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22" 9.2-Million Pixel Display
chrisd writes: "Just noticed this article over on Yahoo news. It described a research project that Intel and Stanford university developed that concentrated on next-gen displays. The result? A 22 inch display that displays 9.2 million pixels (they use the odious 'megapixel' descriptor in the article), needs 16 processors and 2 GB of ram to run it and costs $200,000US. So it's a little spendy. This is a big step up from my first 12" amber screen though, that's for sure." Ah, the march of progress ... I'm happy with anything that will help drive down the cost of 17" and 18.1" LCD displays, no matter how indirectly.
My friend Daron and I did something very similar a few summers ago.
We exploited the fact that existing LCD technology utilizes a semi-transparent membrane that produces no light of its own and is illuminated usually by way of a fluorescent light. We were able to introduce a very high resolution to these screens by actually arranging them one on top of the other, five LCD's deep. The whole setup relied on some very precise arrangement (each panel needed to be approximately 1/10 of a pixel width offset from the one beneath!). We ended up milling an enclosure with a high-tolerance CNC machine to even make the thing feasable. In addition, we eventually found that a fluorescent light source simply couldn't put out enough lumens to sufficiently illuminate the grid so we switched to a mercury vapor setup. The energy efficieny in these things is atrocious but it really was the only thing feasible at the time.
Suprisingly enough the physical setup was relatively simple compared to the interpolation and digital signal processing required to composite a standard VGA signal across an array of dozens of interlaced LCD displays! I attribute most of our success in this to the fact that Daron and I are both wizzes in QBasic. For those of you who don't know QBasic is a low-level systems language specific to the windows API. It's one tremendous advantage is that it is native to the OS (operational system) and hence runs at what we call real-time kernel speed. I think this is really where MacOS and linux tend to fall down--they mostly rely on cross-platform languages like C, which, unfortunately must perform to the "lowest common denominator." QBasic afforded us a modularity and granularity of performance such that I don't think a similar feat could have been pulled off in any other environment.
thank you apple marketing department...
I could see this used for film resolution work as well. It's close enough to film rez specs that I tend to think that's the market the researchers are targeting in the near term.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
"But it seems like no one (besides MS) is working on resolution-independent GUI frameworks."
Hey, buddy, you misspelled "Apple," there. OS X is thoroughly vector-based.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
What is wrong with the term "megapixel" (when spelled properly, of course)? It is descriptive and makes perfect sense.
High resolution displays like this one are going to require a graphics card that is a generation beyond the current cards in 2 -D computing power.
Even though video cards have gotten more powerful in recent years, it has generally been in the 3rd dimention, rather than the first two were most of us spend our lives working. For instance, most people who work with intel based hardware will only concider nVida video cards. But guess what? My ATI Radeon card is FASTER in 2D display. It is nice that you no longer need an expensive fast video card to work in photoshop. But lack of competition in the world of computing....is a strange thing.
Apple's Display PDF (Quartz?) standard in Mac OS X may actually be the first thing in a while to push 2D acceeration forward.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
A company called CopyTele has been developing a flat panel display technology they call E-Paper for something like the last 15 years and they have filed well over 200 patents for it on the way. It looks very promising, but unfortunately it's not here yet.
It is based on the principle of electrophoresis - moving microscopic particles with electric charge while suspended in opaque fluid. When the particles are moved to the front they are visible, when they are pulled back they are obscured by the fluid.
Since the particles have the same density as the fluid they don't drift. The image stays even after you turn off the power. Power is only required to modify the image, resulting in extremely low power consumption. No backlight is required - the display is reflective and has very high contrast, supposedly comparable to ink on paper. It is clearly visible in full sunlight.
Since the image remains without refreshing it is not necessary to update the image tens of times per second just to get a stable image. This makes it easier to reach very high resolutions (>200DPI). This technology may not be appropriate for video, but it should be ideal for e-books.
If you look at their site you will see that they now sell encryption devices. This move is relatively recent. In their press releases you can see that they are still working on their display technology. I first heard about them in a Popular Science article in 1985(!). I'm still waiting for them to bring this display to market...
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I have a Matrox G200MMS Quad-head that will do 5.2 megapixel over four monitors, and IIRC, it was only $800. I'm using it now to drive a pair of Samsung 770TFT panels. At $950 each for a 1280*1024 flat panel, they're a bit more reasonable than most.
:-)
I'm a bit disappointed in their manufacturing though. I have one born in Oct 2000 and another born in March 2001. Unfortunately the older one has a different white point and neither have hardware color temperature adjustment. But it was the low cost that allowed me to get away with having a 2560*1024 (soon to be 2560*2048!) flat panel desktop, so I can't complain too much.
Now if you want to display a bunch of DVDs on those monitors, you're going to need a heck of a lot more bandwidth than the PCI bus can provide you. (G200MMS is PCI card) And you'll need something to decode with too. But if you didn't read the article you should know that you don't need that kind of cash to get 9.6 million pixels up on a monitor, as long as the pixels aren't doing much.
Nitpick: 600mm by 700mm is less than a half a meter squared. .42 meters squared, actually.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Why is the term 'megapixel' odious to the author?
Surely you don't thik we should go around talking about how our floppies can hold one million four hindred-forty thousand bytes of data, do you?
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
I try, but 8% per year is glacial compared to the rates for ICs and for magnetic/optical (take your pick) storage technology. Believe it or not, your average "good" PC system used to be equal parts (in cost) of RAM, mobo, disk, and display. Now, for systems that we'd really want, it's better than 50% display (thinking along the lines of a big Apple flat panel and even the most tricked out consumer-level PC).
Under these conditions, patience is hard.
Babar
Careful with the word "superior"-- not everyone has the same opinions of what's superior and inferior.
For example, some folks might find a 22" monitor more handy than a 17" monitor, regardless of the dpi.
not quite sure what your reasoning is there.
all available microsoft oses use bitmap graphics, which are resolution dependent.
what you're looking for is vector graphics, which are used to a large extent in apple's mac os x, and to a minor degree in gnome.
i would say microsoft are actually lagging in this race, unless they've got some vector tricks up their sleeves in windows xp (which i haven't played with yet, so can't comment on).
matt
Actually, I've been rather disappointed in the advancements in display technologies (and prices) over the years. Yes, I too started with that 12" Amber screen (with a Hercules "high resolution" mono graphics card).
At the same time, we've seen incredible increases in processing power, from a 10mhz to a 1ghz CPU. In graphical terms, we should have a 3d holographic display on our desktops by now.
I personally blame the CRT manufacturers for this extreme lag in display technology. They've really controlled the prices and their technology hasn't increased significantly.
Then there is the industry that placed all its bets on CRT technology for the longest time. But, considering what we've seen in the recent past, I think we're going to get a surge in display technology. CRT technology is increasing in quality, and alternative technologies like LCD are becoming mainstream.
Here's to graphics display research.
The paper on the Lightning-2 hardware that drives the monitor is here.
See also WireGL and its associated paper, which was used to run Quake3 on the IBM display.
yeah yeah - I know - offtopic - moderators act accordingly.
Anyways - now we are on the topic of monitors - has anyone in the slashdot crowd had any experience with the sgi flatscreen monitor? http://www.sgi.com/flatpanel/ - I am very interested in picking one up.... but I am running Windows 2000 and am not to sure of support for it / video cards? Anyone able to shed some light on how good / incompatible this sexy monitor is?
S.t.e.v.e.
Where do I get 9.2 megapixel porn?
What's that you say? It doesn't exist? Well, what's this contraption good for then?
cheers,
mike
Over at dpix (pronounced "Depicts"), they've been doing very high resolution LCD's for several years.
The last time I checked, they could do 300x300dpi monochrome, and 200x200 dpi color. These aren't 22" panels, of course, but I found them pretty impressive nevertheless.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Just because that's a perceived maximum doesn't mean you'd be able to determine this unless you sat in front of your monitor with a magnifying glass. These arguments are always being thrown in the loop with CCD's and crap like that.
Want Root?
Actually, the current good 3D cards just need support for higher 2D resolutions as newer displays become available, not "more 2-D computing power". Basically, 2D performance is primarily limited by 2D fill rate, which in turn is determined largely by (graphics-card) memory bandwidth.
3D cards have continued to push the graphics memory bandwidth curve upwards, so I'm not too concerned that 2D cards "won't be fast enough." Cards nowdays can draw 2D graphics to the frame buffer about 10-1000x faster than the displays can support them using bltblt and similar 2D fill operations. (If you don't believe me, go look at the megapixel fill rates of 2D and 3D cards.) Which brings me to my next point.
There's no competing on 2D because its irrelevant to the consumer. How so? Well, what's the difference between 500 fps 2D and 1000 fps to the naked eye? Answer: nothing, both are faster than any display device (monitor) can support.
Sometimes marketeers try to promote (with the help of ignorant journalists) some artificial 2D performance benchmark comparisons, but I haven't seen any in the last 5 years that made a smidgen of difference in ordinary or even extraordinary human usage scenarios.
I'll agree that Display PDF (and its predecessor Display PostScript) does soak up lots of horsepower, since to display anything means you have to execute an arbitrary program written in a variant of the PostScript language. It'll be interesting to see if any graphics cards attempt to accelerate it rather than just tossing that job to the CPU. Display PDF could make it easier to write graphics applications since it provides a nice library of 2D vector and fill operations, and I'm glad Apple is licensing rather than reinventing the wheel, but you'll never see it take off on the PC because Microsoft is intent on retaining control of those operations within ActiveX.
--LP, formerly a graphics hardware analyst
It's generally accepted that when the monitors get to about 200 dpi, you won't be able to tell the difference with your eye. (Technically speaking, it depends how far your eye is from the display.) Right now, most monitors display at around 75-90 dpi however. So there's still reasonable room for improvement, although I'd agree that today's CRTs are "good enough" aka "just great for many applications". But then I think that my straight lines on my monitors are straight enough too... ;)
Making geometries better with CRTs is an incredibly difficult technical challenge, but trivial with LCDs. If you are really picky about geometry and the newer flat-screen CRTs still aren't good enough, I'd recommend moving to an LCD display.
--LP
Pictures of that resolution will have to be highly compressed and stored in local mass storage or downloaded from off-site servers.
1) How long will it take to see I/O bandwidth improve to where it can handle real time streaming of such huge pictures from storage.
2) Is there any hardware out there right now that can handle such high I/O bandwidths?
Very cool stuff that's just starting to get commercialized -- this is what you'll be seeing in your GeForce 4s or whatever.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
displays 9.2 million pixels [...] needs [...] and 2 GB of ram
:-)
With a colour depth of 24 bit/pixel, 9.2 Mpixel require below 28 MB. In 32 bit mode, it's well below 40 MB.
So the conclusion would be that this beast must have something like 1780 bits per pixel - WOW, that's a hell of a lot colours
(Yes I know what e.g. texture memory is good for.)
--- The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a burning truck.
One cost advantage of very high resolution LCDs is that they hide some flaws such as dead pixels. Hot pixels will still stand out, but they'll be tiny.
Incidentally, the reason displays don't obey Moore's Law, even though they're made using photolithography, is that making transistors smaller doesn't help displays.
As the article points out, displays are getting cheaper at about 8% per year. That's a lot better than almost any other non-IC product. Be patient.
If you're near SF, incidentally, visit the Sony Metreon, which is being used to show off Sony flat panel displays of various flavors. They're everywhere. Little ones. Big ones. LCDs. Plasma panels. No Jumbotron, though.
I think it's supposed to be a joke. DivX is easily counted as 'the Bose of video codecs; most people think it's great, but anybody who knows better knows it sucks.' No highs, no lows, must be Bose.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
My CRT Sony 17 inch monitor is just great for my many applications. At some point all of those "megapixels" just don't matter, the human eye can only resolve detail to about a tenth of a millimeter after that it is pointless to have higher resolutions. Instead of working on the the pixel number companies like sony need to figure out how to make the geometry better with these monitors. I've got 3 sony monitors here and each one has flaws when it comes to making a straight line actually "straight" on the screen. Anybody else with the same troubles?
.biz and .info for $13
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
In any case, as http://developer.apple.com/quartz says, "Quartz supports PostScript®-like drawing features such as resolution independence, transformable coordinates (for rotation, scales, and skews), Bézier paths, and clipping operations."
That's a lot more than what Windows offers. So while I don't know for a fact that the widgets are resolution-independent, the underlying graphics API certainly is.
You mean no one besides Apple? OS X's Quartz is vector-based.
The fact that I can discern individual pixels on my monitor is a problem. What we need is smooth curves without anti-aliasing - let our eyes blur the lines for us.
When these things go consumer level, I'll be the first to pay up (Even if it's up to $10k) - I don't think you really understand how fucking incredible this would look.
At 9 megapixel, you are at 35 MM photography resolution (assuming enough color depth - betwee 16 and 24 bit, if memory serves). With this display, the need for chemical photography evaporates for all but niche applications. True, for motion, this is complete overkill. The human eye/mind would be hard pressed to absorb this many pixels at 24 frames/seconds.
Think big: put two dozen in your house, network them, and every day you could live in a different world class museum. Or have you photo album be available via voice command instead of having to get it of a dusty shelf. or be surrounded by stunning high production value or porn. or whatever.
The resesearchers reached for 9 megapixel for a definite reason: 150 years of chemical photography says this is a resolution people really like for still pictures.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
Um, this monitor sounds like it's about 200-300 pixels per inch, which seems like it would be far below the limit of perception.
Somewhere in MSDN I read an article about how to make Windows apps work on high-dpi monitors; I haven't seen such docs for any other platform.
Yes, Quartz 2D supports all those whiz-bang features; too bad most OS X apps are Carbon and are using QuickDraw instead of Quartz 2D.
But it's not resolution-independent. For example, all the widgets are bitmaps, so on a high-dpi monitor, they would become tiny.
The maximum resolution of the human eye has no relation to the size of the viewed object, but instead is related to the size of the retina (where the image of what a person sees is projected and transformed into nervous impulses).
Now, if you get close enough to the monitor so that the distance between it and your eye is the same as the distance between the front of your eye and your retina (about 1")? then you have a 1:1 relation and you can apply that rule. On the other hand, even if you could focus your eye such a short distance, having a 16"x12" display would still be incredibly useless ...
The answer is eyestrain. It's much easier to read 300dpi text than 72dpi text. Just like it's easier on the eyes to read a printed book than a monitor screen.
One of the largest problems facing manufacturers of large-dimension LCD screens is the high rate of failure during the manufacturing process. This means that each batch of fabricated monitors yields a low number of functional units, driving up the cost per unit. I wonder how the researchers were able to combat this, while at the same time increasing the pixel density by 7x?
Can someone who's more familiar with the industry give approximate numbers on the failure rate of LCD manufacturing? Are we talking 1 bad screen in 20, 1 bad in 2000, or...?
If you can somehow trick them into saying "mexapixel" backward, they'll be sent back to their own dimension. Maybe we can grab their $200,000 display as they're fading away!
Them: "Lexipaxem...Oh, crap!"
Us (grabbing display): "See you at the pawn shop...SUCKER!"
It's useless going past about 300 dpi on a black and white (two-color, no-grayscale) printed page as that is the limit of the human eye's resolution at about 10 inches. The printer needs that extra resolution to dither for grayscale and color. With a monitor, 10 inches is pretty close, back off to 15 inches and you only need 200 dpi. No dithering necessary so that's it, you're done, optimal display. (Actually this is generally overkill because the eye's resolution gets worse for things that aren't just black-on-white, but if the display will be used a lot to just read text like the black on white here on slashdot it's better to be safe.)
Just clearing up some misconceptions.
What is the point of running stories that are factually completely wrong? Just post the link to the research papers and move on.
What this moron seems to have picked up on is the Lightning 2 project, which basically is a video crossbar switch. They used this to combine the DVI outputs from a network of eight slaved 1.5 GHz P4 machines each with 256 MB RAM and a GeForce2 Quadro video card (starting to see where some of the numbers come from yet?) plus another machine as master running their own parallel rendering code over (probably) gigabit Ethernet. They tested Lightning 2 with the IBM "Big Bertha" 9.2 million pixel display.
They achieved frame rates of 12 Hz and 60 Hz (with and without depth buffer capture which requires the Z-buffer to be transferred from each PC to Lightning 2 as well as the actual rendered image segment) on a 1.16 million triangle model.
Lightning 2 itself has 512 MB of RAM and 23 Xilinx FPGA devices.
None of this has got anything to do with the actual display itself, which as someone else pointed out "only" needs about 40 MB of framebuffer storage; i.e. a 60 Hz data rate of about 19 Gbps, or 2.5 GB/s.
Now can you PLEASE try and get things RIGHT in future.
a typical person has a maximum resolution of about 17000 point sources per inch.
So, assuming for the sake of argument the monitor has a roughly 16"x12" viewable area, that gives (16*17000) * (12*17000) = 55,488,000,000 points, or 55.5 gigapoints, as the limit of human eye resolution for a screen of that size. That's several orders of magnitude over the announced 9.2 megapixel display, assuming that pixels are roughly equivalent to points.
Incidentally, putting that 9.2 megapixel value into more easily understandable terms gives a display size of roughly 3500x2600 (assuming a 4:3 display ratio). Good? Yes. Perfect? No.
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BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
Correct you are; my apologies.
Even so, I'm not convinced that a 3500x2600 display exceeds the limit of human eye resolution--though that may just be because I'm used to sitting a foot from my monitor...
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BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
As far as I can figure, the display he's talking about is IBM's Big Bertha. It was custom-built for Laurence Livermore national lab, and it runs at a native resolution of 3840x2400.
I saw a prototype of this display at Supercomputing 2000 in Dallas last year. It was running off of an IBM-brand Wintel system-- can't recall which one, an Intellistation, I guess-- with four 1920x1200 graphics cards. The monitor was stitching the four images together seamlessly.
According to rumor they hooked it up to their bigger iron from time to time, but when I saw it, it was running NT.
So I don't know *where* the author got his "it takes 16 CPUs and costs $200,000" stuff. Hell, LLNL only paid $80,000 for the prototype-- see this Federal Computing Week article. According to the IBM guy I talked to at SC2000-- although I can't seem to find a confirmation of this in writing anywhere-- when the monitor is commercialized sometime this year, they're expecting to sell it initially for about $20,000. One too many zeros, Doug. ;-)
And the obligatory remark: yeah, it's an incredible display. Like reading a newspaper-- effectively about 200 ppi. But for any traditional computer application, it's not really practical. Once you get past the "wow" factor, this thing really lives up to its nickname: the IBM Squintron 2000.
I would say RTFA, but the FA completely failed to link to any relevant info. I had to search myself; IBM's page is here.
Think about print. Early laser printers were 300-dpi resolution, which is pretty good -- good enough for entry-level, mass-market desktop publishing -- but is still quite low by traditional printing standards. The professional (print) graphics shop I used to work for used to run its phototypesetters ($100,000 behemoths) at 1,200 and 2,400 dpi. (And that's in both dimensions, so 1,200 dpi output has 16 times the information content of 300 dpi output.)
600 dpi print is pretty high-quality and acceptable to most applications, particularly with the availability of resolution enhancement, which is roughly the printer equivalent of anti-aliasing. And personally I couldn't tell any difference going past 1,200 dpi.
Anyway, my point is that even 200-300 dpi isn't as good as we might really hope for. Still, it's a vast improvement over the resolution of today's displays. I hope this will have an impact on the well-documented fact that people read (current) computer screens more slowly than printed material and find them more uncomfortable. There's actually a lot of subtle but very helpful detail contained in type that gets lost at lower resolutions such as those used by most displays today.
In a way, graphics are more forgiving than text, because the human eye-brain combination is pretty good at interpolating what's intended if there is sufficient resolution or sufficient color depth. Of course, artifacts can be pretty nasty too -- we've all seen bad cases of the jaggies. But the bottom line is, I think if you ever get a chance to actually see a display this good you won't doubt that the extra pixel density is wasted.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I think they're talking about a setup that would run those 16 DVDs at once costing that much. Normal use as say, a computer monitor would only require the one PC - and the cost would be a LOT cheaper... Although they don't mention the cost of the monitor itself.
From the wording, I'd say it'll be in the neighborhood of at least $2000-4000:
"In two years, we want to see a 27-inch monitor able to display two pages side by side for $2,000," Leglise said. And in five years, we want to see a 10 megapixel display for $2,000."
This is so wrong, I don't even no where to start. First of all, SOMETHING has to RASTERIZE the Image. Putting it into the monitor or into something that sits next to the monitor is only a matter of cable length. Doesn't matter where the rasterizer is. Second the assumption that display PS is the most efficient meta language is suspect as well. For monitor usage it is too much and too slow. This is why OSX uses PDF rather than PS as it's metalanguage. There are many meta languages that are available, from GDI, to X, DPS and PDF, and others that are fine. The dependency comes on the rasterizers and the languages. Most of the time it is moved to the video card and rasterized there. That is what a video driver does... (Takes machine side Meta language and converts to hardware rasterization, Sometimes taking pixels, sometimes taking vector data.). Normal PS rips that do high resolution are BIG and EXPENSIVE, and SLOW (for video purposes). Damn, I just used up all my mod points, so I was forced to respond.
Like with every new technology reviewed on slashdot, the real question about it is, what does this mean for Quake? Since it's resolution functions are nonexistant, wouldn't the Quake screen just shrink to about two square inches (maybe less)? In all reality, I don't really understand why such ultra-high resolution displays would ever take root in home consumer applications. Nobody has eyes good enough to utilize this invention. Maybe it comes with extremely high magnification glasses or eye gene manipulation tools! It could be useful for wearable technologies, though. The 1/4 inch display in your glasses would look a lot better with if it could display at a normal resolution. In current technology, the number of pixels aren't nearly as important as the refresh rate anyway. Unless you're a graphic pro, it's the headache-giving flicker that needs 200,000 research projects, not the number of tiny dots, and good LCDs take care of that anyway.
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
This is a link to the display subsystem that was powering that 9.2 million pixel display
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http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lightning
You'll be able to see it with some hopefully very cool imagery at this years SIGGRAPH It really has to be seen to be believed... beautiful!