Black and White monitor?

Does anyone know if there's a way to make your monitor black and white? Maybe a certain driver or something? I guess the proper term would be grayscale of whatever number of bits.

For some odd reason I think it'd just be cool to do this and it would look neat. If you have Windows XP, when you shut down or log off, if you leave the little pop-up box up a while before you click shutdown or logoff, it turns the background, whatever was on your screen, black and white. That's what go me going on this...

anyway...

---John Holmes...

You're not alone in wondering:
http://www.driverforum.com/video4/22.html

The answer to your question isn't easy to find. I was able to find you a grayscale video card. Unfortunately it was for viewing X-rays and cost $4,950 (click here). How bad do you want this? The best I can tell, the ability to display grayscale is a property of the video card / driver. You need something that will display a color depth of 8 bits. Unfortunately, even the bottom line cards of some of the major video companies like ATI will only bottom out at 256 colors.

It may be that in order to get grayscale, you might have to give up True Color. In other words, a card wimpy enough to display grayscale might not have the range or power to display True Color very well, if at all. Then again, like my X-ray example above, there may be cards made specifically for the publishing or graphics design industry that would do what you want. If they exist, then they were too obscure for me to find quickly.

If I can't find it with Google in under five minutes, I have to want it really bad to keep looking.

Yeah, I don't want it that bad.

I did read something about where if the color-sync pin was bent, or disabled, it would result in grayscale on your monitor. I don't really want to ruin my cable to get this to work, though.

Oh well, thanks for the help.

---John Holmes...

Is it not possible to get a cheap extension cable and selectively remove pins on that instead ?

Actually, I think I have one of those. I'll have to give that a try. Anyone have a good link to what pins are what? I know... I'll be searching google for it, too...

---John Holmes...

What about your monitor manual?

FYI, the 15th pin is called SCL and it's the only one closest to what you describe but maybe it's only the terminology used.

Manuals are for losers.... I never read them.

---John Holmes...