So, how's your VGA out at 1920x1200?

Mine's awful. I think it may be the monitor's fault. :suspicious:

 

Well, you only have a VGA out, not DVI or anything. Check your cable (don't have any magnets or anything, including speakers near it), and make sure it's running as far from the back of the monitor at all times as possible. There are some big magnets that make a CRT make a picture, if that's what you're using. My output to a 1680x1050 LCD (highest res I've got) over VGA isn't bad. How does your screen look on DVI input, if that's available?

(btw, your Tsomething in your Macbook is a T7200 )

 

It is an LCD. I use the monitor with my desktop mostly, and my macbook some as well, both with DVI only. It looks fine on those. From the VGA on my HEL80, the picture doesn't match the monitor's pixels, and there is some blurryness in the text, even after I've adjusted the "clock" (whatever that is--monitor setting) to get the screen stretched out to roughly the right width. I could try one of those dvi-vga adapters with my desktop to see if it's the cable.

Alright. Tried aforementioned cable + adapter dongle, and it looks fine. Maybe a tiny bit less great than DVI, but plenty good; I wouldn't even rule out my imagination for the difference in quality. This really smells like some sort of potentially correctable misconfiguration issue to me. The monitor did some kind of auto-setup routine for a few seconds before it blinked on. Maybe it's getting bad setup data from my laptop somehow.

 

Any other comments on this? I plan to use the laptop to output to a 1920x1050 monitor

 

Well, it still looks a bit bad coming from my laptop. Adjusting the "clock" gets the picture to fill the screen. The "focus" gets the text looking right... sort of... it varies across the width of the screen, and always looks a bit wrong somewhere. It's not the cable. It's not the monitor. I guess it's either some conflict between the laptop and specific monitor, or something to do with the laptop itself, whether hardware or software.