It warned you about that, but I don’t think actually frying a monitor was common. I was cautious, but I still made mistakes and gave it values that my monitor couldn’t handle, but the worst that happened was a dangerous sound coming out of the monitor and no useful picture on the screen. I immediately shut off my monitor when that happened, but it didn’t do any permanent damage.
Probably a cheaply made monitor might have issues, but well built monitors had hardware protection against invalid settings.
Many of the older monitors could let the smoke out if you gave it the wrong horizontal frequency. The better made monitors would limit the horizontal frequency to a safe value and just not sync if the video signal was outside that range. The later monitors were smart enough to not even try to display and invalid signal and may even show an error message on screen.
It warned you about that, but I don’t think actually frying a monitor was common. I was cautious, but I still made mistakes and gave it values that my monitor couldn’t handle, but the worst that happened was a dangerous sound coming out of the monitor and no useful picture on the screen. I immediately shut off my monitor when that happened, but it didn’t do any permanent damage.
Probably a cheaply made monitor might have issues, but well built monitors had hardware protection against invalid settings.
Many of the older monitors could let the smoke out if you gave it the wrong horizontal frequency. The better made monitors would limit the horizontal frequency to a safe value and just not sync if the video signal was outside that range. The later monitors were smart enough to not even try to display and invalid signal and may even show an error message on screen.