Why in the world did Commodore choose to put a monochrome composite video output jack onto the A500/A2000?

They already had years of experience adding colour video output to their 8-bit line of computers (VIC-20, C64, TED, etc.)

The Amiga 1000 that came beforehand had composite colour output. The later A600 and A1200 had colour composite output.

But they chose greyscale / black & white video output for the A500 / A2000.

The Amiga was marketed as a multimedia machine - colour was important to its image. Why take this step backward?

Monochrome composite output is almost useless. I never used it. Did anyone really use this feature, other than for quickly testing your machine on a TV when a monitor wasn't available, or as a stopgap measure until you got afford a real monitor or an A520 RF modulator?

It seems like such a lost opportunity, too - as having a COLOUR video composite output would have been quite handy for desktop video people who wanted a secondary display, for hooking the Amiga up to a larger TV or video projector for presentations to groups, for recording the Amiga's colour video output to video tape, etc. etc.  It would also have helped sell the Amiga to those on a budget who wanted it only for gaming - they could have bought an A500 and hooked it up to a TV instead of buying a monitor.

But instead someone made the decision that it would be monochrome.  WHY?!

It just doesn't make a lot of sense, in retrospect.  There are only two reasons that I can think of that would explain why Commodore did it:

1. It saved a few cents of production cost per machine,
2. or initially there was no composite output planned for the A500/2000, and some innovative engineer figured out that it would be simple to add a monochrome (luma) output without adding much cost to the design.

Wasn't it something to do with word processing? green/gray screen typing was all the rage then.

Wasn't it something to do with word processing? green/gray screen typing was all the rage then.

Maybe, but a composite video output would barely give you the sharpness to do actual word-processing.  It would be pretty hard on the eyes, anyway.

They were trying to add features the Mac had.

Some say that using interlaced modes on the monochrome out flickers much less. Try it out and tell me if thats true.

I've had the RF output of Amiga 1200's and 600's hooked up to a B&W set, and it flickers just as bad. So my guess would be a "no". Couldn't imagine the mono output socket making a difference. I'd be surprised if it did. :laugh1:

Probably to save money. :-)

They did ship the a500's with modulators that have colour composite, so it wasn't completely a cost issue.
 
However it might have been cheaper and easier to build 50hz & 60hz Amiga's and then ship the appropriate one with whatever modulator is required for each country.
 
It might also have been a space issue.
 
I used both the RF and composite video from the modulator when I first got my a500 and it was fine for playing games.

The Biz market back in the 80's was 80%+ Monochrome because Colour monitors were quite a bit more expensive and so I supect that the composite output was to cater for that market.

I got given my c64 with a Composite Green monochrome screen and I remeberber seeing a lot of biz computers being mono only (in PC land it was MGA aka Hercules GFX cards).

iirc not having the extra colour pixels made for more pixels on mono screens and the GFX looked sharper and smoother as a result.

Just to be clear: The built in composite output of an A500 is way beyond PC land monochrome.  A500 composite is 64 shades of gray easily displayable at once from a palette of 4096 gray shades.

Using HAM mode or raster interrupts one can get all 4096 shades on screen at once.

To view the gray-scale screen in color one had to buy an extremely high-quality 1080 RGB Analog Color Monitor for $399.00 or spend $50.00 for the Composite color output adapter that so many of us have laying around in our closets that we have no use for.