Comment by amiga386
3 hours ago
It was nice of the ST to offer a special black and white screen mode on a custom monitor. The Amiga had the memory bandwidth to offer the same, but chose to only offer PAL/NTSC and no other custom video signals at launch, probably to avoid making its display chip even more complicated.
The Amiga had a "professional" resolution of 1008x1024 PAL or 1008x800 NTSC, 4-colour greyscale with a 15Hz refresh rate via its A2024 monitor (which effectively sampled 4 screens worth of video output and stitched them together).
You could also buy a "flicker fixer" (later included internally in the A3000) which gave you full colour 640x512 at 25Hz or 640x400 at 30Hz if you didn't like interlace.
In 1990, the ECS chipset gave you "Productivity" mode (640x480 at 60Hz, 4 colours) and "Euro72" (640×400 at 70Hz, 4 colours) - there's a nice list here: https://amiga.lychesis.net/articles/ScreenModes.html
But different strokes for different folks. The Amiga distinguished itself by being easily genlockable to video and having a 4096 colour palette and 21kHz 4-channel 8-bit sampled sound replay in 1985. The ST distinguished itself by having MIDI ports and a choice of either monochrome monitor, or the TV (or a colour monitor based on NTSC/PAL) if you wanted to do anything in colour. It found its niche in controlling other musical devices.
But the ST did have a garish green low-res desktop by default.
I never knew anyone who used the ECS "productivity" modes. That would've required an expensive multisync monitor since other Amiga stuff would still need the 15 kHz support. The only useful feature of ECS, as far as I can recall, was support for additional chip RAM.