it's no secret that the majority of the
items I show on my channel
come from thrift stores. The ones I go to
have different colors of price tags
and every day one or more colors have
discounts on them
which I think is just their ploy to
raise prices across the board
and hope you'll shop more often to try
to get those discounts but in some cases
it can work in your favor
such as with this HP monitor which had a
price sticker of $5.99 on it
but it had a 75% discount so I
got it for $1.60
I also got this Sony Digital8 Handycam
which did not have a discount on it but
even at the full price of $9.99
that's a steal compared to what these
things sell for on eBay
and it works perfectly -- it even came with a
free tape in it. But you may ask
even at that price why bother getting
this tiny little 15-inch monitor
when I have a perfectly good 19-inch
monitor
that you often see in the background of
my videos? Well, there's a couple reasons
why I think this will be much more
ideal as what I call a utility monitor
than that one. First of all it's a lot
smaller and lighter so I can easily pick
it up and carry it around with one hand
whereas this one is not only a lot
bigger and heavier it also has this
fancy articulating and swiveling base
which means trying to pick it up is
always going to be a two-hand job
and this monitor has both a VGA input
and a DVI
input, which you may not think is a
downside
but the problem is it always defaults to
DVI
so whenever you first turn it on it
wastes a couple seconds
checking the DVI input to see if
anything's there
before it switches over to VGA and that
can be a big problem when you're first
turning on a computer and you want to go
into the BIOS setup
or the boot menu and you don't know
which key to press to do that
because every computer is different
this monitor often has
such a long delay before it shows
anything on the screen
that it completely misses out on
whatever BIOS messages the computer is
showing
and the first thing you usually end up
seeing is when the operating system
starts loading
as I'll demonstrate with this computer
I'll turn it on
and there should be a BIOS screen showing
up about now but you're seeing nothing
on the monitor
until it finally wakes up
and you saw it just flash there for a
brief second, too quick to see what it
was telling you
and now it's already booting into
Windows. So if I wanted to get into
BIOS setup or
use the boot menu it would have been too
late. It also has an annoyingly long
delay
whenever switching between text and
graphics modes
such as I'll demonstrate when I switch
over to a full screen DOS
prompt
I don't know exactly how long that is
I'll time it in the video and put it in
a subtitle but that's a pretty long
delay
and especially if you're using older DOS
games and software
which are constantly switching between
text and graphics
it gets to be rather annoying to have to
wait through that delay
again especially if the program is
showing something very quickly
once it switches modes and you'll miss
out on it. And also
although this is obviously not a
widescreen monitor
it's also not 4:3 aspect ratio
it's actually 5:4
because it has a native resolution of
1280x1024
so if you're using it at its native
resolution everything looks fine
now if I switch over to a 4:3 aspect
ratio
resolution such as 1024x768
you can see everything is slightly
vertically stretched
just enough to be noticeable and
annoying
and although this is not nearly as bad
as seeing a 4:3 image stretched out to
widescreen
it's still not ideal. And also for the
purpose of a utility monitor
where you're testing out and setting up
various systems on your workbench
I think it's really helpful to have a
monitor with built-in speakers
which this one does not. Obviously these
are not going to sound that great
but it's better than nothing and it's a
lot more convenient than having to set
up separate speakers
I also like how it has a built-in power
supply
so all you need is a standard computer
power cord
you do not need a separate power brick
unlike a lot of other monitors
the model number is HSTND-2A02
and it was made in October 2005. And
just to confuse you in addition to the
model number it has a model name
of VS15 and I don't know if that was
somebody's idea of a joke or if that's
just a very
unfortunate Chinese company name. And
also after I took off the price sticker
I noticed it has a headphone jack on the
front there
that's really convenient and unlike some
really cheap
LCD monitors I've seen where the base is
completely fixed
on this one it does tilt. But before I
get too far in praising the virtues of
this monitor
I better make sure it actually works, so
I just connected the power cord and now
I'm going to plug it in
and we'll see what happens... I saw the
power light come on for a moment
and then it disappeared so hopefully it
was just it going to sleep
so now I'll press the power button
Ah-ha! "no input signal",
"recommended settings 1024x768", "check
video cable" and it's already showing a
test pattern so it is working
so I connected it to my computer here
the monitor is on but it's in sleep mode
right now
so when I turn on the power to the
computer I'll see how long it takes to
react
see, that's a lot longer showing the BIOS
messages
than the other one. It was long enough for me to
see it said
press Del to enter setup which the other
one
went by in such a quick flash I couldn't
see that
[Windows XP startup music]
and those are the monitor's built-in
speakers -- not great, but
good enough for testing a computer. And
there it is at the Windows desktop
let me do the auto adjust thing
and there it is. It looks fine. It's
correctly showing its maximum resolution
of 1024x768
although I think it actually can go up to
75 Hz
but I don't know really what difference
that would make compared to 60 Hz
since it's an LCD monitor so it's not
like it's flickering
like a CRT would so I usually just leave
it on 60 Hz
and that's fine. Now let's go to a DOS
prompt and see how long that takes to
show up...
still a little bit of a delay but a lot
quicker than that other monitor
and notice it's also not shifted off to
the left which is another common problem
I see a lot with
LCD monitors many of them tend to cut off
the first or two
columns of text in text mode but this
one obviously is not
even though I did not do the auto adjust
in the text mode
I'll do that now
and that looks fine. It looks nice and
sharp -- I know it's especially on the
higher resolution monitors
they tend to over-smoothen text mode
because I'm always used to being able to
see the individual pixels in text mode
so on some monitors which overly
smoothen that out it just
ends up looking a little bit too blurry
but this one looks fine
now I connected it to my vintage Tandy
1000RLX
so I can test out the lower-res graphics
modes
here's 320x200... there's 640x200...
there's 640x350... and there's
640x480
and also 40-column text mode works fine
if you're wondering if the monitor
will accept a 15 kHz video signal
without the use of a scan doubler
the answer is no. I have it connected to
my Tandy 1000RL
right now which is outputting a CGA
signal, and the monitor does recognize
the signal and turn
on, but all you get is a black screen. But
if I restart the computer in MDA mode
we do get a video image, but it's very
smeary
and the monitor displays a constant
warning that it's not using the correct
resolution
so you can kind of see what the computer
is displaying but obviously this is not
a usable image
if I go into the menu here and go into
information
it actually does recognize the signal
the computer is putting out
it says 18 kHz horizontal, 50 Hz
vertical
which is what MDA and Hercules use, so
it does recognize the signal; it just
can't display it properly
now I'll play a couple of short video clips
and I'm sure you'll be able to tell that
the built-in speakers are really not
that good
but again just for testing computers
it's good to have built-in speakers at
all
even if they don't sound that great
Ed: "Windows 7 sucks. I have Windows XP
running on it now.
It was successful!
Yes! Eyeball, eyeball..."
[music]
Linus: "Why would you even write this?" off-camera: "You love
consoles." Linus: "I did happen to buy an Xbox One
this morning, though. Yeah! So I don't
think he even knew that."
off-camera: "I didn't know that." Linus: "He's just putting
things... putting words in my mouth.
Well, I'll put something in your mouth!" off-camera: "Oh dear!" [laughter]
and I like that it's silver because I
think that's a good compromise color
that won't look out of place of either
an older beige computer or a newer black
computer
so I think now is a great time to pick
up one of these little 15-inch
4:3 aspect ratio LCD monitors while
they're so cheap
or maybe even free if you know someone
who has one they're not using anymore
because you never know when their value
might start to increase again
after all it wasn't too long ago that
Pentium II and III computers from the
late '90s were just considered to be
worthless old junk
and now they're often selling for
several hundred dollars on eBay!
Linus: "All right guys, that's it for Netlinked
Daily. Thanks for watching me talk
because I love hearing the sound of my
own voice....
Really!?"