Why did Commodore put monochrome video output on A500/A2000?

[Iggy]

Simple answer.
Monochrome monitors were cheap and you could look at an 80 column display on a monochrome composite monitor (I had one, although I sometime switched to 64 columns for better clarity when doing word processing).
No way were you going to try that with a color composite screen.

$100 monitor vs. several hundred dollar monitor.

A no-brainer if you're primarily concerned with office apps.

[Iggy]

It's a shame they didnt put S-Video on the a500's and other wedge Amiga's just like the Commodore 64 had.

S-video output on a C64?
Where?
I don't even think they had that standard at that time.

[Iggy]

Yeah the 82' model with 5-pin connector doesnt but the 83-84+ models do but there was no mini-din standard plug at the time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Video#Connector_and_Cable

If you look at the 1084s monitor for example, it has chromina and Lumina inputs which is just S-Video using RCA connectors.

http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=849

I personally use a c64 S-Video cable to connect to my Sony Bravia and the PQ is awesome.

That's too cool.
Much better then composite.
Until component video became common, I had a lot of devices connected with S-video cablles.