Thank you COVID-19 for the motivation and time to get my awesome, old, contraption working. – In the words of some great, ancient philospher “I tinker therefore I am”.
After many moons of trying – I finally managed to ‘frankenstein’ my old Apple 30″ inch Cinema Display to work with modern equipment. I still say this is the best display I have ever owned – costing more than my MacBook Pro from the early 2000’s. Shown here powered by my shiny new iMac with 5k retina display (which looks great in this night-time photo but is so shiny I can’t use it when the sun comes out).
Insipred by this video from Harris of iDB, I decided to give her one more try before caving in and buying something like the BenQ thingy with a bunch of interfaces (multiple HDMI, DisplayPort, Mini DisplayPort and ThunderBolt 3 (similar, but different to USB-C) for daisy chaining two 4k monitors from a single modern computer.
My old Cinema Display had been in constant use from when I bought it soon after the turn of the century. That was, until my work ‘upgraded’ my old Microsoft SurfacePRO (with Mini DisplayPort that powered the old beast to its full 2560×1600 resolution) to a managed ‘Levnovo’ shitbox clone of same. I tried every adapter in the book (or at least in the photo below – purchased at my own expense) and made many more servicedesk requests that I care to remember – all to no avail.
Then, sadly, my favourite old MacBook Pro (unibody A1286 circa 2008) gave up the ghost, and could not be persuaded to power up (even after judicious tinkering and attempts to ‘hotwire’ with the assistance of Matt). Add to this the fact that my wife’s old MacBook Air with MiniDisplayPort that works with the display, has nearly run out of (120GB) space – and therefore “needs replacement”.
So, I began searching for the ‘Stone docking station by Henge’ (I see what they did there), mentioned in the YouTube by Harris at iDB – and sadly – they only seem to be available in the UK.
So, I put my isolation to good use and started to search more carefully for docks and adapters that support the DVI-Dual Link mentioned by Steve Jobs at the launch of the 30″ Cinema display. Bingo – I found some products that mentioned ‘Active adaptors and specifically addressing the 2560 x 1600 native resolution of my thirty inch beast. I found this little $AUD 290 adapter:
Mwave had none in stock, so ordered one from this little eBay store. It (eventually) arrived and worked perfectly with my work LENOVO surface at full res but on my 2019 iMac it showed as: “Cinema HD with max resolution of 1280 x 800” – DANG!
A quick search or three: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8439790 To see all available resolutions for your monitor press and hold down the option/ alt key whilst clicking on the Scaled button in displays preferences. Revealed 2560 x 1600 which works perfectly when selected.
Thanks StarTech.
a blog by Mike Seyfang 