Sony widescreen monitor display problem?

CNET staff

Sept. 1, 2009 11:29 p.m. PT

2 min read

David Kahn writes: "I've recently attached a Sony GDM-FW900 widescreen monitor to a 733MHz G4 via the built-in video port. The monitor comes with a special Mac G3/G4 adapter from Sony that's supposed to adapt the video signal to the widescreen format (1600 x 1200 and 1920 x 1440). While I can switch to either of those ratios and the image does fill the screen, the results are less than satisfying. All icons, text, images, etc. are horizontally stretched, rendering them all but useless. Not so much on the icons but very much so on graphics and photos. I contacted Sony's Tech Support about the problem. Their response was that I should not use the adapter and that Apple should ultimately provide a fix. I did try the monitor without the adapter, but had the same poor result."

Update: Dana Spiegel replies: "While I only have a DP500Mhz G4 machine with an ATI Rage 128 Pro card in it, I can tell you that the Sony Widescreen Monitor does indeed work as expected with this setup. You don't need the adapter, and the monitor works best if you use the BNC connectors (since the monitor has both VGA and BNC connectors on it, for 2 inputs). The resolutions that reported by David Kahn are not widescreen resolutions. They are standard 4:3 resolutions. If you want to run widescreen properly, you must use the 1600 x 1024 or 1920 x 1200 resolutions (the former is the standard resolution for the Apple Cinema Display). I have been using these resolutions for the past 8 months without problems on both PC and Mac. Finally, with the new NVIDIA cards, you may need to use the VGA connector on the monitor, since I believe that BNC doesn't properly send sense signals. I've had great luck using BNC with the ATI cards, but the NVIDIA cards may require VGA connections."

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