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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!
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.
>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....
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.