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Wide Panel LCD Displays
fredz writes "EE Times has an interesting article on wide-aspect-ratio LCD displays. Samsung is adding a 24-inch diagonal display (20" W x 12.7" H). This is about the same height as a conventional 20" monitor, but a lot wider. There are also some smaller (and presumably cheaper) 17-inch diagonal (about 14"W x 10"H) displays.
" The SGI diagonal (18") is what I've been using for nearly a year now. LCDs are much easier on my eyes, but ya gotta accept the resolution you're given or things get yucky. The aspect ratio is interesting... I like having two comfortably wide browser windows side by side without overlapping. Now when Linux can play letterboxed DVDs ...
I think this should read "This is about the same width as a conventional 20" monitor, but much less high." or "This is about the same height as a conventional 13" monitor, but alot wider"...
You're kidding, right? Have you actually measured the screen size of a 20" or 21" monitor?
I'm currently sitting behind an IBM P201 20" monitor and an IBM P202 21" monitor. So let's get out the ruler and see...
P201: around 11.5" high, nearly 15.25" wide
P202: around 12" high and 16" wide
These are just rough measurements so +/- 0.25". In any event, neither of these are in the same ballpark as the 20" wide display in the article. Looks like the original poster was pretty close after all! How 'bout that?
I know it's nitpicking, but LCD means Liquid Cristal Display. So the term "LCD display" is, although used often, redundant. No need to write "Liquid Cristal Display display" :)
Under the view menu, you can turn off most of those stupid menubars (though on 3.1 most come back after any crash or anything slightly wierd.
Then take that stupid window to the left, drag it away so it floats, and nuke it, too.
Then again, I started grumbling about wasting my precious screen space when microsoft added the extra ruler in addition to the regular ruler in Word 3 (or was it 4???)
hawk
If you're actually using color, monochrome is kind of useless :)
:(
Overall, though, at the same level of technology, monochrome will be sharper. I just haven't seen a new, huge, monochrome for years . . .
Define "text editing window". I have, right now, on my desktop, two 66x120 xterms, with about a 2cm empty space to the right of them. (I normally have 66x80 xterms, but I widened a couple to see whether you could have two 120 column windows on the screen.)
Of course, the monitor I have on my desktop is the 1600x1024 SGI 1600SW (which is why I pay no attention to people who talk about how c00l their video cards are; unless it does OpenLDI, so that I can plug my SGI flat panel into them, I Don't Care, especially given that I don't use my machine for games^H^H^H^H^H3D interactive multimedia applications. Hopefully the I128 driver will get ported from 3.x to 4.x in a future XFree86 4.x release; 4.0 doesn't support it, and hence doesn't support the Revolution IV-FP card that came with the monitor - does anybody know of any other video card that can drive the SGI monitor?).
It can't do two Netscape windows at the width I use for Netscape, but it can, at least, do two 120-column xterms (those being what I do my text editing in)....
.. Once you go wide, you won't go back..
;) ;)
Now I just need to hook a DVD player + QuadScan (or hell, considering the price it's probably cheaper to build a HTPC w/Matrox G400 + DVD and have scaling from that) up to it. Though in principle I agree with DeCSS and have used it and the LiViD stuff to watch DVDs over 100mbps SSH, I still can't easily use the menus and features of the DVD, and my linux box at work does not and will not have a digital audio out. Still, I could possibly argue for having the DVD player and using it as a monitor stand
btw, that modeline again fro the Sony W900 (works be-yoo-tey-fully with Xf86 4.0 (thank you X4 for DDC support! I even got the monitor's s/n for its inventory sheet without having to turn it around)):
ModeLine "1920x1200" 245.500 1920 1984 2240 2584 1200 1203 1206 1250
Your Working Boy,
Is there a way to tell X that the window is about twice as high as it really is, and about half the width, then display on my monitor in 2-column format...? The problem with real estate is that I wind up with this big blank unused area called the right.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
In btw it is a standard VESA mode. Most older cards (95-97) used to support various awkward modes with inverse aspect ratio. Dunno about now. Guess I need to buy something new to replace my old faithful S3 and read the leafelet instead of drag-n-dropping it to the "rounded" folder.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Yeah, it's big an' sweet, an' I only seen the pictures!
It's a standard DVI connector, and Apple announced in the last week that they'd allow VARs to sell it independently of getting a full system. It's around US$4500 IIRC. Err... damn had the link somewhere. AH well.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I have an expensive Mitsubishi 22" flat CRT at home, and even though it supports similar resolutions, it isn't nearly as useful. I have to run a much lower resolution than the monitor supports to keep the text sharp, even with top-of-the-line cables and video cards. And what a desk hog!
I run a Dell (Repacked Sony or Princeton, I think) 21", and with my Riva ZX 128, I run 1600x1200x16bits and have great looking text all the time. What I had to do was make sure that I moved all other cables (esp power) away from the video cable. That made a huge difference.
Yeah, you are right about a desk hog. And, it's a real bitch to haul to LAN parties.
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
Perhaps movies will add a plot and characters, to distinguish themselves from TV.
"I like having 2 comfortably wide browser windows side by side without overlapping."
:)
Yes, so do I. But the need for that would be far less if web designers would design for less-than-fullscreen browsers instead of simply putting in a note about "best viewed at 1024x768". I do have a large screen (my favorite resolution being a custom 1440x1080 I designed for XFree because 1280 just didn't cut it and my monitor only does 75 Hz at 1600), but I refuse to open my browser in absurdly large widths just because some web designer couldn't think of somebody wanting to do something else besides browsing the site.
An especially ugly example is the web interface to german teletext. Try viewing this at less than 800 pixels width. The page navigation instantly becomes unusable (to use it, you have to scroll the window to the right, but after the next page appears, the slider is all left again), yet there is just a feeble bit of actual information on the page which would have fit in a 40x25 text window if it weren't for the graphics.
(In case anybody is interested in the modeline for 1440x1080 @ 95 kHz/85 Hz, tested and working on a 19" Belinea 106090:
# 1440x1080 @ 85 Hz, 95 kHz hsync
Modeline "1440x1080" 184.6 1440 1504 1664 1944 1080 1083 1086 1117
As always: No warranties that it doesn't kill your monitor, but at least it works for mine
Wider would be great I think for movies and some games would just rock that way.
However I prefer taller for most computer related work. I often place the monitor of my 2nd system beside the monitor of my primary system, however I did manage to set up my desk with one monitor above the other. I much preferred that since I found it much easier to glance up and down than side to side. I found working on documents or code with the display spilt between the 2 monitors, much easier to look at vertically on top of one another than side to side.
I have one of the Radius monitors on a IIFX, and just for a gag I tried it with a patch cable on my Matrox G200. Syncs up nicely at 768x1024 in X, but the annoying fact it is monochrome got to me. I also got my Rage to do it, but I really had to fight with the X server..
.sig: Now legally binding!
I'll give you the sharpness, but my frequent use of the Gimp, xawtv and xmms/Blur kinda accentuate the need for colour. Besides, my NEC 6FGp's reasonably sharp, and at 21 each definitly outscore the Radius in desktop real-estate.
.sig: Now legally binding!
I'm not going to claim that 17.3 inches is the ideal size for a family to huddle around in the living room," added Maunu, "but it does have an appropriate aspect ratio for content creation and business productivity, and if you're watching DVDs on your computer now, all the better if it's in a wide aspect ratio."
I have to agree with this, my girlfriend and I tried to sit in bed and watch the Matrix on her computer last week and it wasn't a very pleasant experience. Thinking about it now a wider aspect ratio would have made a lot of diference (and of course better speakers which I'll have to get for her now ). I hope this actually does begin a trend with PC monitors so that the price actually drops enough for a couple of college kids like us to buy it.
Anyone remember the Radius Pivot monitors, back in what, the late '80s? They were Mac monitors that you could rotate between landscape and portrait mode. When you rotated the screen, MacOS would know and resize the desktop and everything; pretty slick :) Portrait was good for fitting a DTP page on the screen... I don't remember what resolution those things ran at, maybe 624x832? Perhaps 768x1024...
What resolutions do these monitors use? I would assume that the standard 640x480, 800x600, etc. would look stretched since the monitor is more wide than usual. Also, it would be a disadvantage to use a non standard resolution because, most webpages and background images are made for the standard resolutions.
I am thinking that it might an option to run in standard resolution, with two black bars on the left and on the right(kind of like widescreen movies on normal TVs, just horizontal).
Anyway, I think this monitor would be excellent for playing DVDs or playing Quake with a bigger field of vision than usual(since it's wider, there would probably be a smaller distortion).
I have found exactly two uses for color:
1) marking keywords
2) looking at pictures of peoples kids--and I do that rately enough that it's not important; I can use another machine when it comes up.
Monochrome isn't just a little sharper; it's a lot sharper. There's no mask to get in the way.
However, I"ll admit to apprciating a slight improvement when I went to four bit greyscale on my powerbook a few years ago. 2 bit really wans't enough, and four would have been silly. But I'd generally prefer the sharper screen to the color.
hawk
Think about your eyes, you actually see far wider than you can see in height, try it and see.
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Laptop006
laptop006@netexecutive.com
Vic, Australia
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
When I worked coding on an Air Traffic Control system doing the Radar display I had the sort of screen space that made developing a breeze.
Connected to one box were:
1) 21" Trinitron monitor
And the best of the bunch
2) A 2048x2048 30" Flat Screen by Sony. A real beast of a monitor.
Requiring a £30,000 graphics box (Barco) plugged into an RS6000.
6 normal size emacs windows on the 30" and the app running on the 21". One day I shall have such riches again. I've never suffered from such information overload. Magic stuff
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Yes, and we would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for our pesky craniums! :)
;)
But Seriously, i wonder if our eyes actually percieve an equal 360' FOV or if they actually work in 16:9 widescreen. As I sit here now, I can see both my forehead and a little of my cheeks (and no, I'm not a fat b@stard!) with clear space to either side ie: I can't see my ears. That must be a pretty equal Field of Vision; so to optimise our eyes potential, we need to tear off our cheeks and smash in our craniums
(or not)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Than having rays shot at your face for 12-18 hours a day. With all the leaps in technology over the last 20 years it's about time that we get past CRT's and the basic architecture we use as a standard today. As soon as the costs come down a +20" LCD display is tops on my list, for me and for my kids. I fear that is another 20 or 30 years, the medical community will come back and say that all the exposure to monitors causes cancer or something like that.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.