Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!psuvax1!psuvm!jkt100
From: JKT100@psuvm.psu.edu (JKT)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Duped!!
Message-ID: <90284.232257JKT100@psuvm.psu.edu>
Date: 12 Oct 90 03:22:57 GMT
Organization: Penn State University
Lines: 44

(alternate title might be "Damn am I glad I own an Amiga!!"  :-)

The story goes as follows:

I've had an Amiga for a while.  Lately, though, folks have been claiming
that the Amiga isn't such a hot value anymore and that its video edge is
slipping drastically.  "A VGA 386 clone with 256 colors at once out of
a 16 million palette makes the Amiga look bad!"  Well, I sort of came to
believe them, but stuck with Amiga because I knew it had many other
advantages which more than made up for this deficiency.  We will call
my believing them Mistake #1.

Well, the company where I work uses PC's and Macs exclusively.  (I'm
trying to remedy this situation, but that is another story.)  The
CAD package we develop (MicroStation) has the capacity to render to
many styles of display.  The machine in my office has VGA and I finally
got around to doing some rendering today.  When I chose the highest
quality rendering, I noticed that I still got very poor color selection.
"This is strange - it's only using 16 colors and is dithering like mad
to get the shading."  So I went to the programmers and asked how to
get the full 256 colors out of my VGA.  This was Mistake #2.

What I got was a lecture about how VGA only does 16 colors in 640x480
and you have to drop to 320x200 (or whatever) to get 256 colors.  This
is something I told them I thought was a cheap shot by all the folks
hyping VGA and its wonderful palette.  They let me know pretty
quickly that I had been duped, just like a lot of other consumers.

So that's the story.  Sorry if it was anticlimactic for those of you
who knew VGA has this limitation.  But it sure was enlightening (and
rather gratifying as an Amiga owner) to learn this.  In a world full
of hype, it is nice to know at least ONE machine stands up to its
claims.    // forever!!!   :-)
         \X/

                                                            Kurt
--
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|| Kurt Tappe   (215) 363-9485  || Amigas, Macs, IBM's, C-64's, NeXTs, ||
|| 184 W. Valley Hill Rd.       ||  Apple ]['s....  I use 'em all.     ||
|| Malvern, PA 19355-2214       ||  (and in that order too!   ;-)      ||
||  jkt100@psuvm.psu.edu         --------------------------------------||
||  jkt100@psuvm.bitnet  jkt100%psuvm.bitnet@psuvax1  QLink: KurtTappe ||
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