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38-Inch LCD Panels
MasterDevelopers.com writes, "How about this for a laptop screen? Rainbow Displays is building the world's largest LCD displays coming in at 38 inches diagonal. It's a cool way that they do it, combining four 19" panels into one large one in a way so that you can't see the seam between the panels at all. Look out plasma displays; LCD may be making it in the big screen format."
Some quick math:
;)
2x2 display, 36" diag
800x600 fmv resolution
Chopping each dimension in half (to give stats for individual displays) gives us:
4 displays, each 18" diag
400x300 res per display
Ick...imagine running 400x300 on a standard 19" monitor (most are 18" viewable diag)...this is the resolution we're talking about.
When they can link 4 1600x1200 capable screens of the same (18" diag) size together seamlessly, and provide total resolution of 3600x2400 - then we'll talk
(just imagine the video ram you'd need for something like that!)
The link to the person who submitted the article Masterdevelopers.com just happens to have a nice little interview with our one and only hemos it's a nice little, fluff piece :) read it if you like
Sgt Pepper
Lame Sig Shamelessly Ripped from
Fortune:
Grandpa Charnock's Law:
You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.
[I thought it was when your kids learned to drive. Ed.]
No question that Firewire/IEEE 1394 was built from the ground up for these kinds of applications:
w Fast
http://www.pavo.com/ieee1394/faq/1394faq.htm#ho
Presently the fastest implementation is S400, which runs 393.216Mbits/s (megabaud). Future standard extensions may run up to 1200Mbits/s! And like SCSI, these are only effective over very short distances.
Just like USB will soon completely replace serial connections, Firewire will probably eventually replace all parallel, SCSI, and video connections, not to mention its potential for things like home networks combining data, telephone, and video interfaces. It's already becoming a standard for full-motion video interfaces.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Why such a high resolution?
It sounds nice, sure, but do we really need it? I mean, most monitors now are supposed to be around 72 DPI and the pixels on them are fine. And while the size of a screen increases, so does the practical viewing distance so you can get away with even larger pixels.
This doesn't mean I don't want one, but we can do it cheaper than that.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Apple's Studio Cinema Displays cost $4,000 each, and are only available with the purchase of an expensive G4 tower.
For more information, click here.
I might be wrong, but doesn't those screen still have the problem with a limited view angle?
According to Philips's Password magazine, they have overcome some of this problem with "simple compensation foils". They also have a Colour 3D-LCD Evaluation Kit.
If only they would combine the two.
You know, that would be a good poll, "How many terminal windows do you keep open at a time?" (0; 1; 2; 4; 8; Until I run of processes; What, you mean like DOS?)
It is about 4 for me, because I like to keep them all in the same workspace. This naturally means that the more screen I have, the more terminals I have. Mmmmmm, CLI....
EE Times pointed out how the technology could take 2 inch by 2 inch screens and glue them together.
Given the excess capacity in the small market, and how cheap a 2x2 is, we can get big displays from small.
21 inch displays for under a grand in 3 years was what caught my eye.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
The problem with really big displays is that the computer can't send enough signals to the screen to get a decent refresh at a high resolution. It'd probably be possible to get 2048x1530 or something ludicrously high like that, but you'd have to accept visible rescanning rates. In other words, completely useless for typical applications.
Since LCD displays are digital, it shouldn't be hard for the display to include memory and buffer the image on the screen. It might do that anyway.
Firstly i would say that I am very pleased to see Philips involved in this, since I have a great deal of respect for this firm (for those who don't know we owe the the audio casette and the CD)
In the web page, though, it was stated that the diplay supports full motion video @800x600 which makes it quite useless for the desktop (at least for now). After all, of you had a 36'' monitor, it would be a shame to use it at a resolution smaller than 2000. And I guess that LCD doesn't go that far for the moment.
Then again, the first purpose would be large panels for public sites and I think what they provide is enough.
And as a mean question : on the site says that the announcement was made on Nov 9 1999. Don't you think this is a bit old even for a boring Sunday ?
I don't see driving the thing as a serious problem. Worst case, you drive it using a multiple-monitor setup, with multiple graphics cards. And for many applications, you don't need fast update anyway. Flicker isn't an issue; this is an LCD, not a CRT.
The image could be scaled in order to make the Window$ controls recognizable, the same way a single-piece LCD with 1024x768 pixels displays at 800x600. Of course, since this is a 38-inch screen, the effective resolution (not the actual hardware resolution) would be rather less than 72 ppi.
Once you see a Rainbow display, you will be amazed at the image quality in a large flat panel display. We invite you to see it for yourself! You will then agree that Rainbow has created a display with excellent image quality, and most importantly: NO VISIBLE SEAMS!
If it was really that seamless then why aren't there any pictures on the website. The graphic that depicts the four displays becoming one seamless display doesn't convince me.
Ok, so there are a few screenshots at http://www.rainbowdisplays.com/news/ images.htm, but they really should have some closeups so you can see how seamless it really is. Such a small image of such a large real estate doesn't convey much.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
I might be wrong, but doesn't those screen still have the problem with a limited view angle?
A few years ago, almost all LCD screens were like this. Unless you were almost directly in front of the screen, you couldn't see anything (or the colors were inverted). But advances have been made in LCD technology and most of today's LCDs look great from almost any angle.
I've wondered for years why nobody has done LCD's that way. Perhaps because until recently it would have resulted in a product more expensive than a new car ;-)
The best part is that it scales beyond 2x2; you could do an entire wall that way (assuming you have the budget for it). The problem then is that it's even beyond HDTV resolution or 35 mm, so you would have trouble finding what to show on it.
But the SCSI bandwith is nowhere near enough to drive a monitor. Case in point:
A monitor running at 1600x1200x24bpp requires about five and a half megs of video memory to display. The fastest SCSI specification has 160MB/s bandwith. Since display needs to be sent to the monitor in full every time the monitor refreshes, we divide the two to get the refresh rate. So, in the best case, we get a refresh rate of 29Hz.
By the way, even AGP 1X has something like 532MB/s bandwith. There is certainly a reason why we have video cards instead of SCSI monitors.
More interesting to me is the software constraints of running at super-high resolutions (36inch 200ppi). Very few operating systems offer the ability scale icons or font size on your desktop. This obviously needs to be changed before any super high-res displays can be adopted. The hardware will surely catch up in time to support these displays, it always does.
LSD is paper thin, and projects beautiful imagery of a fantasy world across your whole field of vision. Forget about thick "panels", kludgey technology like this 38" screen, or cumbersome technology like heavy headsets -- all you need is LSD, and I think it might be cheaper.
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fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
There are a couple of possibilities on this one. One of the major problems that keeps LCDs so expensive is errors in the manufacturing process. Every manufacturer allows a certain number of pixels per specified size to be bad to keep the rejection rate down, but the process still leaves a lot of bad screens, and so a lot of work and materials are wasted.
:: Technology never does move fast enough for me.
The question that needs to be answered to determine if costs go up or down is the accuracy of the joining process. If it is very accurate, can be done by machine, and has a low failure rate, the costs could well go down significantly, as each rejection would be of a smaller part, meaning less work and fewer materials wasted. If it is a painstaking process, the materials question remains about the same, but the work costs can go up, meaning no reduction or possibly an increase in size.
One interesting possibility with this technology is a sort of "Lego" function, where you could snap in more and more of them (this would require some very tight manufacturing tolerances) to create larger screens on your own. This would allow not only individual consumers to build to the size they need (gamers go for larger traditional screens, graphic artists and webmasters go for wider screens, etc.), but companies could create screens that fit into their decor. Another upside with this is that if you have a panel that starts to have an unnacceptably high number of bad pixels, you swap it out for a new one.
:: sigh
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I wonder if screens with this technology could be folded at the seams?
If so, IBM should take the idea of their Thinkpad folding keyboard and apply it to displays. I'd like to see a laptop screen that folds out to > 17" inches.
The only other way I can see to make laptop screens bigger is to increase the length and width past the "notebook" size, which makes the laptop less portable.
The real questions with this display combination thing are "What's the best balance between number of displays and their size?" and "Do they sell a product like that?"
They have a display made from four displays 1/4 the size, but would it be more or less expensive to combine 9 1/9 size or 16 1/16 size displays? I'm thinking that if the joining process is cheap enough, you could have displays made up of 1" squares, thus reducing the cost of each display (fewer pixels to go wrong), and the entire display, to a point, that point being where the cost of joining (and calibrating) the little displays meets the savings of having smaller units.
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Seeing is believing; You wouldn't have seen it if you didn't believe it.
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Is a 36 inch, 200 ppi display. Of course, we wouldn't have any chance of taking advantage of that resolution at that size.
The problem with really big displays is that the computer can't send enough signals to the screen to get a decent refresh at a high resolution. It'd probably be possible to get 2048x1530 or something ludicrously high like that, but you'd have to accept visible rescanning rates. In other words, completely useless for typical applications.
I think that we should be concentrating on increasing the bandwidth that we can send to the monitor. Why not run a fiber-optic cable from your computer to your monitor? Put that SCSI interface to work providing you with the bandwidth you need, to your monitor, not your CD-ROM!
Besides that, we could use a different system for screens...field-emission might work. Something that could get the information from your cable to the screen faster. IIRC, field-emission can be based on Carbon-60, a superconductor. That'd probably translate into at least a small increase in speed.
But there's one more problem. If you have a 36" 200 PPI screen, it doesn't matter if it can handle super high resolution. You need the hardware to handle it. Depending on what you're doing, it might take huge amounts of processing power to display pictures on that screen. Of course, some things (like DVD movies, which don't need processing to display) would be easy to display and would therefore look great and be big (although other's have pointed out that this resolution is even higher than HDTV, maybe burn your movie onto FMD..?).
But who can say what tomorrow will bring? (ha, that look like a signature, but it isn't!) I've no idea what MIT will announce tomorrow, maybe someone in a secret collaboration between Sony, IBM, and DaimlerChrysler that will produce 12' 200 PPI screens that automatically drive around on a truck chassis next to you so you can always check slashdot.
But I doubt it.
Then again, I could be wrong.