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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.
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.
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"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
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!
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.
What does a "godly" monitor do?
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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!
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.
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
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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