But when I used to sneeze on my Amiga monitor, it magnified pink dots. Do Amiga use a colour combination other than the generic red/green/blue one?No,
Amiga monitors are
red,
green and
blue too. But amiga monitors were designed for a low, fixed resolution, and have a different pixel structure in order to make the picture look less '
blocky'.
PC monitors must cope with lots of different resolutions, and must produce nice sharp lines, so the phosphors are laid out in nice rows, producing nice sharp pixels (in this case, five blue ones, on a white background. The phosphors are each 2 characters tall, by one wide.
Just Because.):
RGBRGB--B--B--BRGBRGBRGB
######--#--#--##########
RGBRGB--BRGB--BBRGBRGBRGB
######--####--###########
RGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGB
########################
On an amiga, this would make an individual pixel look like this
RGBRGB--B--B--BRGBRGBRGB
######--#--#--##########
RGBRGB--B--B--BRGBRGBRGB
######--#--#--##########
RGBRGB--B--B--BRGBRGBRGB
######--#--#--##########
Which would look like a giant rectangle.
:(
So the phosphors are laid out in a triangle pattern instead:
r g b r g b r g b r g b
g b r g b r g b r g b r g
r g b r g b r g b r g b
g b r g b r g b r g b r g
r g b r g b r g b r g b
g b r g b r g b r g b r g
r g b r g b r g b r g b
g b r g b r g b r g b r g
So a pixel looks like this
r g b r g b r g b r g b
g b r g b r g b r g b r g
r g b r - b - - b r g b
g b r g b - - b r g b r g
r g b r - b - - b r g b
g b r g b - _ b r g b r g
r g b r - b - - b r g b
g b r g b r g b r g b r g
Which is much more pleasant on the eye. And because the pixels aren't in nice rows, the
refracted rays aren't all coming from the same place, so it's more likely that rays entering your eye are from more than one color of phosphor, so the spots won't be simply red, green and blue.
Phew!
TVs are also laid out like this. But TVs were designed to display fuzzy demodulated UHF signals, and their pixels are even bigger. If you've got an old amiga monitor kicking around, get a good scart cable and attach it to your sky digital box/playstation. Unfortunately, monitors don't have remotes