scandoubler???

That would be sweeet!

[dandelion]

Actually - thinking about it!! I think there is an "OSD" option in the setup menu. Will play with that this evening.

[dandelion]

Okay, well. Got home, plugged the monitor into my Acorn (which gives SVGA out) to access the on-screen display. The "OSD" option within the menu allows you to control the horizontal and vertical position of the OSD menu, but not warning boxes it seems. When I plug the Amiga back in, it's just as before. The only options I don't understand are "clock" and "phase" which i'd think have some low-level frequency adjusting ability. Anything of value there? Otherwise I think it's going to be 31khz only

[Zac67]

Most of our Belinea and NEC monitors have options for turning off OSD.

Clock and phase are parameters to adjust the timing of the video input to the (static) LCD matrix. Since it's a digital display (essentially a large memory chip where you can actually see the stored data bits), the analogue input needs to be digitized/sampled and if the sampling rate (clock) doesn't match or the sampling takes place between pixels (phase) the display is blurry and may even show noise (flickering pixels).

Because the Amiga's output timing is in no way common to the industry, you may have to adjust those values manually:
- if possible set the video output to the TFT's native resolution or something with a simple ratio, e.g. 800x600 for a 17/19" 1280x1024, makes roughly 2:3 (OK); 640x480 is 1:2 (better); very bad is 800x600 on a 15" 1024x768
- display something with high contrast & lots of detail, full screen, a lot of small text will do
- change the 'clock' value to get rid of vertical stripes
- change the 'phase' value to get the sharpest possible display
- if you're not using the native resolution, there's no way to get a really sharp picture

Because this is prone to error (even when done automatically) it's much better to use a digital DVI input - the display is always perfect.

[leirbag28]

@amigakid

Quote:

Try a scan doubler. I have never tried to hook an LCD to my Miggy.
----------------------------------------------------------------


 That would miss the whole point of his joy!  he is or could be very happy because it displays 15khz Amiga modes without the need for a scan Doubler.



If anyone is interested.............I have purchased an INFOCUS DLP projector that works with Amiga extremely well and even had a Flickerfixer/De-Interlacer for 15khz modes!  all through the S-Video portif you have s-Video out on your Amiga. It might work through Composite as well. The only thing is that it displays PAL in Black and White i your Amiga is NTSC and I suspect Vice versa if your machine is PAL.

This projector cast me $650 brand new plus a $200 rebate! so its $450.

You get:
1.  A large screen TV
2.  A FlickerFixer
3.  A Monitor

all in one with multiple inputs for Component, S-Video, Composite.

I got to look at the model number as it slipped my mind.

[Ami_GFX]

The monitor tells you to better use its native resolution since all TFTs can not produce sharp output in any other resolution. I'm pretty sure there's some menu item to get rid of this message.

Not all LCD monitors are created equally. Mine is a Phillips Magnovox LCD TV/Monitor with VGA, composite, and s-video inputs. Native resolution is 1024x768 but it does 800x600 and 640x480,640x400 and 320x240 just as well and switches between these resolutions like a CRT. It can handle dblntsc modes too--some better than others.It is also excellent for watching movies and can handle both NTSC and PAL video. I have had to do quite a bit of tweaking of the Picasso 96 drivers for my Merlin RTG card to work properly in all these modes but the monitor hasn't required much tweaking at all to work with my A4000. Had to adjust the vertical position of DBLntsc modes a little and that's it. Every now and then, the display will come out distored or out of sync but when this happens, all I have to do is turn the monitor off and on again and it readjusts itself. The only mode that required some serious tweaking is Atari ST mono 640x400. That required some radical adjustment of the clock and horizontal position controls but the resulting display is excellent. And once I made the adjustments, the monitor memorized my settings and I don't have to readjust after using it with my Amiga.

On the other hand, the laptop I'm using now can only do it's native 1024x768 resolution properly and I have another laptop that does it's native 1280x1024 and 640x480 equally well but everthing else is pathetic on it.

Since the monitor accepts 15khz composite and s-video, it has occurred to me that it must have some sort of internal scan doubler/video scaler. I have seen some hardware hacks for this monitor floating around the net--adding component video inputs for hdtv as I remember.

 :roll:  :roll: