My 21” Apple CRT, for bulk pickup, but maybe for the gleamers…
A long while ago, back in 1999, I fondly purchased a used Apple 21” Studio Display. If you’ve never seen that model in person, I’ll say first that it was perhaps one of the largest and finest flat screen CRTs you could ever use for photography and design at the time. The color gamut was brilliant and it had a contrast range worth every dime. Of course, it also looked bizarre. Being an Apple monitor from the original Bondi iMac’s day, it was fabricated in a transparent blue and frosted plastic casing with a corrugated tripod base that made it look very strange yet “designy” on a desk, like a whale’s head sculpted by a futurist. Maybe that was the real premium. You either had taste for this or thought it was childish and repulsive, which is probably why Apple only sold them for what seemed like less than a year.
I had been looking for one for ages. If you found one used, they were significantly less overpriced than a brand new equivalent (less than a new LaCie or LCD Cinema Display), but still enviable enough to be a great find. Eventually, it became possible to get a studio quality Diamondtron monitor for less than $300, but the people who have the giant 21” Apple Studio Displays that still work and appreciate them often cling to them desperately like security blankets. Or that’s what I told myself, anyway.
This monitor was my trusty color-calibrated companion for years and years, despite the perpetual LCD temptations. For example, you could never hang this monitor on a wall. At one point, I drove with it across the country, some 3,500 miles, having it carefully settled into a passenger seat and then seat-belting it down for safety. It weighed about 90lbs and nearly broke my neck a few times whenever I picked it up. It hardly went anywhere without me making a nerdy fanfare about how hard it was to move yet “totally worth it.”
Then recently, its scanning started “popping,” and all too frequently the colors would go psychedelic until I would have to cycle its power on and off. I put up with this for months rather than acknowledging the inevitible. But tonight, after way too much careful introspection and reluctance on my part, it now waits alone by the curb for its next incarnation. I’m still a clinger, I guess.
We do love our technology, sometimes to the point of, if not insanity, at least counter-productiveness. That's why storage lockers were invented.
But I've spent too much recent time cleaning up accumulations of the past, including dead, or at least broken, technology and the world works best when we look forward rather than backward. If the companies and their techies are going to create new marvels that outmode the bits we favor, who are we to ignore their efforts and limit our efforts to what could be done years ago rather than what can now be done.
JD