D9200 Email Exerpt

I very much enjoyed your D9200 monitor review and can add some info after
fighting with nearly 150 of these beasts for MAME systems. Things like
convergence and purity are a bit hit and miss, usually OK but often not.
I'm also one of the ones that told Andy Warne about the light gun problems
with the D9200 early input boards. WG will usually provide the newer input
boards for free if you ask or I have the info in how to upgrade your older
input board if interested.

The problem you described:

"A scant two days after I originally posted this review, my D9200 monitor
failed - instead of a bright, colorful display, I now had a barely-visible
dim gray-green picture. (When reviewing a product, you always would like to
be able to comment on the service and support for a product, but you don't
often get the opportunity. This time, I got the chance!)"

This has happened to me MANY times often after months of perfect
performance. As you described WG did fine with service but the drop out
rate was approaching 10%.

I've been down to WG in person many times and their engineering and sales
people (including Jeff Gardner) are pretty much clueless as far as resolving
this. The electronics are done in Malaysia and shipped over here in
containers and mated to tubes locally.

What you would have found if you knew how to check is that the color gain
and bias settings had gotten messed up on your monitor. In factory mode
they can be restored and your monitor may have been fine from then on. It
got to the point where I started recording the initial gain and bias
settings so I could restore them quickly in factory mode versus
experimenting.

I switched to a new PC system recently and the D9200s started dropping out
even faster with trashed color gain settings. I've even loaned one of my
MAME PCs to WG to try to get a resolution and again no results from them as
it's very difficult to reproduce but happens for sure. After talking a
great deal with a WG engineer I learned that the color gain settings can be
changed with the correct signals going into the DB15 connector. I have no
way to prove it but I'd be willing to bet that something in the startup of a
MAME system is trashing out the color setting.

This was happening way too much for me to live with. In desperation I
contacted and ex-Midway employee I know. When he left Midway he worked for
WG for a while and then moved on to Incredible Tech. Incredible Tech
stopped using the D9200 in favor of a Neotec monitor their Trisync
NT-500DXB7. The Neotec site is apparently being worked on at this time as I
can bring up info but basically this monitor does everything the D9200 does
and is available in more sizes and tube types for around the same price.
You might consider doing a review on it.