Zalman Stereo

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3d lcd

Zalman LCD Stereo for COOT

The first viable LCD monitor for stereographics display is made by Zalman and costs about $300: Zalman ZM-M220W

The attributes for this monitor have been tested and described rather extensively by Warren DeLano on the PyMOL site. Please read it for important details and suggested purchasing sources.


The following describes specifically how to get this to work with coot on Mac OS X, but the instructions should be generalizable to linux and Windoze. The beauty of this is that it is platform-independent and apparently works with pretty much any hardware (PC, mac, etc) and operating system.

Setting it up

The monitor comes with both a VGA and a DVI cable. If at all possible, use the DVI cable. Apple users will need to purchase an adaptor like the one pictured below:

31nBUURNRYL. SL500 AA280 .jpg

Plug in all the cables and verify the monitor is working. To get the stereo display to work, it is imperative that you turn display mirroring off. I placed the monitor to the left of my laptop, which required moving things around in the Display System Preferences. I also dragged the menu bar over to the external monitor to make in the primary monitor. This isn't so important for coot, whose menu is attached to the X11 window, but OS X pymol will drive you nuts if you have the menu on a separate monitor.

Invoking Zalman Stereo mode in COOT

Make sure "Hardware Stereo" is turned off.

As of now, there is no button for Zalman stereo mode. Instead, open up a scripting window, and issue the scheme command

(zalman-stereo-mode)

or else the python command

zalman_stereo_mode()

and you should then see a double image that looks like this:

Some Potentially Useful Scripts and Tweaks