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Super Large, Super Hi-Res LCD Screens?
"I did some digging and found that while the VP181 is advertised as having a maximum resolution of 1600x1200, its native resolution is a piddly 1280x1024 (every image I've seen so far is intended to be displayed on a device with square pixels, and 1280x1024 crams a 5:4 resolution into a 4:3 space resulting in squished pixels) and the higher res is just emulated. Then there's the 17.3-inch SGI 1600SW, which does 1600x1024, but I understand it locks you into a specific video card and the product is no longer supported. Every once in a while we hear about new flat panel technologies being developed (IBM developed the QX20, a 20.8-inch, 2048x1536 LCD (this was last year. Where is it now?). Then there's the 22" Apple Cinema Display, which can do 1600x1024, but it's made by Apple, and I'm not quite so sure about that one."
And you don't have the USB connectors on the back of the machine - they're much easier to reach on the display.
SGI has released the multilink adapter (at least $300 extra) - allowing any VGA or DVI card to use the monitor... you just need to make sure the card supports 1600 X 1048 resolution. Bingo! No longer locked into any specific video card.
Its an excellent monitor, especially price competitive to other monitors, and the resolution (110 dpi) is tighter than anything coming out over the next 2 years.
I haven't heard about SGI discontinuing support for the product... you might want to contact them directly. I have a feeling though that in the next year, they will either introduce a new flat panel that will work with the standard DVI interface... or they will end up dropping the product line all together.
eBay always seems to have a few available for bids as well... but the price tends to get up towards $2000 - still quite less than retail.
Doode, I just like hacked a I-Opener and stuff. Got the display going great in Windows98 for a while and even switched the keyboard for a Windows keyboard. Added a fan for the processor and a :Cue:Cat, it was dope!
/. bekuz I don't want the man shutting me down so you will have to look me up and work out the detailz. I promise to have it done in less than a couple of weeks or something.
Buy one of those Apple monitors and send it to me and I will hack it to work on your computer for $20.
I even got a 15w soldering iron, solder, liquid flux, a Dremel, solder wick, solder sucker and other lab stuff for this I-Opener thing, so I am really set to hardware hack just like a factory. But I ended up frying the USB and some other stuff, so I got free practice for you. If you want it send another $200 and will send it back with your monitor.
I don't want my info posted on
Don't send cash, use PayPal an I will give you a discount later. Don't forget to add for shipping too, bekuz I have a low margin that is too low for the UPS truck to drive under. Lotsa big companies don't ecksplain that to people and rip them off really bad, but we are real honest since we are doing lots of business so people will trust us real good. So your money is safe. We even got a guarantee for it.
Sinserely,
ODK Team
WhitHatHardwareHackerz, Inc.
P.s., the old guy next door is in a movie and he lets us sleep over and drink all the time.
The Viewsonic panel actually does have the correct aspect ratio for its native resolution (which is 1280 x 1024). Phisical screen size is 359mm (H) x 287mm (V), 1024/1280 is 0.8, and 287/359 is ~0.799. This is of course the wrong aspect ratio for any other common resolution, but what kind of fool runs an LCD in anything other then its native resolution?
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Alot of people here seem to be praising the 22" Apple LCD display, though I have to say that I'm not all that impressed with it. We have one here at work, and it's exhibited some issues. The center of the screen is darker than the edges, so you get this wierd shadowed effect. There are a couple geometry problems as well, with certain areas of the screen not lining up as well as you would expect. It's made it unsuitable for some of the vision studies that are done here, so now it's just pretty much used as an over-glorified workstation monitor (Still a rather nice one). I guess my suggestion would be that when you factor in how much this display costs, you really should be getting perfection, and so far our experience with it here has been unimpressive.
Mark Nelson
If you can't stand the thin black lines on a Trinitron display, I don't know how you can stand an LCD display.
I detest the trinitron display's lines, but I use my 14.1" notebook every day and don't notice any blocking. Glasses are recent and keep everything in focus so I know I can see the grid effect. (in fact I do if I sit 6" in front of the screen) I prefer my 14.1" LCD to my 17" Philips 107s @ 1280x1024 (no flicker, just not as clear as the LCD)
It's 1920 x 1080, actually.. At least when watching 1080i HDTV programming, which is what those screens are designed for.
Woah! For that money, Apple will give you their cinema display, plus their top-of-the-line G4 to run it with:
$7,598.00
I can't find a picture of that NEC, but I'm willing to bet it doesn't look as good as the Cinema Display.
It should also be noted that the 1600SW *is* a digital input device, not analog. The only drawback is that the XFree86 support is very weak, it mostly works under 3.3.6 (but no DPMS support) and there is no 4.0 support.
So has anyone been able to get an ACD working with an x86 machine? After several emails to ATI asking if their Radeon could do 1600 x 1024 I gave up. Their tech support people are clueless and never gave me a straight answer. I am dying to get this monitor, but must have verification that it will work with SOME card under Linux and Winblows (gotta play Quake (I know you can play in Linux, but I am still on libc5 (don't ask))).
I'm using right now (the joys of being a student at a rich university) Silicon Graphics workstation with a 1600SW monitor - 1600x1024 LCD screen. Very nice picture, easy on the eye and has a very small desk footprint.
These can work with as PC using a special graphics card from Oxygen, I believe.
Not sure if they can be fixed up to hang from a wall, but for a desktop they get my vote.
For those that do not understand, Tau Beta Sigma and Kappa Kappa Psi are not social organizations. They are service organizations for college and university band programs. These organizations are the driving force behind many college band programs across the nation.
Just because this person did not like the actions of one chapter does not mean that all chapters are the same. It also does not give this person the reason or the right to post the most important documents of the orgainization.
In case the person that owns the site does not know, what he/she did was also copyright infringement. A person in my chapter has already contacted the national office and they will be contacting the owner of the site soon.
Please people, act like adults and don't take vengence on something that you obviously do not understand.
To the owner of the comment I am replying to, the second half of this reply was not intended directly for you...but I felt I had to let everyone know...
it doesn't matter what the owner's real name is, the site has been taken down. Regardless, geocities has some way of contacting the person.
Maybe the 1600SW? There's information about that one here. Summary:
* 17.3" display
* 1600x1024 resolution
* 0.23mm DP (110 DPI)
* US$2475 @ buy.com
Just junk food for thought...
Just a few comments from someone who works on one of the SGI 1600 flat panels daily.
;)
It does have a nice aspect ratio, but there are SEVERAL problems to it as well. For one, when used in anything but 1600x1024 you get a 'framed' screen with black bars and useless space. Further the NumberNine card really needs to have some improvements to it, as it can create pixelated sub-groupings on the screen in solid color fields especially at high resolution blow-ups (take a picture, any format, and blow it up a few hundred percent. you'll suddenly notice blocks of 4x4 or 8x8 pixels becoming off-color for no reason, while reproduced correctly on a CRT).
I do graphic production as part of my living, and I prefer the ColorSync monitor next to the SGI lcd for color rendering. Once I saw one of the Apple 22" flat panels I was amazed at how handily it beat the SGI I had on my desktop, but alas it was chained to the countertop so I couldn't take it back to compare directly
If you havent looked at the apple 22' Cinima Display, do it now. Its absolutly gorgeous.
:p
22 cinima display and some features
You dont mention your computer preference(although you allude to a distrust of Apple), or what the final use of the monitor will be for(sound like you want a nice tv), so pick up a cube and one of these, and youll have your tv/dvd player. And if you ever can trust apple on one thing for, its a product with good color reproduction
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
Who's limiting you to the visible spectrum? :-)
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
It has an infinite maximum resolution.
;)
If I remember correctly, resolution should be at minimum the wavelength of light in the visible spectrum (although it varies).
I just got a KDS AV-21TF, from onvia.com for ~$760, shipping included.
2048x1536 @80hz max resolution.
1600x1200 @85hz recommended resolution.
.24 dot pitch.
Flat Sony trinitron screen.
The Gimp is mind-blowing on this thing. Text looks decent, too. Really shows off enlightenment. If you're jealous of those 1600x1200 e.themes.org screenshots, this one might be the ticket. Not too heavy, either -- only about 60 lbs.
(Note, the price dropped right after I got it -- $733 now. Hint for shoppers: you have to consider the shipping which is usually $40 for a large item like this and can run to $80. soft4u.com seems to have the best price right now at $733.53 and free shipping.)
You can get the 1600SW for around $1500 - $1800 on eBay. Just serch for *1600SW*. Number Nine Revolution IV T2R cards are on there, too.
Buy.com has brand new 1600SWs with the multilink adapter included (expensive item -- lets you hook up a number of different video cards) for $1900 and change.
Looks like a cool television, but how did they arrive at a 1600x1200 resolution for a monitor with a 16:9 aspect ratio? Couldn't they have done 1600x900 and given us square pixels?
(bitch, moan, whine...:)
I know that the two I mentioned don't quite fit the bill - I was making a blanket recommendation to check out the Samsung *line* of flat panel displays.
Don't they teaching "reading the subtext" in high school any more?
Specialization is for insects. - R.A.H.
I think they are Fujitsu. I spent way too much time staring at these on my last trip to Dallas.
I've got a 21" Trinitron and a ATI Rage Turbo Fury Pro (Pro Rage Turbo Fury? Whatever.) and I love it. I run 1600x1200x16bit @ 80Hz. No flicker, and great Linux support.
:)
The only problem is the weight and the size. The thing is a real bitch to haul around 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
The only one that I've been able to find with native 1600x1200 resolution is
the NEC-Mitsubishi LCD2110, a 21.3" monitor that is claimed will begin shipping in October.
NEC estimates the street price to be around $7999.
The only site I've found that advertises it listed it for $8273.92, but
as "call for availability." ZDNet estimates the price to be $9999.
- AlanH
I can testify from hundreds of hours of dilligent testing that high quality LCDs (eg Apple Studio display) perform beautifully for Quake. They have nice convolution filters for converting the lower resolutions favored for twitch games to the 1024x768 pixel matrix without creating blocking artifacts.
You might get trouble with the Cinema display because of the aspect ration, but if you can pay that for a display you can buy a 2nd one in a more normal resolution for quake.
I had a Samsung 170MP for a little while. It was beautiful and exactly what I wanted, but I eventually sent it back because I couldn't get rid of pixel jittering. (Analog inputs only.)
And now I'm sensitized to jittering. I can notice annoying jittering in the annoying fuzzy dots on my Nokia CRT too.
I don't sit at my desk much any more. I geek from a Dell Inspiron laptop, 1400x1050. Crisp dots, no ghosting, no jittering, good scaling. The downside is I get to see all sorts of jpeg compression artifacts that aren't visible on a CRT.
Next desktop monitor I get will have digital inputs.
i picked up a black T86 digital input in august.
the difference between my old CRT and this is enough that i still look at this thing and think "this was money well spent."
$4000 (up here in canada) was worth it.
18.1", digital in, 1280 x 1024, 90 Hz. top notch.
i'd recommend buying one.
Well, I dont know much about an LCD, but the company I work for buys Plasma displays. We get them in 42" and 62". The 42" model will run you about $16,000 canadian.... or $9000 if your an NEC dealer like us... Still pretty pricey, but something to definatly consider.
This guy wants an image better than most CRTs, not worse. The TV-out on my All-N-Wonder Pro is great for piping movies over to the TV, but the resolution is limited to a hair above 800x600. The unshielded VHS cable also causes loss in color and contrast and makes things look trippy whenever anything rated over a couple of amps is turned on in the room. An SVHS connector (Also on the All-N-Wonder) might be usable for a good picture at low resolutions.
--
Win98 sux without these 1337 toolz !!
...is 22 inches diagonal, and has a nice connector, but its an Apple standard and you're not likely to find any non-apple product using it besides an adapter. A VGA adapter is likely to happen, but you're probably looking for some other kind of connection. This would be a good buy, but only if you bought a Mac and had lots of expendable cash. Like the macs, it looks nice, too.
Note that most DVI video cards I've run across (e.g. the GeForce DDR-DVI cards) will not do any higher than 1280x1024 to the digital out (although they go higher on the analog out).
If you get the apple monitor make sure you get a card that can support that res on the digital connection.
I've bought several touchscreens from here to install in industrial control systems and they are indistinguishable from the Allen Bradley screens (which I've also bought)
I know, I sound like a commercial, but I have no connection to this site other than offering some constructive critcism of their website, which used to be truly horrible and is now merely annoying.
This guy is also the supplier of touchscreens to Automation Direct. Sorry, no direct link, Look under Operator Interfaces-->industrial monitors. (Warning, very "busy" site with lots of frames and redirection)
I believe it's due to color differences between
different pieces. Some large outdoors displays
are composed of small perhaps 16x16 blocks of LEDs, and the borders between blocks are easily seen and in fact, quite annoying.
isn't that 22"?
me
Don't forget Barco. :).
Barco
The DLP R12 kicks ass...12,000 lumens
Simple: Dell purchases LCD's in such high quantities that the manufacturers are willing to guarantee them so much production of these.
The biggest problem in the LCD industry right now is supply capacity: with current manufacturing methods, they simply cannot manufacture these things fast enough. It's the same thing as with high-end CPU's -- Dell/Gateway/Compaq/IBM always get the top-o-the-line before the smaller manufacturers, who get it before the DIY market, simply because they can lay out the cash for 500,000 units in advance.
What's this conversation thing I keep hearing about?
After seeing many LCD's in person, my favorite and the one I think looks the best, and has the smallest pixels, is the Apple display.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
http://store1.europe.yahoo.com/microwarehouse/e239 228.html
5,869.13 pounds sterling = $8,600
Ouch
Cause I don't run BeOS? :)
:] )
I have a SuSE Linux partition but I haven't found much in the way of visualizations (not that I've really put much work into finding one...I'm having enough fun just trying to set up WindowMaker + Gnome
Besides, I've worked with Ryan Geiss at my old job. Really smart guy. A true hacker.
---
I wear pants.
You're trading screen flickering refresh rates for residual images. Plasma displays don't have the residual image problem but they are expensive. LCD residual will drive you nuts.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Uh, eh, umm, excellent point :-( Mea Maxima Culpa
Hi!
Having had the "pleasure" of manning a company's stand at some trade shows recently, I can truthfully say plasma screens are not good for your health.
Try standing in front of one of these puppies for a couple of hours, talking punters through all the features of your latest product, staring at this humongous plasma screen - I was more green than the Energis balloon (and it was green).
Has anyone actually sat down in front of one of these to say, watch a movie or something? Do they work??? Without making you vomit, like??
Roll on virtual stereographic glasses...
/prak
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
G-Force, by Andy O'Meara, kicks ass over that POS proprietary app Ryan Geiss wrote anyday!
check out G-Force
Plugin for winamp and standalone app. Its basicly the technology behind geiss with the ability to program the visuals (Or well, you write mathematical functions, but it works really well!) And more or less its open source. Maybe one day with enough of our support he'll GPL it.
yeah umn.. ill buy quantity. in fact, ill buy 100 for $5,000 a piece :)
Hmm.. A modeline labelled with 1600x1200 for a screen that does maxes out at 1600x1024. Forgive me if I don't trust your numbers.
...but putting the USB connection in the same cable provides no additional functionality...it just means there are less cables. You could just as easily use ports on your usb-hub monitor if it was connected via a second cable.
He didn't describe DVI as proprietary; he said the "Apple Display Connector" is proprietary (which it is). So you are both distorting the original statement as well as making a factual error.
More likely efficient manufacturing processes have yet to be designed for something like this.
There are additional issues with manufacturing a unit that is 100% pixels...generally displays have a "dead" border where control lines are aggregated. To make a seamless display would require no border, and would require each chunk to have it's pixels offset nor more than about 1/16 of nominal, or you'd get wavy lines as they crossed boundaries. Accuracy of >1 mil is pretty tough. (note that I'm talking about accuracy of the pixel network relative to the substrate, not relative to each other, which is much easier)
My error on the ADC.
I think the reason it didn't catch on is that it doesn't provide a lot of additional functionality, but adds to the cost. If you want to run power on a single cable that means you need to transfer a huge amount of power through the video card. Current architectures aren't designed to do that. USB is easier to implement, but what does USB really have to do with monitors? (VSYNC, R, G, B, USBclk??)
The bottom line is that you can get equivilent functionality at lower cost and with more flexibility through the use of an additional 2 cables. I'll take the two cables.
Pete
Pete
Generally with LCD technology the idea is to have a flat screen--perhaps if that wasn't the goal they could build the circuitry behind the module instead of beside it. Wires bend pretty easily.
OTOH If this was possible, it should be available by now, so I assume there MUST be some really compelling reason this won't work.
The PC flat panels, and there were 6-7 of them, all looked like shit next to it. I guess the PCC manufacturers think specs are more impressive than a good-looking product... I'm going to hold off on flat panels for now is all I'm saying.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
The 22" Apple Cinema Display is quite a nice display. I think you'll find that you need a MAc to interact with it though. But if you can afford a $4k screen, what's a grand or two for a nice new G4. They make a good deskto... OK, not looking for flames. What I want to know is if anyone ELSE out there can sell you a 22" screen like Apple will. The thing is beautiful.
As to square pixels, the Apple page on the screen is here.
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
And in case that didn't make sense, with that adapter anyone with DVI out (digital) from their video card should be able to take to the Cinema Display.
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
vote nader. 3 dollar crack is just not good enough.
Take this personaility test.
mmmmm, plasma display... i want one... mmmmmmmm... they look sooooooooo sweet... maybe after i get out of college and get a job or something...
btw, anyone in the boulder/denver looking for a very talented c/c++/java programmer feel free to drop me a line
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
I know! Antialias everything! Oh, wait...
Don't Panic...
I might be mistaken, but I believe that Apple licenced SGI's flat panel technology a while back (2 years ago?). There was some hype about this back on the rumor sites - which makes me think that Apple's flatpanels are just colored-plastic covered SGI flat panels.
I run linux on both my Macs and love it. I only use MacOS if I need to write something (IE - having to use those darned "desktop" apps). For everything else - linux is the way to go.
I'm using my 1600SW with the nVIDIA GeForce2 chipset. The card, a 3D Prophet II 64mb, has a digital out, but it only works in three modes. However, the MultiLink does a great job of converting the signal... pure digital is better tho.
.inf file with 1600x1024. Works great, even in DirextX games!
I can do nothing more then give my approval for an 1600SW. And if you get an nVIDIA card just change all the 1600x900 entries in the
Here at the day job, I have a wonderful LCD screen setting on my desk. It's an Allen-Bradley 21 inch LCD touch screen.
It's wonderful. I mean, REALLY wonderful. I normally runn 1280 x 1024, and since this thing got put on my desk, I haven't worn my glasses a single day because of eye strain. What this thing REALLY is happens to be a re-labled Elotouch screen, and if you get the chance, check one out. However, one downside - expensive as hell. It's designed for Industrial Control applications, and since it has the Allen-Bradley name on it, it's marked up a considerable amount. The only REAL downside to this screen - it belongs to a customer, and in a couple of months, I have to part with it and go back to my old 21" CRT display, because I'll be installing this one at the customer's site. :-(
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
I agree with you, I've always hated the anti-aliasing effect on LCD screens. However, I just got a laptop with an SXGA+ screen (1400x1050) and I've found that it is no longer a problem. I still don't like 1280x1024, but 1024x768 is acceptable and 800x600 and 640x480 both look as good to me as they do on CRT's.
I imagine that the UXGA laptops (1600x1200) will look even better.
some of the credit probably belongs to the video chipset which actually does the anti-aliasing.
pornking
Here's a better (i.e. working) link for the Apple Cinema Display.
You left no contact information. Please contact me for more information. Specifically the interface required for the device.
tmath@primenet.com
Thank you.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
The SGI 1600 SW was/is a stunning display. SGI completely dropped the ball when it came to marketing and distributing the thing. I have one and a Number Nine Rev IV FP to drive it, but since #9 went out of business, support is impossible. SGI has a matrix of supported graphics cards and the flat panel goes for about $2100.00. It's a truly awesome display. I have never seen anything like it.
"Mmmmmm, beer." Homer Simpson
It'd be a shame if i had to nix my new voodoo5 for something with a DVI connector...does anyone make a good 3d card that you can use with LCD monitors? is there a nice flat-screen CRT display that comes close to LCD quality?
Saw the old slashdot article, and the users talking about the wall, but has anyone just gotten a pair of 14 or 15" panel running with Xfree 4.0 or else with one of the commercial Xservers.
I check buy.com every now and then and saw at one point 14" panel that do 1024x768 for about $550. 2048x768 would be pretty good for me, and for less than $1500 (includeing the extra video card) you are saving quite a bit off the cost of a large single panel.
Anybody have recommendations on this type of setup?
-MS2k
The next version, codenamed Mirror is capable of live image capture!!
They're Pioneer plasma displays. $20,000 a pop.
http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/home/pdphd.htm
This is not exactly what the man asked....but here I use a ViewSonic VP150.
It is set up as 1024x768, and uses standard VGA card and cable. Two years
ago when I started my ISP service, I was spending 8 to 12 hours a day in
front of a tube monitor. My eyes would sting and tear, and at night I
would lay in bed with my eyes pounding and pulsing. I had no idea what
an LCD would do for me. I had horrible visions of blurry, faded laptop-type
displays. You know, like you move the mouse and the pointer dissapears for
a few seconds then you have to look for it. Well, the VP150 arrived and I hooked
it up. Surprise! No fading, no streaking, perfect images. No blurring.
And what is better, my eyes immediately got cured of all the problems I was
experiencing.
This display has been by far the best I ever had. It may not be the best LCD
in the world, but it beats ANY tube display hands down. Recommended.
Hmm, flamebait=bad. :(
What's this conversation thing I keep hearing about?
In case you couldn't figure it out, he's just talking about his huge plasma display running a Winamp visualization plugin being a conversation piece at a party. Admittedly, that would be really friggin' cool.
Kappa Kappa Psi is a co-ed music service fraternaty. Tau Beta Sigma is it's sister organization. The reason I got so upset about the documents that were posted is that this group alowed this person in and they then decided, for whatever petty personal reason, to post things on the web that are meant to be private to the organization on the web to make fun of them. Not only that, but these ceremonies have most likely changed greatly since 1971, as much has changed in these two organizations in the last 29 years, and what has been posted is most likely a gross miss representation of TBS.
I've solved this problem by using an old pair of eyeglasses. Lack of focus can be your friend.
(just kidding. sorta. I did note that getting a new prescription recently made me much more aware of flaws in my laptop's lcd display)
I was drooling over the Cinema Display at Comdex last year, and I remember the manufacturer (forget who now. They make them for Apple) telling me that they expected to have comparable displays available for the PC by mid-2000. So there you go, your problem is solved. :-)
What you've said isn't quite true. If you think for a bit this should be obvious: CRTs work by "steering" an electron at a display ... the pitch or number of dots can be enormous, and changing resolution just means bending the electron's path less. Crudely speaking it's analogue...
LCDs on the other hand have a finite number of pixels that are turned on and off ... it's digital in other words. What this means in practice is that if you choose a resolution that doesn't fit nicely into the LCD's number of pixels, then you get weird stippling effects. For instace if you want 640x480 on a 1280x960 LCD ... no problem! Every "pixel" is now 4 LCD pixels. Try and do 960x640 though, and you have problems. You have 1 pixel that is a LCD pixel, but the next pixel will be 2 LCD pixels. It looks horrible.
So you *CAN* show lower resolutions on a LCD, but only resolutions that go exactly into the LCD size.
I found some interesting information about LCD screens in whole. According to http://www.cybercomp.net/english/avantages.htm, the LCD screens are more energy efficient, truly flat displays, save more space, and have super crisp quality imaging.
All these are things that we know.. one thing that surprised me, however, is that LCD are optimal ONLY at their native resolution. This means that it can be viewed at a higher res than it was made for but would look 'strange' -- but even stranger -- if it is viewed at resolutions LOWER than its native it will also look strange. While this may not be a problem for most people who can afford high res. monitors, some people cannot (because of memory available or video card they have) keep their computer in the native resolution of the LCD -- that is it may not be too high for their monitor but it is WAY to high for their computer's vid card.
did you compose this with some voice recognition software?
I don't know if you can get enough vapour concentration that it would burn, but one time i got drunk very badly with orujo and puked, and then one friend of mine that was playing with a zippo lighted it and threw it into the puke. It started burning though it didn't make a very big fire, and it lasted at least 5 min(I think). Funny thing, and funnier smell...
Slightly off topic, but i was wondering, how good are LCD's for first person shooter games? I know CRT's can affect how 'smooth' your game can look based on it's scan range (measured in Hz)... even if you're pumping out 200 fps, you can be limited by how fast the monitor updates the image(i think most have a scan range of up to 120 hz?). Anyway, i don't think i've ever seen a spec for the scan range for LCD's, so how good are they for FPS gaming?
Wow. They must have had at least 50 of them. Even at a steep discount, we're talking between $0.5-$1M in plasma displays! No wonder it costs so much to fly to Dallas.
sulli
RTFJ.
yes. I also got lost trying to get out of it .. very poor directions to the freeways.
sulli
RTFJ.
LCD is the way to go, and my next monitor will be flat, I'd like to upgrade but swallowing £500 (uk) for 15.1" screen is loads, never mind 1500+++ for a nice 18" screen, LCDs are apparently going to drop in price next summer due to over manufacture so maybe we'll see a drop to 17 & 19" crt price levels ... now that would get a sale from me...
I have thought of just going CRT but I don't play games and don't wanna lug around heavy monitors no more!
A client of mine uses an Apple LCD display (older 15") on his PC with no problems. There is a converter box but it works. Don't know if the cinema display would work similarly.
Some things that make larger displays expensive: 1) Supply vs. demand vs. market 2) Glass / mfg. cost (basic raw materials) 3) Data rates are extremely high for 1600x1200 4) And finally, row/column driving is very difficult (ITO has a high resistance, row/columns in the center can only be active for a short time, simple RC rules apply.) Point being, the risk is higher than gain for most manufacturers. Few companies can afford to spend a billion dollars on an LCD line that won't return the money for five to ten years. Your best bet is to look for projection systems for large wall displays, they get around item 2 and 4, and mitigate 1 a little by being of less image quality. Also, tiling several images is easier.
There's not much cost difference in single glass vs. multiple pieces. Gameboy displays are in the order of $30-$50 each ... Gameboys don't have the same profit margin of PC LCD displays.
This would depend on the spec ... many high res LCD displays raise their number of bad pixels for higher resolutions.
Yes, desktop cards will also scale fine. I don't know which ones specifically, but I have seen scaling done well on a desktop. Also, there are some LCDs that can scale at the same quality, but these are more expensive.
Imagine: A Beowulf 2 cluster of LCD screens covering an entire wall.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Hopefully, in the future, when manufacturing processes become more refined, the price will come down and availability will increase.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
I've seen this. The resolution is absolutely awe-inspiring. But the refresh rate sucks.
The point I was trying to make was there is more to a display than size and resolution. Like I said I love the feel of a Cinematic display, and the desk space is wonderful, but I can't get over the grid lines. If they could add another layer to the display to blur the lines it would be perfect. Then if they would get the cost down it would be ideal.
If you can't stand the thin black lines on a Trinitron display, I don't know how you can stand an LCD display.
Yeah, they're pretty nice, but man, do they draw power. ~395 Watts for most of the Plasma display monitors I saw at the 1999 CES. As you can imagine, they also give off a lot of heat.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The poster does NOT need the SyncMaster 1100p+, because that is a CRT and the poster was looking for an LCD.
How the hell is that post "informative"?? Exactly what information did it offer? Looked like a bunch of questions to me. Silly ones at that, if you know how LCDs works.
If I got a laptop with 1024, then I'd have to play all my games at 512 to avoid a conflict between native resolution and current resolution. Sure, some panels have anti-aliasing, but that's only good for the standard 640x400 text-mode instances; at 800x600 it looks ghastly. I'm sure this problem is insignificant for a flat panel which can handle 1920x1440, but how much would that cost? My guess is about $2,500, as much as an entire system.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Okay, before you flame me - I know, I know... They have no floppy drive (!), and the company spends more time on creating slick looks than they do on making things work good. But who cares? There are distros out that are specificially for Macs. I don't have a Mac, but I'm not opposed to them, either - as long as they run Linux.
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
I dont know if this has been posted yet, but if you want bang for your buck (and I do mean buck...try around $16000, you can go out and nab a pioneer PDP-505HD, a 50 inch high definition plasma monitor. This is as good as it gets kiddies, ive got one hanging above my fireplace, and yes, quake3 does look very nice on it...(it goes up to 1280x768 (why would you need higher??)
specs are available at: http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/home/pdphd.htm
Troll eBay looking for either an SGI 1600SW or a Radius Artica ($1500-$1900) - both are the same device: 1600x1024 resolution, wide screen, awesome image quality, uber geek. Only two cards that I know of drive it directly; the now defunct Number Nine Revolution IV or the current 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1-1600. Looks like Xi Graphics have decent X support for both. Otherwise you can get the SGI multi-link adapter ($495) that will take analog DB-15 or DVP/DVI digital inputs and drive it that way. Though, whatever you do, get 100% digital from video card to display. DVI is the current standard in the PeeCee world with support from Matrox, nVidia, ATI on the video card side and more flat panels are coming out that have a DVI-D connector (i.e. Philips 150P) - see Tom's Hardware for a good write up.
Troll eBay looking for either a SGI 1600SW or a Radius Artica - both are the same thing (~ $1500-$1900). 1600x1024 resolution, awesome dislay, uber geek. Only two cards that I know of drive it directly, the now defunct Number Nine Revolution IV or the 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1-1600. Otherwise you can get the SGI multi-link adapter (~$475) that will take analog DB-15 or DVP/DVI digital input and drive it that way. Though, whatever you do, look for 100% digital from video card to display panel. DVI is the current standard in the PeeCee world (Matrox, ATI, nVidia do support it) and more flat panels are coming out that have it.
I don't know anyone who doesn't think that the Apple display is the best one available to people who can't afford personal jets. It's big and bright, and the viewing angle is flawless - and the older models have standard DVI connectors.
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I remember reading something about a SGI LCD display being the best. Maybe not to informative but at least you got a place to start looking. --t0q. ps. BTW are you guys really rich now or something? You talked about buying that LCD like 3k is a meanial amount of money to spend "because your monitor got blurry" I dunno, I would have done more research before spending money like that but I guess for me 3k is a lot of money so i think before i spend that much. err 3k isn't an impulse buy.
at dell's gigabuys website , there are a few 17 inch panels that are well under two thousand dollars.
They're not the tops of the pops (Viewsonic VP181), but they're pretty damn good, and as low as ~1450USD. Most notable is the DELL 1701 FP for $1449 .
Just use mulitple monitors with that, and I'm sure you'll be happier than if you dropped the same wad for a single VP181. That's the decision I'm making right now.
I scrutinized the documents that you are referring, it look pretty stupid to me, I can't even figure out what is the point of these ceremonies. Why are you so pissed by the publication of these documents? And what is Kappa Kappa Psi anyway? Please explain.
Does anyone make a Plasma, rather than LCD display for computers?
Philips does, but you'll need a big wallet and a pretty big desk as well. Check here and go to Products-Monitors-420P10
Sorry, can't link directly as it is a dynamic site.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
-
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
when looking at getting a flat screen monitor it would probably be prudent to wait for the technology to further develop.
...
...
I agree. My bet is that a $3000 flat-screen monitor will sell for about $1200 in February 2001 and $800 in February 2002. If you want screen res equivalent to a nice CRT, your best bet is wait until February 2001 at the very least, especially if you're going to drop $3000 on it.
It's Marketing 101 - actually, we covered this exact pricing paradigm in a course I took a few years back (maybe it was Marketing 110, not sure). Early adopters pay through the nose.
Yes, chicks dig them, but you'd be better off spending the money on a cool leather jacket - that will work way better
Or faux penguin jacket, if you want to get the cyber-babes
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
i personally want the apple 21" cinema display..
-Psyiode
C'mon man that is so funny, sure the converter box works but it just sounds so funny.
See Ya!
I'm gonna put about 400 15 inchers in a beowulf cluster!!!!!!!!!!!
Just FYI for all y'all I spent quite a bit of time beta testing some of the first flat panels.. and I really got into the Apple stuff (it was tre' nice).. but then I thought... huh... lemme t'ink bout dis here.. I called around to a friend of mine @ a high-quality monitor company (the one I buy from 8p) he then went on to inform me that up until a few months ago there where three companies that made about 80% of the TFT on earth!! Most companies (including most major Monitor shops) just buy it from them in sheets (sometimes even pre cut). It seems that they only make it in one size then cut it down to fit the aspect. The bigger the piece the more x'pensive not only cause it's bigger but cause you have to throw away a bunch of the rest of the sheet because it's too small to use for another monitor. So, I know that some of it's based on the actual product line of the TFT (e.g. some is shitty laptop, some is nice desktop and some is SUPER FLY desktop) but reguardless, most all TFT comes from the same place.. Thus Apple uses the same TFT as Sony etc (although they may get a higher end film.. I donno) Peace KLRNSDME -Killer Inside Me-
There is a display I am dying to get. It is the Syncmaster 240t LCD. So far, I only see it available in Britain, Germany and Brazil. It is a 24-inch 1920x1200 LCD with DVI, VGA and TV inputs. It can do picture in picture. The best page on the monitor is from Samsung in Brazil. Do a google search for "syncmaster 240t" (use the quotes to narrow the search. The Brit company, Trident, that comes up wouldn't ship to the US.
Until LCD monitors converge with HDTV monitors, I'm stayin' out of the high-end. For $3K I should be able to hook my DVD player component output straight to it, or DVI off a video card, or the output of a DTV box. As long as there is analog conversion and scaling already present, I see no reason why this is particularly hard. One day, consumer and computer video will converge. But not today.
I'm working at a small company that has upgraded some decomissioned military equipment used for War Room displays. They're like imagesetters, they use 3 colored lasers and can easily kick out 4000x3000 pixel displays at any size from desktop to projecting them on the side of a building. The only problem we have is finding an video image source with resolution that high, it can go way beyond HDTV rez. Its the ultimate display, the Air Force wanted to use them as displays for air fighter simulators, but abandoned the project and put the whole technology up for sale (and we bought it). Now with some upgrades, they're the ultimate computer display, movie projector or HDTV system.
The bottom line:
Basic unit: $500,000. Quantity discounts available.
ADC is just Apple's name for another standard called "Plug & Display." There was a Slashdot story on this a while back, in fact.
The standard never caught on, it seems. I don't know why; IMHO it makes a lot of sense. Then again, it seems very few standards get popular until Macs start including them on all its machines. Witness USB, which existed but was languishing in no-peripheral-support limbo until the iMac came along and gave it the boost it needed.
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It's also supported by the 3DLabs Oxygen VX1-1600SW. I don't know whether that card's better than the #9 Revolution IV-FP or not. (Presumably one reason SGI switched is that #9 is out of business....)
One has been checked into the XFree86 CVS tree, so some future 4.x release will probably support it.
I don't think there's currently any XFree86 4.x support for the VX1-1600SW, but it may appear in the future.
...although, as I read SGI's FAQ on the MultiLink Adapter and, in particular, the answer to "What happens if my card is not SuperWide savvy?", you don't get 1600x1024 unless you have a "SuperWide Savvy" adapter - and you may need driver support for that; see the SuperWide Savvy page.
It was recently checked into the XFree86 CVS tree (I don't know if it works yet, all I know is that it was checked in).
The high costs come from having to scrap large peices. Why not interconnect smaller peices to make one large peice. Basic Lego or JigSaw Puzzle strategy. One peice that will attach to any other type of peice. Then special peices for each of the borders. With 5 peices you could interconnect to make one large peice. To get a LARGER monitor, you just put more of the global peices in the center.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
From what I recall of the original IBM project page, this beast was designed to be as readable as printed text in a book.. basically the images are sharper, less blurry than current CRT/LCD technology, which typically has 80/100 ppi. This is something to watch out for, I think.
"World domination...and scantily clad females, of course. Who cares if it's below zero outside?" -Linus Torvalds
As a long-time owner of two SGI 1600SW panels, I have only one response to the news of the Multilink adapter:
Yeeeeeeeeeessssssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Nine is just fine for 2D graphics, but sucks rocks for 3D (especially OpenGL).
I recently assembled a game machine with a GeForce card, and I'd love to be able to move the SGI to it.
You are thinking of depth of field, which expresses the range in distance where correct focus is maintained.
This is different then maximum resolution, though of course if your eye can't focus, then your maximum resolution will be severly limited.
Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
There was no factual error made. The ADC is not proprietary. It is a little known extension, allowed for in the DVI spec., that apple implemented. It is true that you, currently, cannot use an ADC display on non-Apple hardware, but that may very well change.
I have this kind of setup on my desk at work (twinhead, two NEC 18" LCD screens side-by-side to give a wide desktop) but although the screens are nice the width of the bezels effectively forces you to treat it as two separate displays. It's impossible to read any window that spans the two screens as the eye loses its place as you scan along each line of text or spreadsheet row.
The suggestion was. I believe, to join LCD displays edge-to-edge so there is no gap.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I'm sure the developer concerned would be delighted to hear your opinion that his efforts are trivial.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
There are plenty of 21" and 19" monitors that don't flicker at 1600x1200. I went for one of those in the end, a flat-screen Sony, and I'm very happy.
I'm sure big LCDs will be more viable in a few years time. In the meantime, I'd rather save my money for some other toy.
Samsung makes a couple of flat panels that may suit you better. I've been rather happy with the 770TFT and the 170MP that I've had a chance to play with.
Specialization is for insects. - R.A.H.
Good ones can be had for around $5000 USD now. (Paid $9000 CAD for ours, and it's wicked)
Bulbs are the killer. $500 a piece for ultra high pressure sodium bulbs.
High-end CRT's don't have flicker problems.
Color reproduction is still more accurate on a monitor..
And.. although it's fact that digital input to an LCD is accurate.. it is also less versatile until the digital connector is standard.
Creates problems with anything that does video passthru (like DVD decoders and such).
For those of you that don't know.. there ARE competing standards for Flat panel displays. DVI which is backed by intel, and proprietary.. and OpenLDI, which is the standard that is currently used in notebooks. OpenLDI consumes much less power and is capable of driving much higher resolutions. (yes there is such a thing as bandwidth when it comes to displays).. but anyway.. by the end of december, there will be a new crop of lcd displays these are 24" UXGAW displays w/ a resolution of 2048x1536. So far, these panels use OpenLDI.. ok.. I'm biased.. I used to work for a company that supports OpenLDI, but if anybody would care about proprietary standards I'd think the linux community would be the one to support the open standard. Too bad not enough consumers even know there's such a battle going on. Most geeks only care about rambus and ddr sdram. btw currently.. those 24" panels alone (like buying just a crt tube) costs around $5k
AFAIK, it's not the kind of adapter you want. The apple store web site clearly states that the ADC-DVI adapter is so that you can attach an "old" Apple DVI flatpanel to a new Cube or G4 with an ADC connector. It doesn't let you hook up a new ADC-only flatpanel to your DVI video card.
For that matter, the G400 specs don't list 1600x1024 for the DVI daughtercard, but SGI lists it under their SuperWide Savvy list and a search of the Matrox support forums has responses from Matrox tech support claiming the G400 will drive 1600x1024.
Incidentally, I know some people love the SGI 1600SW, but IMHO, a 17" monitor running 1600x1024 is just painfully small. We had a couple at the last place I worked and I didn't think they were so hot. Of course If I had spent $3k on one, I might find reasons to think that ;)
I really don't know much about monitor technology, but what exactly is the story on why pixels AREN'T square? I mean, why aren't they? And what's the big deal about them becoming square? Is ti harder to accomplish technologicaly?
The link the article was a link into the Apple store that timed out. http://www.apple.com/displays/acd22/ ; ; ; is a more permanent link to information. (square pixels, top notch image quality)
The input is TMDS from the Digital Display Working Group. Follow the link, hit product list, search for vendor and cards. (Be aware the the connector changed recently. New Cinema Displays have a combined power/video/usb connector, you may need a fancy cable to get into it from your video card.)
I have used a number of flat panel displays from different vendors. I must say the Apple ones are the best I've used, no exceptions. Its especially striking when an Apple display is next to another brand.
If you decide to buy one you should go by smalldog. You won't find a better reseller and they sell off refurbished Apple units at reduced cost. All my displays are refurbs, I've never had a problem.
This is TI's "Digital Light Processing" system. It is indeed very cool: It's a direct digital output device, there's no DAC or pixel drivers required. That's because it's really just a video RAM with a set of MEMS mirrors which rock back and forth on a duty cycle proportional to the "on-ness" of a particular pixel. They ysed to have a site explaining in detail at www.ti.com/dlp (Warning - I haven't checked this link to see if it still works, since Netscape is acting flaky and I want to get through this post.)
I looked at this technology a few years ago, and all the better portable "LCD" projectors out now are actually DLP units. There is *no* visible separation between pixels, unlike LCD or other systems, and the brightness is incredible - easily viewable in a daylit room.
At one point a year or two ago, the TI web site said that Nokia was planning a (40-ish inch) DLP-based TV, which while not a flat panel, was still planned to come in at only about a foot deep. I don't know what happened to this product, but it looks like Samsung beat tehm to that form factor with their new FLCD TV.
(I do know that TI had real problems in getting the DLP chips to scale up in resolution - they were stuck at 6x4 and 8x6 for a long time... (Yes, that's 640x480 and 800x600, really - it's a common abbrev. in the laptop business...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
More information about PALC, at least a nice picture and some details, can be found here:
www.meko.com/palc.html
As of last December, the three companies appeared to still be developing the technology.
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
The newest ones use Apple's new proprietary connector, which carries power, USB, and video from the video card to the monitor. If you can still find an older model with the standard DVI connector, you'll still have to ensure it will be recognized by your video card.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
i actually worked on lcds from a research point of view. the reason why lcds will not be cheap is, as stated, the manufacturing limitations. to create an lcd, you have to make individual transitors for each pixel (and don't forget, for each 'pixel', you need three- red/green/blue). so on a 22" display, you're requiring uniformity in the plasma processing chamber (how they create the transitors) that is very hard to mantain from step to step. so, for 1600x1200, you have 3x1600x1200 pixels to define- each pixel probably needs a few transitors. it's not the number of transitors, but the fact they are distributed over such a large area. there is a reason why cpus and such are made on 6" wafers, and not 21" ones... of course, there is a solution other than lcd or plasma displays (which throw out enough heat to keep your coffee warm) it's called PALC- plasma addressed liquid crystal display. a small spin-off company from techtronix was developing it and showed some wonderful prototypes. sony bought their rights and then killed the project a couple of years later. the beauty of this thing is that it was easily scalable to any resolution and any size. a plasma was used to switch individual rows/columns on and off. thanks sony. [yeah, i developed the plasma model to describe the thing (running on linux, of course)]
Check this out:
A mouth-watering picture of the new Samsung 24'' LCD. Was just tested in lastest (?!) issue of C't (germanies only computer magazine)
Here are the technical details.
Cheers,
Chris
I've got a Sony VPL-CS1 LCD Projector.
;-)
I haven't tried to measure the dimensions (Kinda depends on the distance you can get it from your screen)
It is great.
I can plug my DVD system into, my Laptop can connect to it, and it's got USB connectors so you can control your mouse through the remote control.
It can deal with PAL and NTSC.
Quake III is NICE!
All you need is a big White wall (or projector screen) good curtains/blinds, oh and about 2000UKP sterling (I bought mine in April, so the price may have come down since then).
So, 20" + screen - check; Hang on the wall - er-check; $3000 - check!
I think you're all out of excuses...
ys
-- "To ask a question is to show ignorance; Not to ask a question means you'll remain ignorant."
Actually, no. The problem is that the lens of your eye is not optically perfect. This imperfection is magnified (no pun intended) when the pupil is wide, and reduced as the pupil comes to a point.
This is the reason why some of the contact lens companies are making a big deal about "better than 20-20" correction: the contact lens can correct the imperfect lens of the eye to a point where near-optimal focus is achived.
Additionally, some researchers are looking into using active optics to bring focus in the eye to the limits of diffraction: in fact, the focus so achivied is so fine, that a HeNe laser (red, 632.8 nm) can be perceived as green, IF the spot falls on a green cone, rather than a red cone. In short, our vision system does not approach the limits of diffraction, but is limited by the accuraccy of focus of the lens.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Actually, the wider the pupil, the less resolution you have. This is the same effect as a pin-hole camera or squinting: by reducing the apeture to a point, the image will be in perfect focus for any focal length.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Its true, Apple has the highest-quality LCDs out there. Theyre bright, crisp, and a pleasure to look at. It sounded in your post that you were knocking them, or at least that you were reluctant, simply because they were Apple.
Alien user-interface designs, insane business practices and an extra helping of hubris aside, Apple has always made superior hardware, bar none. (Okay, so there was that exploding Powerbook back in 1997 but hey, we ALL make a mistake from time to time).
Truth is, Apple is the first place I'd look for a display because I know it will last, and if it does't, that they will back it up. (And if it DOES break, maybe you'll get a phone call from Steve-O himself!)
You can use the new 15" and 22" displays on any graphics card with a DVI-out connector with a DVI-ADC adapter, availible now for about $15.
The last generation, which you should still have no trouble getting your hands on refurbished or even new, use DVI.
And if you wait another month or two, it is HIGHLY rumored Apple finally has a 17" or 18" display in the pipeline to fill the gaping chasm in their product line between 15-22". It will have a new case design and should be a beauty. Best of all it should be priced compeditively, about $1500.
--Xel
========
"Eagles may soar, but weasels dont get sucked into jet engines."
If you use the ADC to DVI adapter, it should work fine with a DVI-based digital video card.
As a reseller, I was able to do some research with our suppliers and there is not much choice in terms of large LCD screens (e.g. something over 20") with the exception as you found, the Apple Cinema Display.
:(
:)
I have found something that seems to be what you may be looking for -- the NEC LCD2110. 21.3" viewable, 1600x1200 native resolution. Link to the NEC press Release.
There is a price sticker shock though - MSRP is $7999.
Minotaur Technologies, the company that I own sells it for $7595. Free shipping!
If you want a really big high-resolution screen then go with an LCD projector. Something usable in a well-lit room will cost about ~$9000 USD + the cost of bulbs.
If you want a resolution higher than 1280x1024 native then buy two of them with a dual-head video card and align the images to make a seamless display. This would be very cool.
Jason.
Must resist temptation... Must not read such articles... must not buy huge lcd screen.. must buy clothes... arrrrrrrrgh!
(Can slashdot have a "disable-temptation-and-bankrupcy-causing-articles " button?
The resolving power of the eye is measured in degrees i.e. what is the smallest angle subtended by an object that can still be seen. This resolving power is related to wavelength, but is also related to the current open diameter of your pupils (changes with light conditions). When it is dark you can see much smaller objects (stars) because your pupils are dilated. If I remember correctly (could be wrong), for a circular aperture, like eye or optical telescope, the maximum resolving power is given by:
p = c*l/D
where D is diameter of aperture, l is wavelength of light and c is a constant (1.22 may be?). p is in radians.
No it won't, because of difraction. I checked my physics books and my formula was actually correct. It gives the theoretical limit of resolution by a circular aperture. For rectangular, the constant is 1 instead fo 1.22.
The 22" Cinema Display has a DVI connector.
The ADC-DVI adapter at the Apple Store allows you to connect an ADC Computer (Cube) to a DVI monitor (Cinema Display). As far as I can tell, it does not allow you to connect a ADC monitor to a DVI computer (old G4 or a PC).
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Oops - it's the OLD Cinema Display that has a DVI - the new one is ADC.
The question still is: Can you just turn around the Apple adapter and do DVI to ADC?
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
The Apple Cinema Display, the 22-inch one, is made by LG in Korea. LG makes some pretty good stuff, but having worked with LCD panels from LG and Philips for a while, I have to say, I am waiting just a bit longer.
Why?
Two things are coming that will make a big difference in the quality of the display.
There are other things, like new forms of backlighting that are brighter and longer-lasting, and new ways of designing the dot layout on the glass. Let's not forget front-lighting, which is already available and makes for a much better image.
Besides all this, LCDs are still expensive and not that great in general. Once LCDs make it into televisions, the production costs will come down as the yields come up (they will have to!), and it may be possible to have a nice, large LCD computer monitor for the price of a large CRT today. It better be possible, anyway.
Anyone travel to Dallas often enough to get the brand names?
sulli
RTFJ.
it's because the edges have all the connectors required to power the millions of individual pixels. When I've seen LCDs naked, they're surrounded on all sides by circuitry. Hard to get rid of that.
sulli
RTFJ.
The tech I'm excited about is that one pioneered by Texas Instruments, (of all players!) The one which uses an array of micro-mirrors that you reflect a light from onto a screen.
They're already using this for theatrical film releases in some test markets. It looks awesome. (I actually forced myself to sit through a showing of 'Mission to Mars' to preview this system.)
When I can project my computer screen onto my wall, (and back up my hard drive on to 30gig phosphorescent CDR disks), then I'll finally be happy with the state of affairs in the computer world.
Probably won't become available for the lowest common denominator, though. Reflected light is too passive. You can't play Black-Ops team and scan a room from a white van like you can with CRT rays. (Paranoia, Paranoia. . .) I expect the dominant tech will end up being something that bathes us with rays, in order to keep the secret government happy!
-Fantastic Lad
Gentlemen, we have the technology to rebuild this man, but let's dick around and act like children and not actually do it for another decade, Okay?
Why don't you try QING (QING Is Not Geiss) - it's a visualisation plugin for SoundPlay, the kickass backwards-playing sound player for BeOS?
Aliasing is less of a problem with the newer video cards. Also, starting with a higher resolution helps. I've seen one 1024x768 LCD run 640x480 and it looked just as good as a CRT, but it was the video card doing the magic.
Except that you have to use an Apple product with it...
Is there any info on using the display with a non-Apple product?
On the other hand, the question doesn't give us enough info on why the Apple display wouldn't work for him/her?
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
I would think that putting the USB connection in the same cable (as the video and power) is the added functionality; less cost, less space, less hardware, less clutter. It's usability issue in which people need not figure out where cables go, etc.
IE, if Apple decided to eliminate cables altogether in their nextgen G4 tower by going wireless (wireless USB, keyboard, mouse, speakers), the added functionality is *zero* clutter, zero confusion, zero space loss.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
I like them, but so far I haven't read of any which provide decent graphics quality, say for high frame rates in Quake 3. Picture quality is fine for static images or low refresh rates, as for your ...yawn... everyday business suite of applications.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is a difficult question to answer. Apple assemble's them (or contracts out) from parts and adds custom boards (ColorSync, for example). It's the custom boards and their choice of only using high quality parts that make them stand out. Their color accuracy is astounding, expecially considering that all of the color calibration is done in internal hardware.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Apple offers, pretty much, the best monitors (or one of the best monitors) on the planet. Their flat panels are no exception. You'll need Apple hardware, which I assume you don't have. Sony also has a fine selection of flat panels. Altough slightly unrelated, they even offer a wall mountable 24' TV. I bet you can get a TV card, and hook up your computer to it.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Good question, and in fact this is exactly what an old "dual-scan" screen is (two passive matrix screens, one above the other - in this case the main reason was to double the scan rate, since passive screens are pretty slow otherwise). I don't know if it's as feasible to do this with active matrices, since they require more traces to feed the transistors individually. I also dunno whether you could accomplish something similar with four quadrant panels - probably not easily. In any event you'd almost certainly be able to see the joins, as you can with dual-scan screens.
> So why don't you just buy a new G4
> (Cube?), and plug that 22" LCD in?
> Okay, before you flame me - I know, I know... > They have no floppy drive (!), and the company > spends
i'm happy that the cube doesn't have floppy drives. i'd be happy enough to buy one if:
- it was a *dvd-ram* device (dvd-rom would have seemd cool in 1996 or so)
- it also lacked a hard drive (and used the resulting xtra space for a couple of pci slots)
- that is, if it was a "info-toaster appliance" instead of a weird attempt at a mini-micro-computer....
add those features and continue to tout it as a digital video port and apple has something imho...
--oxo
My laptop has a ATI Rage Mobility in it that can apply what I think is a bi-linear filter to the image before it displays it. The result is that the image does not have any of the horrible aliasing that results with most video cards. The result is a little fuzzy, but rather than annoying it has an almost attractive "magnified" look to it.
The result is that the lower resolution are 100% usable. To be honest, I don't even know why vendors implemented the old stretching method at all. It looked so crappy as to be useless. I always turned it off, and just had the display use the center 640x480 pixels with a huge black border. At least then I could read things.
However, I don't know if this solution is available outside of laptops. It is a function of the video chipset, and I don't know if the desktop ATI's implement it. I also don't know how it would work with the VGA connection that most LCD displays use. I wouldn't be suprised if it didn't. But, if you get a laptop with the ATI Rage Mobility, you won't have this problem. However, you might want to check for a BIOS setting to let you turn the stretching off on your laptop. All the one's I've used have had an option for this. The 1:1 mapping isn't great because it's so small, but at least it looks OK.
As long as you don't switch resolutions they are great, but the instant you do, you have:
;-)
Aliasing.
And it looks like crap.
I have a 2 year old laptop with a LCD screen of 1024x768. You switch to a resolution like 640x480 and you have TERRIBLE aliasing problems. The video card scales the 640 pixels up to the same physical width as the 1024, and the 480 up to the same physical height as the 768 instead of just doing a 1:1 scale and having the 640x480 image shrink. Now, since you need 1.6 pixels across and down (1024/640 = 768/480 = 1.6 scaling) and the LCD screen doesn't have fractional LCD's you end up with very bad aliasing artifacts.
Analog tubes do NOT have this problem. (They have temporal aliasing, but that's another discussion
For most uses, you just leave the LCD screen running at max (highest) resolution and it's not an issue. But playing, or developing games, on a LCD, and unfortunately the problem shows up.
I love the cleaner and sharper look of the LCD screen. It seems to be easier on the eyes. I would switch over to LCD screens in a second, if this is non-issue nowadays.
Have "modern" LCD screens fixed this scaling problem?
Cheers
--
"Those who fail to learn from the past, are condemned to repeat it" - paraphrasing George Santayana
The 1600SW is fantastic but the Number Nine card could be better (and doesn't have a driver in XFree86 4). They now supply a MultiLink adapter which allows the monitor to accept many types of video input.
How is it that Dell has a laptop with 15" 1600 X 1200 resolution (native), but you can't find one for a desktop computer? You'd think whoever builds their screens (Quanta? not sure) would be able to market that tech elsewhere. Of course, I'd like to see that pixel density on a 20" screen...
This is the kind of think I would advise waiting on. You can use this argument for anything(wait 5 more months and you can get a faster computer for the same price) but when looking at getting a flat screen monitor it would probably be prudent to wait for the technology to further develop. If you are looking for a flat screen with the same quality as a nice CRT then you should wait a while. CRTs have been around forever and have had a really long time to develop. Buying a flatscreen now could be a waste of money because Im sure new better technology will come around tomorrow. Then again... they look cool so maybe you should get one now. Chicks dig them.
Because of rising demand for high quality hangable high resolution imaging, the new company known as ArtistInc has been formed.
ArtistInc has some very major selling points in their special project code-named Painting. It has an infinite maximum resolution, with the average being 6 feet wide by 4 feet long. When asked about Flicker the CEO demonstrated the project in front of a large group -- one person their commented that "It looked like it was real and right in front of my face."
One possible problem with this new technology is that it is incompatible with turpentine.
(Someone please mod this information up as it's fairly important to combat the misinformation raised in the extended posting.)
The SGI 1600SW is definitely still sold an supported and still winning awards. With the fairly new MultiLink Adapter it is no longer necessary to have special video cards -- absolutely any VGA signal capable of doing 60 Hz refresh can drive the screen.
Keep in mind however that a standard VGA signal will go through an analog stage so you lose some of the theoretically possible crispness of pure digital. To keep pure digital you would indeed need one of the supported digital cards.
Here's a set of questions and answers about the 1600SW and the MultiLink Adapter.
I just wish I had one on my desk!
Cyrano de Maniac
This has been bugging me for years now.
Everyone knows that the reason LCD screens are expensive is that they have to be made as a single piece, and the larger the piece the more likely that a few pixels are out causing them to have to throw the whole mess away.
What on earth is stopping them from producing a bunch of those little gameboy color screens, or maybe even something cheaper, and placing them side-by side??
You would be able to have a TV the size of your whole living room wall where you could place various channels, perhaps even nature settings. Add a touch sensor and you could even have the worlds coolest (and largest) white board.
And the price should be relativly trivial--probably under $1000/wall for the LCDs, a bit more for the control hardware.
If something like this was available, I would even forgive a little bit of a line or border where two LCDs meet (Hell, putting 4 TVs side-by-side to show one ballgame looks pretty cool, this would be MUCH better than that).
Anyway, anyone out there know why?
Good question, and in fact, it's been done. And discussed in this slashdot article. It's not exactly what you describe, and costs well more than $1000/wall, but it's in the right direction.
My name is 11223.
And what is your quest?
I seek the holy grail of flat-panel technology!
And what is the ModeLine of an ATI Rage Fury Pro with DVI connector neccessary to hook up to an Apple Cinema Display?
Uhh.. uhh... I don't know... Aieeee!
I see what you mean, then.
USB is a 4 wire standard; 2 for power/ground and 2 for signal. All you add to the ADC then would be the 2 signal wires, assuming that there is hardware on the monitor end and the PC end to handle the power conversion (as opposed to having 2 sets of power on the cable, though stupid engineering could very well have allowed for that as well). This is speculation on my part.
So you can conceivably get rid of the wiring and shielding necessary for the power, if it rides along the same line as the monitor's power lines.
You don't get an argument that it will take more engineering to get the wires, at different clocks, shielded, flexible, and working. On the other hand a new solution was needed for next generation displays, at least as defined by VESA, due to the fact that clock/refresh was increasing, display size/resolution was increasing, and the old VGA cables could not handle the bandwidth, limited at 150MHz, to the 2GHz limit of the newer interface.
See <a href="http://www.vesa.org/news81798.html">this page</a> for more info.
Your second point is also noted; but it is definitely an engineering solution, and not one that is insurmountable. I suspect Apple's future plan is to integrate Firewire as well into the cable, and produce a product with only one cable out the back:
ADC.
Speakers would migrate to USB, which collapses into the ADC, while video, firewire, and power are also provided by the ADC(Advanced Display Connector, if it's adopted outside of Apple, I would hope). Networking, of course, would be wireless.
And it isn't the cable that your saving money on; it's the ports and complexity and chipsets on the motherboard that get condensed. Say future PCI/AGP chipsets collect USB and FireWire functionality onto them. Instead of 3 or 4 chips, you now have 1 chip running all four functions. Instead of 3 ports, you now have one. Engineering wise, this makes placement and layout easier, I think, as well as heat disippation and traces simpler.
This has nothing to do with the stupidity of the user, though stupid people definitely benefit/gain from this arrangement. It is a convenience thing too. One less cable to package and ship. One less cable to test and try. One less cable to produce and buy. A $2 cable, a $1 in chips, $3 in ports, across a million machines => $6 million not spent. And since Apple seems to be shipping in the millions a year, I don't think saving $10-20 million is something one can laugh at easily...
Considering that's 250 engineers for a year of about $80k, it would be worth it if it cost 5 engineers 3 years of development time to design/implement this, at $100k salaries. One year of sales, if it's even close to $6mil saved, is enough to warrant the cost/difficulty in implementation.
My numbers are pure guesswork and rough numbers, nothing scientific. But on cost analysis, it isn't *outrageous* for Apple to implement something like this...
On the user end, it really is 2 less cables: Instead of video, power, and USB, it is only ADC.
So it may not be such a big deal on our end...
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
Well, I have a SGI FlatPanel 1600SW. This is, by far, the best LCD monitor I could find today--and that includes LCDs by Apple.
With a Number Nine Rev 4-FP (Do they make these anymore?) 1600x1024 @ 32-bit color really kicks ass in X. What I like most is that it's unusually crisp and very clear... I can read small text from a few feet away.
People have already mentioned that X 4.0 hasn't had the Number Nine drivers ported over, but that's trivial--I know they are working on this.
In any case, the SW-1600 is unbeatable. They just had a deal over at sgi.com where they were selling a kind of "G3"-looking Flatpanel for something like $US 1,699. It normally sells for $3,000 and I think they throw in a card too, a 16 MB Formac if you have a Mac, or a 32 MB Oxygen VX1-1600SW if you have a PC (Oxygen VX1-1600SW is not supported under X, unfortunately, not even with Xig's (www.xig.com) Oxygen VX1 driver.) But so what? Sell it (Value=$400) and get a Number Nine Revolution 4-FP instead.
So, that's about a 3,500 value which they are selling for 1,699. And no, I don't work for SGI, it's just that I think that this FlatPanel LCD is the best. (And believe me, I've looked.)
For price versus quality, I think this deal is quite good--if the deal is still there. (http://www.sgi.com/flatpanel).
Even so, I would shell out $5000 for this monitor, because I can't live with anything else anymore. I know most people don't have the money for this, but apparently the poster of this story does.
Hope this helps.
My roommate works at Panasonic and brought home one of their Plasma Displays. There's nothing quite as cool as playing Quake 3 Arena on a 42" 16x9 aspect screen. :)
:)
For our Y2K party we set it up to use Ryan Geiss' Winamp Plugin as a nice conversion piece.
Of course it costs around $13999.95...
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I wear pants.