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."

Comments

You know slashdot is going downhill...

[Anonymous Coward]

When Bill?s so-called ?$mart quotes? start appearing on the main page.

"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."

Where can we see it at?

[Marvin_OScribbley]

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.

Re:Good way to do it!

[iMoron]

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.

Good way to do it!

[RickyRay]

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.

Re:Now, all we need...

[CrazyD]

Interesting
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.

How about LSD Panels instead?

[Fat Lenny]

You want flat, you want pretty, you want interactivity, you want it all to be big and bright? Use LSD, not LCD.

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.

--

Re:Cost effectiveness

[Martin Blank]

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.

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 :: Technology never does move fast enough for me.

Fold-out Laptop screen?

[AT]

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.

Cost effectiveness

[ForceOfWill]

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.

How it's done

[Money__]

More details on how it's done can be found here: http://www.rainbowdisplays.com/tech/i ndex.htm

_________________________

Now, all we need...

[Pufferfish]

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.