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

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

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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.