Another ticket to the 80s - CAF ProLITE 286/16 with Cherry MX blues

[JohnZD]

Hi Folks.

I found this beauty on EBay, offered by a local powerseller, carelessly photographed, very dirty, with a horrifying crack on top of the display case and of course in 'unknown condition'.

However, I couldn't resist, and was rewarded instantly when the package arrived on Saturday evening, when I was already quite drunk.

Slightly euphoric, I immediately connected it to the mains, and guess what - it was working flawlessly.

I have a penchant for those old amber gas plasma screens, and when I stroked a key fist, I was pretty sure this thing would have to put to use somehow. It's a Cherry MX blue keyboard, with double shot keycaps, arranged in a very interesting pattern: ANSI with German legends.

It weighs about 18 pounds - I bet the retractable, solid metal carrying handle alone is slightly heavier than a current Macbook.

And that's just the device alone - no batteries included, in fact not even as an option.

Only a steady stream of electrons from an outlet (preferrably from a nuclear power plant) can feed this hungry beast.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I would have thought that plasma would have good black level, but that's got worse black level than a typical LCD.

[JohnZD]

This is a different kind of plasma technology - think of it more like a flat panel neon bulb with a conductive matrix inside.

Although this type of screen lacks the resolution, colour capabilities or - as you say - contrast of modern PDPs, it has a very fast reaction time, which is a nice experience with DOOM.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Does this kind of panel have a specific name?

[JohnZD]

"Neon gas plasma" would be the most appropriate - hence the amber/orange colour. The technology is almost identical to the later RGB PDPs, but much simpler and without the ability to display true black.

Back in the late 80s, this was far superior to any LCD type screen, although supertwist and later active matrix TFTs made plasma screens obsolete quickly.

I own a Sharp luggable from 1991 with an active matrix VGA (!) TFT that looks quite brilliant, and my Siemens PCD-3NCSL from early 1993 is a whole another level again. My first mobile computing experiences started in the early 90s, and therefore I never owned one of these orange glowing monsters - until now.

A class of it's own is the electroluminescent display, seen in the GRID Compass and a few other early laptops. It has usually yellowish pixels, and the black is black in the meaning of the total absence of any active light, giving it a contrast of 1:infinite.