Monitor

09/29/08

Monitor

For the monitor in my cabinet I decided to go with a 27" Mitsubishi CS27MX1 TV that I purchased used on eBay for $90.

Features:

	Turns back on after power loss. This is a big plus in the cabinet combined with the SmartStrip. This way, when the cabinet is shut down, the TV goes off, and when the cabinet powers back up, the TV goes on. There is no need to use the remote to power the TV.
	The width of the TV was 25 1/2", making it a perfect fit for the 26" wide cabinet.
	If for some reason I do need to user a remote, I have mounted an infared remote extender from Radio Shack inside the cabinet. This allows you to place a remote extender somewhere else in the room and it will communicate to the base via radio waves and send the appropriate signal to the TV. This way I did not need to cut a hole in the monitor bezel.
	The 27" monitor Bezel was purchased from Happ Controls.
	I have also added a piece of Lexan to cover the Bezel.

Update! - I have now swapped out the clear Lexan in front of the monitor and replaced it with Graylite 14 Smoked Glass. The glass was about $62 from a local glass shop and well worth the money. Colors really stand out now and games have more a real arcade look and feel.

Update! 08/01/2007 - I decided to change the TV in my cabinet. Previously I was using a 27" Mitsubishi CS27MX1 TV. The sharpness of the picture was great, but it suffered from what appeared to be "doming". Basically I would get purple blotches on bright sections of the screen. This would happen in games as well as on white screens (like in notepad).

The new TV is an ILO DTV2794 27" TV. I got it for $189 from Walmart. I think it's actually the same as the Orion TVD2710. It has S-Video as well as Component Video in and powers on automatically after power loss. I notice that the picture is not nearly as "sharp" as the Mitsubishi. Text is now much more blurry. Note that I am using S-Video and not component because I have the Act Labs TV Light Guns and they only support S-Video.

The good news is that my "purple" color problem is gone.

Update! 08/04/2007 - It seems that the Act Labs light guns are not compatible with this TV. I noticed that shots were only registering on about 25% of the screen. I emailed Act Labs and they informed me that my TV was not compatible. I have since switched to the EMS LCD Topguns.

Update! 08/19/2007 - I have an update on this. I was having a problem with the component cable that came with my X800 Pro. Today I switched to the ATI DVI to Component dongle that is available for some of the other ATI cards and now everything is working fine. It seems that the component adapter that comes with the X800 is the problem.

Overscan was a serious problem. I went into the service menu of my TV using the "hold the volume down on the TV and hold 9 on the remote" method and was able to adjust my picture so that whole thing now fits on the screen.

The quanilty of the Component input on this TV is much better than the S-Video and I am happy with the results so far. The text in Windows is now clear and fairly easy to read.