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Unico phoenix monitors - Opinions?

This whole ongoing situation gives me the creeps as a potential future interested customer. They need to scrap this monitor, cut their losses and go back to the drawing board. Look at OLED as a premium option too, or at least something that doesn't have bad LCD blur.
What does this say about their faux Astro cab monitor too? Details are still scarce 🤷‍♂️
 
GeorgeSpinner said:
This is interesting.
Any idea what a good interface board would be?
I didn't see any that supported 1920x1440.
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I haven't had a chance to look into LVDS controller board yet. Says on panel look these are for gaming, I wonder who they are making them for ..... and what board they are using. I find the quality of the board/firmware is almost as important as the panel, my acrooda 21" LCD (which uses an LG panel) has a somewhat gimped controller and really could of done with more features negating the need to use something like a GBS8200.
 
So I just did a quick measure and the 'active area' on a Toshiba PFX comes in at around approximately 412 x 542 allow for a bit of error as its set back from the glass but the physical size of the sharp panel is almost the same as the active area on the PFX.

Sharp Outline Size 408(W)x536(H)
PFX active area size 412(W)x542(H)
 
From Unico's facebook page:

Do you want or need the fixed converter board for your Phoenix Monitor Series ULM26 26" Arcade CRT Replacement LCD Monitor.
We understand some will want one as they have a need to fix issues and others will not need one according to its use.
Please e-mail: updates@unico-usa.com
Please include your order or order numbers when replying. There will be no charge for the actual converter board replacement only applicable shipping to your destination mailing addresses.
We will give this two weeks to wait for responses then start shipping all requested replacement converter boards.
An email to all customers who have bought a ULM26 will be going out for those who don't follow our social media.
 
The emails for the replacement boards have finally been sent. I just received my link to the website listing and paid the $20 shipping cost. Pretty high price for what it is, but I guess it would sting less if I needed several.

Regardless of how good or bad the replacements are, I have to say that the communications from Unico has been atrocious and borderline unacceptable for a company that would be taken seriously and isn't just a Chinese drop shipper. Just the email request took well over a month (not counting the months long wait to even be allowed to send an email), with radio silence in between, and they are mostly unresponsive on social media. The Nova Blast delays are especially bad. Buyer beware, this isn't the first time they had problems, and it probably wont be the last.
 
I would agree that their logistics and comms need ALOT of work.... and their ability to hold to a schedule. They did seem to at least respond fairly quickly on facebook when I would post things, but they often just had the estimated dates WAY off.

I mean, I got my phoenix 25" monitor 13 months ago, and its taken them this long to get new driver boards ready. That seems like a crazy long time to me. I really hope these driver boards work as expected.

Matt
 
At least they actually bothered to respond to you. They rarely, if ever would response to anything I said, except during a longer private message chain way back when the whole resolution and response time debacle was under heavy discussion and Unico was asking me questions.

At minimum, I'll test and post lag numbers when the board is in my hands. I'll also be interested in checking the resolution, image resizing, and gamma performance, although it'll mostly just be me eyeballing it and giving an opinion rather than any sort of serious test.

EDIT: As over the evening of 9/4/2024 Unico has privated or deleted their Facebook page and may have been deleting comments on IG as well. Not a good look from a public relations standpoint. Nevermind, the page is back now.
 
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Mine supposedly arrives today, but I have my doubts since tracking indicates that it was delivered to the Bakersfield USPS postal office... which is about 140 miles or so from where I live. If it does actually show up, then I'll probably play around with it and see if there's any noticeable improvements.

Edit: My tracking info shows my ordered as delivered in Bakersfield. Hopefully they just mixed tracking #'s up with a different order and they didn't just send my PCB to the wrong address...
 
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Ok - well, at the lack of predisposing people - I have dome a myriad of tests with my boards here. All at 15khz, over RGBS - CPS1, etc. that show up as 60hz - easy to dial in the geometry and after a bunch of fiddling with some acronyms I don't know what they mean - I have gotten it looking pretty decent.

My big issue is with Midway boards, that show up on the screen as running at 55hz. I CANNOT get the two games that I have here to be full screen - there is always part of the bottom cut off. I have tried with Mortal Kombat 3 and with NBA Jam TE.

Also - on RGBs input - brightness has NO effect - 0 level or 100 level, brightness is the same (was trying to dial it down a little bit and noticed).

Edit - at least on RGBs - the 3 pot's on the back seem to control brightness of each channel, so can adjust those to dial down the brightness.

Will be curious to other folks results.

Matt
 
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mathewbeall said:
Ok - well, at the lack of predisposing people - I have dome a myriad of tests with my boards here. All at 15khz, over RGBS - CPS1, etc. that show up as 60hz - easy to dial in the geometry and after a bunch of fiddling with some acronyms I don't know what they mean - I have gotten it looking pretty decent.

My big issue is with Midway boards, that show up on the screen as running at 55hz. I CANNOT get the two games that I have here to be full screen - there is always part of the bottom cut off. I have tried with Mortal Kombat 3 and with NBA Jam TE.

Also - on RGBs input - brightness has NO effect - 0 level or 100 level, brightness is the same (was trying to dial it down a little bit and noticed).

Edit - at least on RGBs - the 3 pot's on the back seem to control brightness of each channel, so can adjust those to dial down the brightness.

Will be curious to other folks results.

Matt
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It sounds like it doesn't not support 55hz like all my consumer CRT TVs.

That's how Midway boards display on them.

That's pretty disappointing for an arcade monitor.
 
mathewbeall said:
Ok - well, at the lack of predisposing people - I have dome a myriad of tests with my boards here. All at 15khz, over RGBS - CPS1, etc. that show up as 60hz - easy to dial in the geometry and after a bunch of fiddling with some acronyms I don't know what they mean - I have gotten it looking pretty decent.

My big issue is with Midway boards, that show up on the screen as running at 55hz. I CANNOT get the two games that I have here to be full screen - there is always part of the bottom cut off. I have tried with Mortal Kombat 3 and with NBA Jam TE.

Also - on RGBs input - brightness has NO effect - 0 level or 100 level, brightness is the same (was trying to dial it down a little bit and noticed).

Edit - at least on RGBs - the 3 pot's on the back seem to control brightness of each channel, so can adjust those to dial down the brightness.

Will be curious to other folks results.

Matt
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Did you need to cut a pin to install the board? On my monitor pin 6 on the LVDS was cut. I cant fit the socket onto the LVDS on the new PCB because pin 6 for that board wasnt cut
 
I just plugged in my Namco246 - and again, the brightness doesn't work at all... I had to adjust the POT's on the back... I REALLY hope that the expectation isn't that I have to unmount the monitor everytime I put a new board in to adjust the brightness - and having to do that on 3 different color pots is super annoying.

I have also posted over on facebook to see what Unico says. I even offered to be a beta tester for them, as I had known boards that had issues (primarily midway boards).

Matt
 
I did a bunch more testing, and with NBA Jam TE - I got the geometry almost right - just a little but cut off on top and bottom, but the screen is way too dark - POT's are set all the way up. Same with UMK3 and SmashTV.

I was chatting with Unico on facebook - asking if the brightness in the menu is supposed to work, because it doesn't work on my board - either RGBs input or VGA.

using a 60hz board like CPS1/2/3 - geometry is easy to get perfect, and you can dial in the color with the pots pretty easily.

I still don't like the idea of having to UNMOUNT my monitor and pull it out to do color adjustments everytime I put a new board in though.

Matt
 
Some initial thoughts:

- Installation was annoying. On my original PCB, Pin #6 on the LVDS was cut, and the Dupont housing blocked this pin off. I ended up using a micro drill bit to cut a hole into the Dupont housing, since cutting Pin #6 on the new PCB would be really difficult due to it's location (bottom row of a 90 degree soldered connection)

- The OSD is much better than before. The controls have been unreversed as well. The image size and position adjustments work fairly well in VGA.

- VGA has some issues. Color and gamma seems considerably worse when compared to HDMI, and interlaced video is garbled in VGA. I've only tested low resolutions with MiSTer so far, so my results might be different after testing with arcade boards later. I've tried messing with the RGB pots as well as the OSD controls, and I wasn't able to get a good result using the SNES 240p test suite. The last 6 or so steps of the Color Bar Test just blends together no matter what settings I tried to adjust.

- Total display lag performance has improved. Performance is also still fairly consistent across VGA, HDMI, interlaced, and progressive video signals. The exception is interlaced VGA, which I can't test due to the aforementioned garbled image problem. When measured from center, I'm getting somewhere between 10.4ms to 10.8ms, which makes the total dispay lag vs my PVM roughly 3.4-3.8ms. Roughly 2ms faster overall compared to before.

- There's some scaling weirdness with HDMI still. Win11 might be to blame, since the OSD kept seeing 1080p no matter what signal I tried.
 
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