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Super Large, Super Hi-Res LCD Screens?

Posted by Cliff on from the can-you-say-super-expensive? dept.

Saberwind asks: "Fed up with flicker problems when viewing 1600x1200 and 1920x1440 resolutions on even some high-end CRTs, and wanting a perfect image that I can hang on my wall, I'm ready to switch to LCD. I almost plunked down nearly $3000 for a 18.1-inch Viewsonic VP181. The ideal LCD would have a digital input, be at least 20" diagonal, be wall-mountable, have an orthagonal shape, and of course square pixels (regardless of the aspect ratio). Does anyone know where such holy grails might be procured?"

"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."

2 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. The SGI FlatPanel 1600SW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5

    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.

  2. Plasma Display by Ribo99 · · Score: 5

    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.