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

[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.

[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:

[Ami_GFX]

Framiga wrote:
to avoid confusion (or to add some)

an LCD monitor is a thing while a LCD TV/Monitor is all another matter.

The same basic technology. The LCD TV/Monitors generally come with VGA inputs and the same resolutions as LCD monitors--at least the 15-19 inch models. They have wider viewing angles than LCDs dedicated to PC use and more circuitry to decode video. Because of the composite and S-video inputs, they are much more suitable for Amiga use. My impression is that they are VGA monitors with NTSC/PAL decoding added and not the other way around--Video monitors with VGA added. Because they have to deal with video resolutions, they seem a bit more flexible in what they can deal with resolution wise than dedicated PC LCD monitors. Of course there could be wide variations between brands and models and you Europeans are so fortunate in having SCART rgb inputs.

I've sold off all my 1084 monitors now that I have the LCD monitor and am quite happy with it.

[Ami_GFX]

I've tried connecting an Amiga directly to my monitors VGA input. Doesn't work. Just a black screen with an "out of range" warning message. This is what leads me to believe that it is basically a VGA monitor with a built in scan doubler, video scaler to handle the composite and s-video inputs. You can buy external video scalers that convert video to vga and the low end ones are not very expensive. Also, it's native resolution is 1024x768 XGA and not 720x480 or 720x576 DVD video which indicates an internal video scaler.