On Wednesday, October 7, 1992 at 12:33:56 PM UTC-7, Marc N Barrett wrote:
> Over two and-a-half years ago, when the Amiga 3000 came out, many people
> remember how much I flamed the system because of the few improvements it
> offered in the overall characteristics that make the Amiga an Amiga. But to
> its credit, the A3000 did not head in reverse on any key technologies, either.
> The A3000 offered substantial improvements in areas such as display resolution,
> HD access, HD speed, and CPU speed. It offered no improvements in the key
> areas of sound and color graphics capabilities. But it was in no way worse
> than Amigas that came before it in any areas.
> The A4000 is a different story. With the A4000, the only substantial
> improvement is color. And it becomes clearer every day at just what the costs
> have been to improve the color capabilities. In the key area of display
> resolution, the A4000 is substantially inferior to the A3000, do to the fact
> that the A3000 has a Display Enhancer and the A4000 does not.
> The Display Enhancer in the A3000 is arguably its best feature. It allows
> all resolution modes (except for the Super HiRes modes, which are limited in
> color capability on the A3000 anyway) to be boosted to a high-quality 31Khz
> display. Resolution modes that were non-interlaced before are improved
> substantially by removing the scan-lines. And interlaced modes are now totally
> flicker-free. Because of the Display Enhancer, the A3000 is usable with lots
> of very high-quality monitors. I know one person who found a bargain on a
> 19" workstation monitor which syncs down to 31Khz, offers a brilliantly sharp
> picture with lots of colors (as many colors as any computer can put out),
> and just plain works beautifully with the A3000. With the Display Enhancer,
> the user never has to worry about whether or not his or her monitor can sync
> down to 15Khz because it never has to.
> The A4000 is a totally different story. At first, I was a little confused
> about the function of the scan-doubler and promoter features of the AGA Lisa
> video chip. I thought at first that Commodore had basically moved the
> Display Enhancer internally to the Lisa chip. I realise now that I was wrong.
> The scan-doubler is not new at all, and is present in pretty much the same
> form in the ECS Denise. In fact, it should be possible to generate the
> A4000's DblPAL and DblNTSC modes on any Amiga with the ECS Denise, but with
> very tight color restrictions. I have also found that the "Promoter" is not
> hardware at all, but simply a function of AmigaDOS 3.0. With 3.0, the OS
> can be told to intercept calls to open NTSC and PAL screens, and open DblNTSC
> and DblPAL screens instead. This has lots and lots of problems, though, which
> I will get to in a bit.
> The biggest problem with the A4000 by far is its lack of a Display Enhancer.
> With the A4000, it is no longer possible to purchase a monitor that will only
> handle scan frequencies of 31Khz and up. If an Amiga problem insists on
> opening a standard 15Khz NTSC or PAL mode screen, the screen will be opened
> at 15Khz no matter what. The "Promotion" feature of the OS only works for
> a tiny few, well-written Amiga programs, and no games. This means that a user
> of an A4000 will have to put up with a flickering display in programs such
> as PageStream, and games such as SimAnt and SimEarth that can open interlaced
> screens. And there will be nothing that the user will be able to do about it
> until the software is updated to support the A4000. Additionally, all games
> will have scan-lines on an A4000.
> It gets worse, though. With the A4000, it is no longer possible to use
> high-quality monitors that can only sync to frequencies of 31Khz and up. To
> be usable on an A4000, the monitor **MUST** be able to sync as low as 15Khz.
> This is because of the very reasons I stated above. If a user were to try to
> use a VGA or multisync monitor that cannot handle the 15Khz frequencies, the
> display would by reduced to garbage every time a program or game opened a
> 15Khz NTSC or PAL screen. Don't worry, it gets even worse than this. It
> turns out that the DblPAL and DblNTSC modes are output at 29Khz, not 31Khz.
> This means that if a monitor were used that cannot sync to frequencies lower
> than 31Khz, the only modes usable would be the few and unsupported VGA modes
> (including the Productivity mode).
> What would this mean to someone such as the person I mentioned above, who
> already has a monitor that cannot sync lower than 31Khz? If this person were
> to "upgrade" from an A3000 to an A4000, he or she would have to borrow a
> monitor that can handle the 15Khz frequencies just to boot the machine. This
> is because the A4000 probably defaults to a 15Khz 640x200 NTSC mode as it is
> configured out of the box. The user would have to borrow a low-frequency
> monitor just to adjust the preferences to yield a Productivity screen, so
> that the system would be at all usable. And even then the system would be
> only marginally usable, as every other program and all games produced a
> garbaged display on the monitor.
> In short, many A3000 owners who have been using high-quality monitors will
> have to replace their monitors with inferior ones usable on the A4000. I have
> thoroughly checked to monitors that can handle frequencies as low as 15Khz,
> and few such monitors have ever been manufactured. Many of the ones that
> were developed have been discontinued since I checked for them over two years
> ago. The Commodore monitors are just about the only monitors available now
> that will work with the A4000.
>
> The point of all of this is that it has become clear to me lately just how
> much the A4000 retrogrades in the important area of non-interlaced display
> resolution. The system is vastly inferior to the A3000 in this respect. So
> I seriously recommend that anyone considering the purchase of an A4000 not
> purchase one, at least until a Display Enhancer becomes available for it.
> Some people might want to simply abandon the A4000 altogether, purchase an
> A3000 instead, and upgrade it with a third-party video card as soon as DIG
> becomes available for the Amiga. (The A4000 retrogrades in more than just the
> area of display resolution, though. Due to its use of IDE instead of SCSI,
> the A4000 retrogrades in the area of HD access and HD speed as well)
> BTW, so far the odd-numbered Amigas (A1000 and A3000) have turned out to
> be the marginally good systems, and the even-numbered Amigas (A2000 and A4000)
> have turned out to be disappointing pieces of shit. I hope this trend does
> not continue. But even if it does, at least it bodes well for the A5000.
> ---
> | Marc Barrett -MB- | email: bar...@iastate.edu
> --------------------------------------------------
> Amiga 4000: JUST SAY NO!!!!

This is VERY dated information. I realize this is 30 years old, but people see the headline and take that as granted. The thing about the A4000 and where it shines is the fact that it was designed to be expanded! Put a top end graphics board in it and it can push the limits of even the best monitor out there! I use an MNT ZZ9000 in mine and the graphics are incredible! It also handles the scan-doubling, so no problems on modern monitors.
Other things with this card, unlike the A3000, with this graphics card, you have a USB port and drivers to make the USB Port read thumb drives! This gives you the ability to quickly and easily transfer data between your PC and your Amiga. Not only that, but with a Roadshow TCP addon board (plugs onto the MNT ZZ9000 graphics board), you have the ability to use this same card to connect to the internet! The same card also has a significant fast ram upgrade!

With cards like these, as well as other even higher performance accelerator cards, the A4000 DOES have its place. Most of what is in this article is very dated. By today's standards, the differences in hard drive performance, specifically SCSI vs IDE is nearly meaningless, because actual hard drives are almost never used these days! Most people use a compact flash adapter and make themselves a 16gb or 32gb hard drive on a CF and you are set. If you want to play around with say amiga unix, just put in a new CF and you have an entirely different hard drive. The A4000 is catching the emotional ire of people here that were hoping the Commodore and the Amiga would have continued on for decade, moving along to higher performance CPUs, etc., like the PCs did. Without any accelerators, the A4000 is the fastest Commodore Amiga made.