I saw an auction for a (nother) Sharp X1 Turbo Z and this monitor – a Sharp CZ-600DB. Usually this stuff goes on Yahoo Auctions with the standard auction format, and it gets bid way expensive and finishes arbitrarily high. But I happened to catch this one with a fixed price – first to buy it gets it. The price was very reasonable for these items. The catch? It was untested. It was a toss of the dice that I couldn’t pass up.
As you can see, it was designed with the same aesthetics as the Sharp X1 Turbo Z. They look very handsome together, although I believe officially this is supposed to be a monitor for the X68000.
So I bought it and it was delivered to me and having these things shipped just makes me so gosh-darned nervous because even when they’re tested working, there’s a chance it will suddenly die from being used again after so long, or there was some internal damage during shipping, or the seller’s testing didn’t uncover some problems. Not even knowing if it’s *supposed* to work makes me all the more anxious! I opened it up and after removing some sticker residue, it looks quite nice.
But when I turned it on it looked pretty bad. Through composite, it had a very faded image and slanted horizontal lines running the whole screen. I switched to digital RGB and it got worse. I could barely discern that the monitor was receiving the signal at all, nearly nothing but those horizontal lines.
And then I left it alone. I let it sit for about an hour. When I came back to it, the picture had cleared up 100%. It was beautiful!
Turning off and right back on had no negative effect. But when I left it off for about an hour, it took about 10 seconds to reach the correct black level. When I finished for the night, I left it unplugged for about 18 hours. Upon plugging it back in, the horizontal lines were back. Nowhere near as strong as the day before, and it cleared up in about one minute. I guess it’s a capacitor problem.
Like my NEC PC-TV455, the CZ-600DB is a tri-sync monitor (15kHz, 24kHz, and 31kHz) and it incorporates a TV tuner. The CZ-600DB lacks a couple of connections that the PC-TV455 has, but it still has some pretty good hookups. It’s also a 15″ screen instead of 14″.
And plenty of controls to get just the right picture.
It came with the original factory stickers in place. I’ll be the first to admit, if it were me and I received this new at the time, I’d probably rip them right off and throw them in the trash. But they’ve been attached for 30 years now, so I think I’m just going to keep it that way!
I don’t know if it will surpass my PC-TV455 as my primary monitor in the long run, but right now I am enjoying looking at this lovely item perched above my own X1 Turbo Z.
Here it is displaying text and DoorDoor over analog RGB, and Haja no Fuuin on my PC-8801mk2 over digital RGB.
