The king of the discount mail order firms, Ehman Engineering, introduced a two page monochrome monitor (it can't do grey scale) at Macworld Expo last August. At the time we were rather interested in it because of its $899 price tag, but finance reared its ugly head and we ceased our investigation.

However, someone on the net recently asked for input on that specific monitor (obviously attracted by the small price on such a large screen) and received some interesting replies. Ehman received extremely good reviews on the quality of the monitor, although when the monitor was first available, a number of people had to wait for up to two months to receive their monitors due to the demand. Ehman's monitor received six recommendations to one each for Apple, Radius, and SuperMac (and no, the original request for information was not biased towards replies from Ehman owners). Some people who owned several monitors said they preferred the Ehman monitor to Apple or Radius monitors. Looks like a case of the low end striking back.

One of the most informative postings came from someone who had ordered one, having looked at all other two page displays without being impressed. He felt that the Ehman monitor is as good as or better than the standard monochrome displays that come with Sun workstations, though not as good as the NeXT MegaPixel display.

It has a refresh rate of 78 Hz and an image size of 1050 by 817 pixels at 72 dpi. The phosphor is standard P104 (if you know what that means, we don't) and cannot be upgraded to grey scale because the CRT inputs are digital, not analog. If you are using an SE or SE/30 at the same time, the small monitor is still usable. As an undocumented tip, one person found that you are given a choice of positions for the small screen if you hold down command-option while the Ehman monitor INIT runs. Other amenities include the necessary cabling, a card for an SE, SE/30, or Mac II-class machine, and in the overkill department, Stepping Out II for those who want the virtual screen size to be even larger than two full pages.

If you are worried about going the mail order route, Ehman has a two year warranty on the beastie as well as a 30-day money back guarantee. If you plan to attend a Macintosh show, you might be able to buy it even cheaper, as one person reported purchasing it for $745 on a show special. Pretty tempting, though we're still lusting after the full-page color display provided by PCPC's Flipper.

Information from:
John Hardin -- hardin@dino.cad.mcc.com
John A Feinberg -- feinberg@acsu.buffalo.edu
Shirley Kehr -- kehr@felix.UUCP
David Phillip Oster -- well!oster@apple.com
Rick Genter -- lti2!reg@lti.uucp
Jeff Stearns -- jeff@tc.fluke.COM
Ed Darken -- erd@cs.duke.edu
Robert C. Berwick -- berwick@ai.mit.edu