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IBM's 5.2M Pixel Flat Panel
An anonymous reader writes "A current prototype of the Roentgen monitor offers a resolution of 200ppi (pixels per inch), with a total of 5.2 million full-color pixels, laid out in a 2,560 by 2,048 grid. Once the production version of the monitor is released, Greier said it will be able to display two full-sized 8.5-inch by 11-inch documents side by side.
The article also notes that the monitor needs a 4 head Matrox graphics board to drive it." Thats ungodly. Sign me up.
The advantage of having a much higher dpi resolution means you can get crisp large fonts without the need for anti-aliasing.
You've got to remember to up the font size when you up the resolution on a monitor, otherwise you do end up squinting at tiny text - though sometimes (scanning large web docs, editing html etc.) it is helpful to fit a large body of text on screen at once.
At the moment it is much easier to read printed rather than on-screen type. Hopefully higher res monitors will fix this pretty soon - or my eyes are going to be dead by the time I'm thirty.
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The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
Monitors aren't supposed to give the user a big radiation dose. Ya, I know that I'm sitting at the dirty end of a particle accelerator right now.
Naming their monitor technology Roentgen worries me a bit.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Cool as it would be to have the biggest, baddest display on the block, I think it still makes more practical sense to have several smaller ones. (Besides, what could be cooler than an array of four flat panels arrayed in front of you? You can pretend you're ground control for the space shuttle.) Take a look at this website for some ideas, as well as this slashdot article.
I think we should file a class action suite against Slashdot for the loss of our keyboards. How do these people sleep at night knowing they have cause do many gallons of drool to clog, short circuit and rust the keyboards of nerds.
The loss of earnings is staggering and the share human trauma of being unable to use you computer is just mind bugling.
Rumor has it that they have signed a deal with the guys making the "Happy Hacking Keyboard" to increase sales.
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Roentgen was the scientist who discoveredy X-Rays, which were called "Roentgen Rays" for many years. What the hell is in that thing?! :)
Pope
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It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
What's the point of running such a big monitor for games if the frame rate sucks. Me.... I'll stick to Wolfenstein 3D on my 1ghz Athlon...
quake III @ 4 frames/second with 4 matroxes driving it.
whee!
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blue
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Ever programmed with a dual-head display? Code editor/IDE up on one, references on the other, execution on one, debugger on the other... I miss those projects....
And the market for this will be HUGE. Once people realize what they've been settling for, how will we be able to take pride in our little .22 dot pitch 1600x1280s? Even the Trinitron doesn't come close. Price'll be a pain, but there are enough different high-fidelity applications for this kind of display (how many will Lucas order to edit SWIII on?). Not just CGI, or IBM's favorite market, CAD - artists, architects, medical folk (like the article mentioned), the defense simulation folks (I know some tank simulators that could use this upgrade).
Of course, I'll have to sell stock to be able to afford one. :-( It still doesn't qualify as my dream workstation, but it's an improvement. (remember Stellar Cartography from Star Trek:Generations? Now THAT's a workstation!)
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
There are also monetary benefits like film costs and manpower spent hunting and transporting film. And storage: consider how many images you can fit on a raid array, then calculate how much space that would take up in plastic and paper files.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Don't know if it's still true, since I've been away from the medical imaging business since leaving Sun (they *own* the OEM medical imaging market), but most of the med imaging vendors were using the X Inside (now Xi Graphics) X server to do this sort of thing. It has support for all kinds of high-end imaging hardware. I'd suspect they're still doing this, since it's not exactly the easiest thing for the uninitiated to jump into - there are some really arcane things to know for performance and fidelity. (And radiologists are to displays what the snobbiest audiophile is to stereo gear - they have very well-calibrated eyeballs...)
BTW: Imaging is very different from graphics. This was one of the revolutionary things about Sun's UPA/VIS architecture in the mid-90's: it was the first affordable graphics susbsystem that did a pretty respectable job at both. Previously serious users had to choose which they wanted and select their hardware accordingly.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Raises a point of how big/hi-res is enough?
I'm sitting at a 26inch monitor with 1280x1024, which is a fair bit of 'bandwidth to the eyes'. But a lot of the time, I'm designing the site I'm working on using the wall behind - a 'screen' of 2 x 4 metres, with enough 'resolution' to fit 20 closely typed pages across its width.
I think it doesn't top out for a long time yet...
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is a single pixel? why is that cool? the dot's on my 'i's are a single pixel right now. They should have said something like "The dot on this 'i' here is 17 pixels!" that would indicate a higher resolution, or at least a bigger font.
Good question. I was wondering the same thing - the math doesn't work.
In any case, this is still *much* less than what will be required if we're ever to get usable interfaces. Even at 2 A-size sheets at a decent resolution, it's still tiny: A quick look around the stuff on my desk reveals 10 roughly A-size documents "open" and the corners of several others peeking out. The surrounding work area and walls have another severl pages available for reference.
So for $10,000, you can get a tiny fraction of the bandwidth of my standard-issue IBM desk. Killing trees isn't going to slow anytime soon until computer desktop bandwidth approaches or exceeds that of the physical desktop. Until then, I'll keep printing out the things I'm working on.
Really, though, this is a real problem - computers simply can't be really useful until they have big screens so we can stop trying to drive the freeway while looking at the world through a knothole. This is the sort of thing we should put all those extra CPU cycles to. Thank you, Gordon Moore.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Slashdot Article - December 13th
IBM Fact Sheet linked in Slashdot Article
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Have a look at some of this stuff on very small (still quite high resolution) and very fast refreshing FLCOS displays. They have a 1024x768 display which is only 12.3x9.2 mm in size!!
Rather than trying to have complicated pixels from what I can make of it they build up colours by simply flashing the primary colours at you in different proportions, and with frame rates in the kHz bracket it looks very interesting.
Not unless you want to be hauling around a car battery with your now huge, 25 pound laptop....
Roentgen features:200 ppi 16.3 inch Active Matrix Liquid Crystal Display
diagonal viewing area
2560x2048 pixels (5,242,880 full color pixels)
Subpixels are 42 x 126 microns
15,728,640 transistors
1.64 miles of thin film wiring on the display
Aperture ratio of 27.3%
Backlight power of 44 Watts
The smallest feature is 5 microns
The prototype is 21 inches high and 16.5 inches wide, the total depth (including base) is 9.5 inches,
the thickness of the display is 2.5 inches
The weight is approximately 20 pounds
The power dissipated by the new display is similar to the power used by an 18-inch CRT display.
Not quite ready for mobile applications, apparently (even if they used a TransMeta proc) ;-)
#include "disclaim.h"
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#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
For instance, how was the previous IBM prototype the same 200ppi/2560x2048 with a diagonal viewing area of only 16.3 inches?
Pythagoras says we need a hypotenuse of 20.2" to get a 11x17 viewing area.
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Not so with monitors. The field is wide open--and overripe, if Sci-fi movie special effects have anything to say about it--for a revoluionary change in the way we view data. Whether it's a 50" flat-screen or a CAVE environment or a holographic projecton, I think things are going to start changing. And it will start changing the way we see things.
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This is something I've been looking forward to for a while. In my astronomy research, I usually work with images from digital cameras with 2048x2048 pixel resolution. Even with my 1280x1024 monitor, I either have to shrink the image (losing detail) or do a lot of panning to see the whole thing. A monitor more closely matched to the image size would help.
As consumer digital cameras approach 2048x2048 resolution, I'm sure graphic artists will start to want high-end monitors like this one, too.
However current top-end astronomy CCDs are using chips of up to 4096x4096 pixels and new cameras are using arrays of 2-16 of these large format chips. This spring I worked on some data from an 8192x8192 mosaic imager and, boy, was it hard to work with images shrunk by a factor of 8x8 to make them fit on my current-generation screen!
Thinking about the same thing, I did some simple calculation on bandwidth requirements... 2560x2048 is (as stated) 5Mpixels (using M to mean 1<<20, as in MB). At 32 bits per pixel, that's 20 MB per frame. If we want to display that at 60 Hz, that's a rather hefty 1.2 GB per second bandwidth requirement. One way to ease that is to split the frame buffer across multiple cards, since each frame buffer then only needs to deal with a fraction (here, a fourth, or 300 MBps) of the bandwidth. Reservation: 60 Hz might be more than an LCD uses, so the above figures could be off by a factor of 2 or so. Still, I think there's a problem here.
If you want to do full-screen 3D graphics (which seems to be high on everybody's wish list, judging from the number of drooling references to Q3 among the posts heremain(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
200 ppi
2560" x 2048"
21" x 16.5"
two 8.5" x 11" side by side
2560/21=121.9 ppi
2048/16.5 =124.1 ppi
two 8.5" x 11" side by side = 11" x 17" portrait or 8.5" by 22" landscape
21" x 16.5" is slightly less than four 8.5" x 11" pages in a 2x2 grid.
So what are the real specs on this monitor?
This is why the issue was brought up that what is needed is a vector based GUI. A vector based GUI would behave much like a 3D game would, in that regardless of the pixel count on screen, the objects remain the same size visually. So even if your monitor had 2500 x 2500 pixels, you could have a 1280x1024 (or higher/lower) equivalent resolution with photographic clarity. That sounds REALLY good to me.
No - that's just nice - this is godly!
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They had a prototype of this thing at IBM almost a year ago. It took them a full year to announce it as a product, i.e., to put it into industrial production. Somehow I think it unlikely that they will halve the price after putting in a full year of production development and who knows how many years of research.
Walt
What does a "godly" monitor do?
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IBM outta team up with these guys - Can you imagine a monster-res 3d monitor? Kinda leaves this whole "real world" thing in the dust!
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I don't know if it comes from using PDAs and emulators for 8-bit home computers, but I'm actually starting to prefer lowish resolutions on small monitors. Maybe it's just the realization that I'm usually staring at a small window in the center of a large, expensive, EMF emitting monitor. Along the same lines, I'm starting to see anti-aliased text as *fuzzy* rather than smoother. I was using an Atari 800 emulator the other day, believe it or not, I really got into the sharp, chunky feel of the text.
They still seem slow to me, especially when dragging a window around.
I have the chance to play with a Sun Enterprise rackmount server with a flat panel LCD, it sure is nift looking, but the slow refresh rate is to distracting.
I imagine doing Quake or Doom on this would be lackluster, jsut a bunch of smeared pixels.
Are they every going to make the refresh rate better?
George
That much said, expect around a decade before this technology works it down to a price point such that you can buy it, cheaply. Right now it's mainly for kick-ass CAD, which IBM has been targeting very heavily with its workstations recently.
Personally, I think the best part of this is the fact that Matrox gets attention out of it - they never seem to get as much attention as they should!
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of....wait a minute...it practically NEEDS a Beowulf cluster to RUN it.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
The cost of the materials that goes into one monitor is less of a factor than the number of monitors that come off the production line flawed, and need to be discarded. We're dealing with the fabrication of tens of millions of microscopic components here, and if even a handfull of them are botched in production, the resulting monitor panel will be unsaleable. When someone pays $10000 for one of these flat panel displays, they're paying not only for the display they got, but for the X number of displays that (on average) came off the line too flawed to sell.
-- WhiskeyJack
I've played Quake on my Vaio's LCD, and it's the best picture I've ever had (better than my Trinitron, yes). Even at 10"! It's also a lot, lot more comfortable to stare at all day. There are bad LCDs, yes, but try out some new ones...
The only reason I haven't switched to LCD for my desktop is that I don't know of any quality digital switches, so all my computers can share it.
I must say I am a little skeptical. About every 2 years, for the past 10 years or so, there has been an announcement from some lab concerning a breakthrough in display technology (the last one I heard about was from TI and was going to provide 300dpi on a 20' screen). None of these technologies has ever come to market; we are still pretty much stuck with big tubes or expensive (and somewhat slow) LCD's.
;-) ). But forgive me if I don't believe it until I see it at Circuit City at a price of less than 1000 USD.
Now, I would love to see a breakthrough in technology and to have a 1200 dpi display device (other than paper that is
sPh
It's sort of interesting that they're using the four-head Matrox boards to power these things.
:)
While consumers are now seeing boards that have output for two monitors from Matrox, according to a friend of mine, Matrox makes a lot of specialty boards like the one mentioned. Some of the four screen models are used in financial institutions or somesuch.
As for the technology driving it, it's a massive board (or combination of boards) powered by the G200 chipset. Matrox may be making these based on the G400 (or even G450) by now, but I'm not sure.
IBM must be using some sort of tiling scheme to display the stuff. xinerema in hardware?
Roentgen
When somebody can get the price of this thing down to around $2000, that's news.
How will this influence pricing of conventional LCD screens by different manufacturers? And will IBM licence this technology to other companies so we will see for example Toshiba notebooks with ultra-high res screens? How about viewing angle of these displays? Is it the same as in ordinary TFT?
OK. That's more than one thing I'd like to know.
I'm drooling already, even though I won't be able to afford such a thing for at least a year. But in the way of everything electronic, today $10,000, next year $4000, year after $1000, and in three years, they're giving them away ('cause the things are obsolete).
Gonzo
I did a search and couldn't come up with it, but this was mentioned before. I know I did once as well, in a report on supercomputing 99 as a comment to a comdex/las vegas 99 report. I played with it a little. The resolution is insane...they showed a map of a 20 mile x 20 mile area of new york as part of the demo. Every single street was displayed. They pointed out the dot on an i of one word and said that was a single pixel. It is really truly nuts, but the graphics head to go along with it is mighty pricy ;)
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Hopefully they can use that new Microsoft ClearType technology to make the text look better.
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