What do you guys do with your old monitors?

1Wolf

1Wolf

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 10, 2007
Messages
433
Probably an odd question. My wife and I are preparing to move, cleaning out old computer stuff and we have these old CRT monitors. An old Dell Trinitron 21" color monitor (Thing weighs about a ton...holy crap I forgot how heavy those things were...thank god for flat panels) and an old ViewSonic 17".

What do you guys do with your old monitors? Do you just recycle them? Does anyone have a use for those old things anymore?
 
Keep them all, and use them for servicing other peoples PC's, and I use a few for my backup PC's.
 
I keep them. CRTs kick the crap out of LCDs anyway as long as they're in working order, without color drifts, focus loss or outright blown flybacks, and it sounds like one of yours is a Dell P1110 or something along those lines - the next best thing to the Sony GDM-FW900. Take good care of it, for that's a mighty fine CRT you have there.

This goes double for my retrocomputing tastes, where not being bound to native resolutions and their rescaling artifacts helps a lot, along with the other quirks of analog VGA input on LCDs. I noticed my Voodoo2's output just looks a hell of a lot better on CRT than on LCD, too; I suspect it's part of that 3dfx dithering/filtering that doesn't get captured in screenshots.

Older LCDs tend to suck because they're often VGA-only (I insist on at least one DVI port) and cheap, low-res TN panels at that, but hey, if you can nab 'em for like $10 or less at a thrift store or a yard sale, it never hurts to add more screen real estate. Some people can never have enough monitors. Bonus if the old LCD turns out to be, say, some old 20" 1600x1200 S-IPS NEC MultiSync (no joke, I only passed up such a monitor last weekend because I didn't have a $10 bill in my wallet and nobody around me did either) instead of your typical 1280x1024 or 1440x900 TN garbage.

Seriously, though, I'll be happy to take up any good CRTs - preferably aperture grilles (Trinitrons and Diamondtrons), but shadow masks are fine too if they're like the NEC MultiSync XM29/XV29/XP29 presentation monitors, huge 29" behemoths that go all the way down to 15 KHz RGB for all your retrogaming needs and without as much of the bulbousness that most cheaper shadow-mask CRTs have.
 
So far the only monitor I know I threw away by my hands was a Packard Bell CRT, which I kinda regretted, as it was still perfectly usable.

Otherwise, all monitors I have used were either part of a laptop, or I/my family have found additional uses for them. Haven't had any that required throwing away.
 
Threw mine away, had no use for them, it took up too much space and I had no need of keeping them anyway.
 
doanted most of them away the last went to recycling.
but that was like years ago
 
Staples will take up to 5 computing items per day per customer for free. Last trip was an old CRT, 2 keyboards, 1 LCD and a NFG laptop.
 
I recycled all my CRTs - I had 3x 21" LaCie's but they weighed so much they started to make my desk sag in the middle.
 
I still have a 2003 Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2070sb 22 inch crt sitting in a box in the garage. Every few years I hook it up out of nostalgia. Always forget how big and heavy that thing is. Can't get myself to throw it away.
 
I used mine until they quit working. Had a Sony fw900 wide screen and a Viewsonic Professional Series 21 inch 3:4. Both were miles ahead of any LCDs that were the rage at the time. Recycled them both at a place in Seattle called Re-PC. They took them off my hands free of charge. Still using a CRT for my HDTV and console gaming. Sony xbr910 with the Super Fine Pitch tube. 1080i, no motion blur, no input lag, great colors, deep blacks. Hoping it keeps working until OLED come down in price.
 
I either sell them, throw them away, or they go into the electronics graveyard residing in my basement.
 
Same thing I do with my old PCs: give them away to friends and family members who need them. It's too much trouble to sell them (seller's fees and shipping kill anything you would make on them on ebay). And throwing them away or recycling them would be wasteful and foolish if they are still working.
 
My system's previous monitor was a Samsung 2693HM, which has a 25.5" 1920x1200 display. I recently replaced it with an HP Omen 32, and now it's sitting in another room, not connected to another PC. After detaching it from my PC and putting it in the other room, I gave it its very first micro-fiber cloth cleaning, I'm impressed at how well the micro-fiber cloth cleans compared to a normal rag, or paper towels - it looks pretty much brand new.

I don't have any ideas yet for what to do with the monitor. If I sell it, I'd probably not get more than $100 CND, which makes me want to hang on to it for a backup, or secondary monitor for possible future purposes.
 
Yard sales and friends/family. I am the 'computer guy' so I always send out feelers if anyone needs a monitor. But I dont upgrade all the time, maybe every 3-4 years.
 
I bought mine old Dell 24 inch in 2003 I think for 1200 Euro. It was very expensive and it is still going strong as a second monitor for me :) It even has slightly higher resolution then Full HD.
 
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