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IBM Ships First 22" 200dpi Displays
wonko writes: "IBM has
begun shipping new monitors that are as much as 12 times sharper than current displays, and 4.5 times sharper than HDTV. These new 22-inch active matrix liquid crystal displays use aluminum-based technology and have over 9 million pixels. IBM will soon be licensing the technology to other display makers, so you could soon see these screens in laptops, PDAs, cellphones, etc. Pardon me while I wipe the drool off my keyboard ..." This is the same high-definition display you read about here earlier. They are not yet in CompUSA, to put it lightly -- first examples are going to Lawrence Livermore -- but the trickle-down effect in a couple of years is promising.
These new 22-inch active matrix liquid crystal displays use aluminum-based technology and have over 9 million pixels. IBM will soon be licensing the technology to other display makers, so you could soon see these screens in laptops, PDAs, cellphones, etc.
22-inch display on a cellphone? Damn!
Actually for photographs, it is newspaper/magazine quality. According to agfaphoto and kodak magazine quality is 150-175 lpi and for art quality books/magazine it its 175-250 lpi.
<i>True, but you should compare the new technology to the best that is available now, not to the average.</i>
<p>Why?
To give you an idea. Right now, I'm holding a ruler and your post in netscape measures as a bit more than 1/4 inch for the caps. a little more than 0.7 a cm. This is acceptable to most people. When I zoom in to the lowest resolution, each capped character measures 0.7 inch.
X is much better for people with eye problems compared to Windows. XFree lets you change resolution with one keystroke. Windows? at least 0.5 minute to change resolution. This allows you navigate with slightly higher resolutions, and zoom in when you need to read something.
If you got eye problems, you simply cannot use any low end displays and you must change monitor every 3 years. Don't be a cheap bastard, make sacrifice on your hard drive, CPU, and buy the best monitor/video card you can afford.
And Geeez! If you got an eye problem, maybe you should stop playing computer games and go out some more. You need your eyes to do something more productive on the screen.
What you need is a good XF86Config file, fine tuned, and a very fast pointing device (mine is a Logitech trackmanFX) that moves super fast across the desktop. Or put in a second 21 inches monitor for a dual head. If the monitor becomes a little blured, THROW IT AWAY, or get the manufacturere to replace it like I do.
And don't whine about desktop publishing, either. I used to be a graphics designer. graphics designers do not demand as crisp the monitor as programmers, and CAD operators. They don't need to look hard.
Hummmm...... Aluminum, imagine what they will do when they switch to copper...
You know like the CPU manufacturers did. Coppermine liquid crystal displays will rock.
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Some people are alive, only because it is against the law to Kill them!
Speaking of the need for vector based interfaces... Berlin anyone? :-)
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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
And don't forget that about half of the dimensions in stock HTML are specified in pixels. Time to start weeding those out, too.
If they use the same standards as for the T86D you would have up to 68 bright pixels or 102 dark pixels... ouch! i hope they improved thier manufacturing yields by the time this thing hits consumers.
From the MSNBC article (which is really just a blurb):
Shipping, sure, but to various famous scientific laboratories only.
[
>rom the my-laptop-will-be-huge! dept.
Yes! 22 inch laptops that can finally cover the average lap of the sysadmin!
Tim, you spot the trend before everyone else....
9 million pixels X 4bpp= 36MB framebuffer! Does anyone know what kind of graphics cards they have on those super computer terminals?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You could NOT break down a wall and rebuild it farther for $3000. Also, a lot of people don't like a big monitor hogging their desk. If you're working in a cozy study or in the corner of the living room, then a flat panel display is ideal. Additionally, if you're a minimalist, then a standard CRT probably doesn't go with the "look" of your house. Not to mention he might just be tired of frying his brain with cancer causing emissions.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Actually, you wouldn't be pusing 36MB x 60fps to do Quake. Remember, 3D is vector graphics. Aside from textures, the data rate should be the same wether you're rendering at 1600x1200 or 16,000x12,000. Also, 50fps video at that res would require about 1.8GB/sec of bandwidth. While that's not within the realm of AGP 4X, it is within the 3-5GB/sec of bandwidth that even mid-range SGIs have.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Do you realize how few people know that 200dpi==40,000 pixels per square inch? You're talking about a country where 1/5th of people don't know whether the earth goes around the moon or vice versa. (Which, BTW compares favorably to the 1/4-1/3 in parts of Europe.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Or just use OS X. Quartz should be perfect for scalable GUIs (when, of course, we get HW acceleration for Postscript primitives.) I dream of a day when the user can specify a scaling size for their desktop, and program designers can work in a virtual coordinate space without having to worry about resolution.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Nope - as they are bitmaps - they will be smaller.
:)
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All I can think is how great Lemmings would look at that kind of resolution. I could see the whole map in a corner of the screen and if I buy a microscope i can even see the lemmings ! :)
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Ever since then, when a friend wants a computer part I go to another store or get it from an online source.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
1.64 miles is 2.64 kilometers.
What ever happened to metric?
Didn't we learn from that nasa flub last year? The future is not in miles or feet or inches.
I haven't done any Windows GUI programming so I can't really compare, but GTK+ still has many distances measured in pixels. Getting resolution dependance out of our applications will take quite a long time.
The other question I have is whether scalable graphics for the GUI is really feasible on existing 72 dpi displays with all the aliasing effects that implies. Does the new Mac interface really use vector graphics for *all* its icons and such? If we've all got 22" 200dpi displays, sure, but that's not going to happen for a long time yet.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
That 5 years to market might be also a safety measure. Why ? Because no video card on the market right now can handle that many pixels in 2D yet. At their rough 9 megapixels, that means 36mb per screenpage for full resolution. Any game will therefore require at least 72mb for double-buffering.. more for 3D. Lastly, can you imagine the abusive CPU load required to ferry that many pixels from system ram to video ram ? Next thing you'll know, Internet Explorer will be using offscreen video ram for its browser cache since it will surely require at least 128mb onboard. Just plain nuts!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Think printing. Right now your monitor has a resolution of 75 dpi and bitmaps are made for that resolution. But you still can print them on you 600 dpi laserprinter. Although you don't take 100% advantage of the 600 dpi, it'll still look better then when it's printed on a 300 dpi printer.
I don't know how dpi settings work in X, but I can imagine that X could be made to use 3x3 pixels for a single pixel from a 75dpi bitmap (200 dpi is almost 3 times as high as 75 dpi).
So, all you have to do to be ready for such a display is alter X. At a later stage you could rebuild/enhance your wm to use high-res bitmaps. Or you could scale them, etc..
Thimo
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Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux!
All bodies orbit around a commen point in space, the common center of mass. The sun and earth do it to. If you look at the sun over a long period of time, it will look like its wobbling because it is orbiting around a point thats not exactly at its own center (though, given the mass of the Sun, its pretty damn close.) The common point that the moon and Earth orbit around is about a thousand miles under the surface of the earth, so you can still say that the moon orbits around the earth. If it were outside the earth, then it might make more sense to call it a binary system.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Printing presses are fundementally different than computer displays. Look closely at a magazine, and you'll notice that the "dots" are 1) arranged diagonally, and 2) are of variable size.
The classic photoshop rule of thumb was to have a image DPI 3x to 5x the LPI of the press.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
On the other hand, not all of the stuff that appears on the screen are games. Any non-accelerated fullscreen app will most likely suffer.
<p>However, 2000x1500 isn't exactly a common resolution, today. Many more people have 1024x768.
<p>3840 x 2480 = 9,216,000
<p>1024 x 768 = 786,432
<p>9,216,000 / 786,432 = 11.7
Then, I went to a LAN party, and saw all the 20/20 people doing Windows at 1600x1200, on 15-inch monitors, and complaining that "It starts to get a little blurry on my monitor when I try that..." Then I tried installing Linux and X-Windows on my own machine, and found that X-Windows was meant to never ever NEVER run in 640x480, because all the applications I found seemed to be designed for 1024x768 -- even though they had 7-pixel-high fonts.
This new era of high-resolution displays struck fear into my heart, that in ten years all computer applications will run at 3000x2000 resolution, with 10-pixel-high fonts. And do you seriously believe that people won't design web pages to be "best viewed at 5000x4000"? Or that they aren't already?
But, in the short term, while a 640x480 or 800x600 large-fonts display is still a realistic option, a display like that might actually be a good thing. See, most LCD screens only work at a certain resolution -- 800x600, 1024x768, etc. If you try to decrease the resolution, you get either a big black border of wasted space, or you get random patterns of thick and thin pixel rows and columns. Either way, it's ugly. But if you start at 3000x2000, it becomes less ugly, because you're not alternating single rows and double rows of pixels anymore; you're alternating quadruple and quintuple rows of pixels. This would be good, not just for me, but for gamers who might want to play different games at different resolutions. Starcraft, for example, still plays only at 640x480 if I'm not mistaken.
Of course, the best option would be if people designed everything to be actually scalable for a change. MS Windows has some support for scalability; you can set 800x600 for "Small Fonts" or "Large Fonts" and it works fine with most, but not all, apps. Other objects change size too, such as icons. Bitmaps, however, will always be bitmaps, and that affects web pages. Have you ever played Sissyfight? A 200-pixel-high window, but 6-pixel-high fonts abound. Or Pixeltime -- only usable because the pics can be zoomed and the text is largely inconsequential. Hopefully, when people think in inches instead of pixels, we'll see fewer sites like those. I just hope the backlash doesn't create pages that say "Optimized for a 22-inch display," though such a thing would better expose the inherent arrogance of such a design choice.
Now, I imagine some of you are drooling over this display for the reason my friends always give for their insanely-high resolution: "Just think of how many more windows I can have open at once!" Of course, after a certain point, it would be easier on the eyes and wallet to just use two displays. Break that down into cost-per-pixel, cost-per-square-inch, etc. Perhaps dual displays might even have organizational advantages: "The 17-inch display is for code, the 15-inch display is for man pages and instant messages."
Of course, none of this applies to desktop publishing, where the situation demands something as close to paper as humanly possible. Or video production, in which having a pixel-perfect HDTV display window would be very useful. But for mortals, well, we'll just see whether we use this power for good or evil.
A friend of mine who works at IBM sent me a screenshot. Looks great:
<IMG src="22inch.png">
<DISPLAY WARNING> If you can read this message your monitor is not high enough resolution to view this picture.
</DISPLAY WARNING>
</IMG>
Unfortunately, they are going for $30K a peice and are only making a few (10!) per year. The seller seemed confident that the price/availability would be going down/up very soon.
pr0n jokes aside, I know more than a few graphic artists who would rip out the liver of their best friends for one of these.
As for scalable graphics, this will be really interesting to see. One of Windows greater failings (IMHO) has always been its lack of geometry management. Most Windows apps basically nail things to specific X,Y positions in a dialog, rather than having a fluid layout which specifies relative attachments. (This is one area where Motif does something better than Windows). Geometry management scales with resolution or font size, where absoulte positioning doesn't.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
As an example they were showing X rays. If you got your face right up next to the screen, you still couldn't identify individual pixels. In fact, it looked just like a piece of paper. The difference between this setup and a normal hi-res monitor is simply indescribable.
We don't have a resolution independent operating systems/applications
Under Windows 9x, right-click on the desktop (unless you are using a web page with Active Desktop and a JavaScript [right-click trap]) and choose Properties. In the Settings tab, click Advanced. In the General tab, choose Font Size: Other... and crank the res up to 192 dpi.
Will I retire or break 10K?
porn 4.5x sharper than it is on hd, shweet.
I just acquired an 18" LCD at work, a Philips. It's impressive at 1280x1024 so the IBM must be awesome. However, with all the emphasis on high resolution, what do we know about the IBM's ability to display colours? I ask because my LCD seems not to do greens very well, they look a little washed-out.
The Register has a little article about this also. They say that it will be used along side ASCI White.. so the worlds fastest compnuter gets the worlds best display... droool... Dear Mr. Bank Manager...
200dpi screen is actually much better than a fax, and probably better than a 300dpi laser printer.
Anti aliasing is partly to credit (esp with the 600dpi subpixel arrangement), but more importantly is that a 200dpi pixel is 1/200 inch in size. A 300 dpi laser printer has dots significantly larger than 1/300 inch, so the display will be much crisper. I think. I don't know why I know this, but am pretty sure about it.
Could you please give a 3 second description of the correction process? I had understood that the argument was that as long as the subpixels were contiguous with the color-carrying full pixel, no fringing would occur. I had also attributed apple-IIs fringing to the fact that the pixels were quite large.
Limited number of programs?
OSX runs all classic MacOS software, runs Carbon/Cocoa-based apps, and can also compile most unix apps, including X-windows packages (I have XFree running in OSX, for instance, and run Apache/PHP/PostGreSQL/sshd on the same box.
That's hardly a limited number of programs.
True, it does depend on the reference system. However, in astronomy the reference point is the common center of mass. Since that center of mass is about a thousand miles under the surface of the earth, you can in all truth say the moon orbits about the earth.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Another reason why I support GUIs switching to a fully accelerated model. back in 1993, I saw a Matrox card that did HW accelerated TrueType. Given the fact that we have a 100 times as many transistors to work with these days, why can't the make a card that accelerates all of the Postscript primatives? I'd buy one, and the QuarkXPress guys would kill for one.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Firstly, fax is 200x100 dpi
So this is not just twice that, but with 3 independent colours, you can use sub-pixel antialiasing and it appears substantially better than fax resolution-wise. Even ordinary greyscale antialiasing makes it appear higher quality than a fax.
I can wait 5 years. But everything already looks a blur to me anyway!
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
We don't have a resolution independent operating systems/applications. Thus, all that will happen on these displays is everything on your windows or linux desktop will just look smaller, not crisper and sharper.
I might be wrong though, I think OS X with it's display PDF engine could actually make very good use of these displays.
-josh
Just imagine pr0n on one of these! The boobs would be more real then in real life!
Ok, maybe not MORE real.. most of them have implants.
Not that I know, or anything!
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CitizenC
Making them into bigger bitmaps will just make them non-portable to older/cheaper machines.
Time to get scalable icons working, whether you're Windows or X. There should be just enought time before these start hitting the market in bulk, although print and design houses will want these displays sooner than most and will pay for them.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I recently setup a MAC for a gentleman who can only read text that is about 1.5inches high. I setup his 19" monitor to run at 1024x768. I then jacked up the font size. He and I tested various modes and it was found that the higher resolution was best. The reason was that the useless windowing crap was small enough that it did not take up huge ammounts of screen space, but the important text information was still readable.
Not all was perfect though. While MacOS was very good at scalling the fonts and icons some of the applications were not. Word in particular is very bad at scaleing fonts. The zoom feature seems to be pixel based. If the document is zoomed to 400% the fonts looked awfull as the fonts were very blocky. Instead of taking a 12pt font and scaleing it to 400%, the pixels of the 12pt font are expanded 400%. The hack was simple two macro keys were programmed to switch the font between 12pt and 60pt (or 48pt can't remember).
The problem is not the high resolution monitors, but rather the software that does not scale its fonts. I am very disapointed with how most software treats fonts. The user should be able to control the size of all fonts. If software was designed properly it would not care what font size was used.
Web pages are a whole other matter. There is no need for a web page to dictate what font and font size is used. Web designers that need to do that generally make ugly, hard to read pages that don't have anything content.
I imagine some of you are drooling over this display for the reason my friends always give for their insanely-high resolution: "Just think of how many more windows I can have open at once!"
I'm afraid I'm thinking of this in almost exactly the opposite way you are. My vision is reasonably good -- slightly better than 20/20 without glasses, even better with glasses. But text is difficult to read from a standard computer display for me, too. Guess what -- it's difficult for anyone to read. Why? In part, because standard displays have awful, awful, awful resolution. And with the standard, antiquated software that comes on nearly every computer made, the size of the text on the display is dependent on the resolution. The better I make the resolution, the smaller the text gets -- it unbelievable to me that I'm still using software shitty enough to demand that. But hey, what can you do? Its not like its a new millenium yet (wait another month and a half for that).
I guarantee that as high resolution displays become available, the idea that the size of the text on the monitor is somehow tied to the resolution of the monitor will go away. Think, for example, of printers -- imagine if someone said to you today, "I only buy the lowest resolution printers I can find. In fact, I prefer the old 120 dpi bubble jets. That way, the text looks bigger when I print, and its easier to read." You'd look at them as if they had a huge screw loose inside their head. "Why," you'd think, "would anyone on earth believe the resolution of the printer would affect the size of the text? The text is always scaled to be the same size -- the lower the resolution, the blockier the letters get. Lower resolution makes it harder to read -- not easier."
With any luck at all, in 10 years resolution independent display drivers will exist, and the idea that higher resolution is somehow "harder" to read will go away. Unless, of course, you're still using X windows. Bleh.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
If it really were "204 pixels per square inch" that would be one of the worst resolutions ever made since it would only be around 14 dpi.