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LCD Display Questions - Longevity and Monochrome?
Jack Frost IV asks: "Since higher resolution LCD panels have started to become a lot more common, many people have been complaining about dead pixels. I just received two SGI flat panels direct from the factory, and each shipped with a single dead pixel. In fact, the second display was a replacement for the first (for an issue unrelated to the dead pixel). While I understand the difficulties in manufacturing the displays, the single dead pixel doesn't concern me right now, as I don't notice it often. What bothers me is how many more pixels these displays will lose during a lifetime; say over the next three to five years. I want to replace a lot of my CRTs (Yes, *some* of us don't do color critical work, and LCDs are perfectly OK) with LCD panels, but if, say, a dozen pixels are going to die in 3 - 5 years, it's going to be quite annoying. SGI claims that once the pixel burns out, you'll never notice it was gone... but I don't buy it. Can anyone explain some of the longevity and degredation issues relating to flat panels?"
O'Bunny queries: "How come nobody apparently sells monochrome LCD monitors for PC-like devices? I'd love to have a largish (say, 1600x1200) flat monitor that: doesn't weigh five thousand pounds; isn't fifteen feet thick; and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
The rationales that I've heard behind the high costs of these monitors were:
- The manufacturing yield is low because of the large number of transistors that need to all work properly to display colours.
- The economy of scale currently is aimed at laptop users, for whom a 1600x1200 screen is impractically large (unless you happen to be Andre the Giant)
Ignoring the second part, why doesn't anyone make a decentmonochrome LCD monitor for those of us who want a large screen but don't necessarily need color?
In my case, I want to edit multi-channel audio. A Color display adds almost nothing to the information that I extract from the screen. I can select, cut, copy paste, apply effects, and otherwise mangle the sounds as well on a 1-bit per pixel display as I can on a 32-bpp monster.
I am also a technical writer. The documents I write are produced on a B&W laser printer, mostly. Certainly, on-line documents (and even most printed ones) can benefit from intelligent use of colour for various reasons, but most printed documents end up in black and white (mostly for cost reasons). Again, colour adds little to the experience.
So, I guess my question really comes down to the following:
- Where can I get a large monochrome flat-panel monitor for a PC?
- If I can't get one for $less than a colour flat panel, why not?"
That is a good point.. People with the money to save the space.. Not so common is spacious north america, but definitly a factor..
I remember kids in school who had had the laptops because they fit pretty in their dorm rooms.. Apple sells a lot of real powerful pretty notebooks to people who don't know a MIP from a Mouse.
I'm fairly sure that wasn't apple bashing, it was owner bashing.. People who buy over powered computers based on looks are in the same boat as a lot of people who buy SUVs and sports cars, and to a large extent, LCD displays. They 'want' one, they don't 'need' one..
That said, I'm pretty sure I don't need my groovy designer sunglasses, or my Nokia 8260, I'm no better, it's just worth noting that looks count in the LCD game.
Dead pixels are acceptable for laptop displays. Last time I checked, the rule for IBM Thinkpads is that you can only get the panel replaced if it has eight or more dead pixels.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
You know, I was thinking about that as I was typing it and it didn't quite seem right. I just saw the figures briefly yesterday, so I'm just going from my ever falable memory. I know Fred's looking at getting their research released so they can post it on their webpage. In any case, the point was that LCDs represent a significant cost savings after only a couple years of average (5 days/wk, 8 hr/day) use.
-"Zow"
several years ago I bought a laptop w/2 bad pixels. It wasn't that annoying but they were still noticable at times...
Monitors from Sony have those lines through the middle. You get used to them, not a big deal.
I don't see any problem w/it really.
What is there market for it? If you see a market for these LCD's then you could either.
1) Get a petition going online to ask the companies to start making them
2) Submit a business plan to a few venture capatalist that will help fund a business that manufactor and distribute them
3) If you have the know how build one yourself (If might not be the case but hey I never know)
4) Or do nothing
Have fun
Check out PC Weasel. It is a card that emulates a MDA but pipes the output over serial. With this you can run your system headless, and still be able to get into the BIOS.
They can sort of fake it, but not really.
The reason isn't hard to explain.
Each LCD pixel is a physical object which can be either on or off.
With a CRT, an electron gun sprays electrons on to a screen, and they are moved magnetically to the right position. So there is no physical object that corresponds to a display pixel. This means that you can theoretically have an unlimited number of resolutions on a CRT.
With a LCD, each pixel is a physical dot, so there is really only one "correct" radiation for a LCD. Some LCDs can "fake" this resolution better than others - my (well, the company bought it for me) spiffy new SGI 1600SW LCD does a pretty good job at 800x600 and 1280x1024, even though its native resolution if 1600x1024. But try a cheap laptop screen sometime - look at the console text and you'll see that it's often difficult to read due to poor quality at lower resolutions.
Other than games (which are not within my area of interest), I see no reason to want to change a LCD monitor to a lower resolution.
Hope that helps.
D
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The prices on color displays are coming down. In another 2 years they will probably be less than 500 for a 17 inch and it will be of very good quality.
Personally I think this will be the next technology push. Flat panal display devices. SImilar to lap tops, but more along the lines of the sony pc that is super thin. basically like the mac cube adn its display. Only instead of it being 3k it will be 800 for the whole deal. Wait and in a year or two you will see these come down.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
The eye only sees one small detail at once and shifts to another one approximately 70 times a second. I guess that's why the ergonomic frequency barrier in monitor refresh rates is usually 72Hz.
There is a 70 Hz tremor in the eye called nystagmus tremor which is probably what you are thinking about. This only affects refresh rates on CRT displays, and only when your eyes are close to the screen though. The problem occurs due to interferrence between the high frequency screen flicker and the eye tremor.
AFAIK the pixels stay lit on LCDs in-between frames, so there is no screen flicker that could interfere with the eye tremor. For this reason the refresh rate is better called an update rate on an LCD.
I agree completely but the **real** problem is we now live with an industry that resorts to snap, crackle and pop rather then intelligent functionality. The move to "pretty" is overwelming when motivated by the need to impress reviewers and salesmen devoted to plying their wares to the mass buying and usually unsuspecting public.
Issues like supporting cost-effective monochrome displays with its resulting lower prices also means lower commissions and less profits. Its ironic that I know so many people who would comparison shop for the cheapest soap and shampoo prices seem too often reliant on a salesmen for higher priced goods, who themselves are usually more interest in furthering their own ends rather then the needs of their clients. I agree that monochrome displays would likely fit the needs of most people most of the time -- but tell them that they might need it 1% of the time and they will not give up the option.
That's right, but what has that to do with the article in question?
There wouldn't be any point in a B/W LCD because it probably wouldn't be any less expensive to produce. You'd have to develop and build a separate process and manufacturing line, the materials cost wouldn't be much lower, and for all that you might as well be making color displays at practically the same cost but getting higher margins.
Don't try that "protecting the children" shit you people use to keep the tits and bad words off my TV. --Seanbaby
It would make a good deal of sense if you followed common UI design critera. A reasonable number of computer users have some sort of colorblindness and as such it is usually a good idea to design applications to not depend solely on color.
True -- if you aim for cost savings, you need to set up a new process and a manufacturing line for producing LCD panels with 1/3 of the sub-pixel density of a color screen. But what if you went for resolution instead of savings? You could use more or less the same process, only with monochrome elements instead of R, G and B -- and have a display with three times the horizontal resolution of a color display. 4800x1200 resolution in a greyscale laptop screen? I could exchange color for that..
Marko Karppinen
We don't have monochrome displays now because the resolution is too low. Just wait, when we get over 300dpi then greyscale will be more interesting (as halftone), and at higher resolutions you won't be worrying about the gradations of even rgb pixels, just how many you turn on next to each other. Think about the resolution of 150 line-per-inch magazine glossies.
The other reason they don't sell now is no demand, and not enough volume for the reduction in margins which the price point we want necessitates. Used mac b/w laptops are still sitting in the 2nd hand
stores..
Dell, and Compaq. They're not exactly cheap, but with a KVM you would only need one of them for a whole room full of servers.
I'm pretty sure that other manufacturers have similar products.
Although the notion of a monochrome display is noble (why do I need more than one colour to read text?), the problem remains that more people are likely to go for devices like the all-singing proprietary NVidia GeForce cards. It's all because people don't understand that there is an application of computers beyond that which has been popularised by the mainstream press and "EasyPC" initiatives that aim to reduce the computer to the level of other consumer devices like the TV or washing machine. As long as there are geeks around, the true importance of computers will not be forgotten, but as time progresses we will find it more difficult to find hardware that meets are needs without exceeding our needs, or our budget.
All in all, of course, mainstream computing has done more to bring down the cost of hardware for geeks who are actually interested in the technology, and for this we must be thankful. But the simple, one-purpose devices analogous to the *NIX tools designed to do one thing right, will be the casualties of this new trend. Our best hope is to get over it and enjoy cheap, powerful computers while they last before embedded devices take over the world and put the PC back where it was two decades ago.
I'm afraid I completely disagree, there are any number of _real_ advantages to LCD's and they more than outweigh the cost as far as I'm concerned. My top three (without even mentioning power saving) is as follows... Space; Deskspace is EXPENSIVE! A 17" or larger screen is purely impractical on my desk. I have a printer, scanner, keyboard, desk lamp and working space to fit onto an area about 2' by 4' Losing the massive bulk of the CRT has been a life-changing experience. Ergonomics; Kind of related to the space issue, but still important. Something that is about 6" deep can be positioned a lot more comfortably that a 25"+ deep monitor. My previous monitor had to be positioned at the side of my desk overhanging the edge to make room for all the rest of my junk - not at all comfortable to use for a long stretch of time. My lovely new LCD is slap bang central, right in front of my keyboard. Clarity; There is _no_ distortion on an LCD panel. This makes a huge difference when you're editing text, code or whatever. (And *yes* I know that some of these points have been made elsewhere...) There will always be a place for CRT's (well, for the next five years or so at least) but once you've used a quality LCD Panel for an hour you will never want to go back to a CRT display. As for the cost, I paid about the same (give or take £50) for my 15" LCD panel two months ago as I did for a 17" CRT about four years ago. Cheers Chris
You could use more or less the same process, only with monochrome elements instead of R, G and B -- and have a display with three times the horizontal resolution of a color display.
Microsoft Cleartype uses subpixel text rendering to take advantage of the fact that each LCD pixel is actually three. Apple used a similar technique for text rendering on TV monitors. And you can enable subpixel text in recent XFree86.
Will I retire or break 10K?
- Something else to consider is that most applications are not optimized to work in a B/W environment.
I think his point was that his application didn't require a color environment. Seems odd to me that anyone would write an application that didn't make the most of the color display that was available.I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
There's not enough market for monochrome LCD displays. If you're going to shell out for an LCD display, you'll shell out for color, and most home users wouldn't DREAM of monochrome (even if it does look cool).
Eh...
For the longest time, I has a 1280x1024 black and white screen on my desk. It is just easier on the eyes, and it's perfect for coding and e-mail. I eventually replaced it with a color screen because of all the web sites I had to use that abuse color.
What is an interesting market once someone uncovers it, is cheap 640x480 B&W LCD's to use as a console in colo facilities. I hate wasting 6U os rack space for a monitor, and I'm not the only one
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
http://www.flat-panel.com/
Ive bought some color And B&W lcds from Earth Tech. (URL above)
You can get a 12" color lcd for just under $500usd
You can also get a 9.4" monocorome for $300usd
much more expensive for the same as a CRT, but overall not bad.
They recently changed their inventory it seems so I cant find any of the more fitting LCDs i once thought they had, but may be useful none the less.
--Jon
B&W LCD's exist for thigns like PDA's but nobody makes them big.... The Dead Pixel issue. 8 might be an acceptable amount of dead pixels on a 1600x1200 screen, but on a 160x160 screen ala a Visor Prism, one dead pixel can be quite annoying. As I take it, on Smaller screen,s there are a lot fewer dead pixels in total, than on the big screens.
every lcd monitor has dead pixels. LCD manufacturing of large sizes is *very very* difficult (which is why they cost so much). I'll take a couple dead pixels that i dont even notice over the blurriness of a crt any day...
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Once, I bumped my color LCD monitor and it fell over. The color all leaked out and left a big, rainbow-oilslick looking puddle on the floor. Now it's monochrome. All the pixels work, though.
Having worked in a Computer store once I can tell you the reason you can't get a great monochrome lcd. Simply put, 99% of the demographic that wants to buy one of these is an older person that is wanting to "get on that internet thing." Unfourtunatly, while I'd have one of these bought for every LAN room I manage now (dozens), techs are rarely the target audience for technical devices anymore. Sure, we have a good amount of buying power, but when compared with the AOLers we're not much in the eyes of a marketing dept. I could only imagine an engineer at company X trying to sell the idea of a monochrome LCD to the higher ups. The conversation would sound something to the effect of {engineer} "There are many uses for these devices and they can be built cheaply." {Marketing guy} "Yea, but why would anyone want a screen that was only black and white. Windows would look terrible." So as you all can see, while it's a great idea it proabaly won't come about. Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Keep Austin Weird!
you can set your games/opengl/directx/etc. to "sync every frame" so things won't seem that blurry.
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
Then there's all the static electricity around a CRT. This causes dust particles to attack you, and fill your pores. Combine that with hot weather and perspiration, and you understand why hax0rs have such bad skin. It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
I could have sworn there was an article on slashdot recently about how CTX monitors are better than LCD becasue LCD monitors cannot display as high FPS on games like Quake and will start to blur out after 40 of so. Not that the human eye needs 30 but still....
We've seen how you can use sub-pixel positioning to get an apparent increase in horizontal resolution for monochromatic text (Cleartype, etc.) on full-color LCDs. Why not produce, for example, a 15" 1024x768 LCD with each sub-pixel the same color? Sure, the display would be monochrome, but horizontal resolution would increase by 3x. As a bonus, you get hardware support from any truecolor video card, since 8-bit monochrome has the same layout as 24-bit RGB. It's so simple that someone must have already done it.
This is because the receptionist needs only one monitor, while even a small operations center needs, at a minimum, about 40.
Even with 17" LCDs going for four or five times the price of CRTs, it saves money in the long run due solely to the fact that the operations consoles can be shortened by about two feet each.
This might not hold true if you're building a facility in the middle of nowhere, or if all those LCDs wind up having a maximum life of about five years; but where real estate is even moderately expensive, the rental on the floor space CRTs would take up would make their total cost of ownership higher than that of LCDs in about five years.
I expect that the break-even point would come even sooner if one was inclined to figure in the cost differential of powering and cooling the things. CRTs use a lot more power and generate a lot more heat than LCDs. I used to use the back of a Sun 20" monitor to keep my breakfast bagel warm in the mornings until I was ready to eat it. The vents there were so well suited to this task that I think they must have been designed for this purpose.
Of course, the potential problem with this reasoning is that CRTs last almost forever, while all these LCDs might well sputter and die within that five-year period.
I've heard that the limit to an LCD display's life is usually its backlighting; supposedly the backlighting dims gradually over time, making the display harder to read. This is why LCD display manuals recommend you turn the display off or put it to sleep when it's not in use, even though it won't suffer burn-in problems like a CRT. I haven't ever seen an LCD display with backlight problems, however (though most LCD displays seem to take a few minutes after power-on until they reach their normal brightness).
As for dead pixels: Sometimes you can 'un-stick' them by massaging the screen over a dead pixel very gently.
The only problem I've had with my Apple Cinema Display is some mild 'burn-in,' believe it or not. Apparently with any LCD display, if you leave a static image on the screen for a while, the LCD hardware will 'remember' that image and you'll continue to see a faint ghost of it on the screen. I see this most often when I've been in Mac OS X for a few hours, and then I reboot into LinuxPPC -- I can still see the ghost of my Mac OS menu bar at the top of the screen! The ghost stays even if I power down the computer and display for a while. I've been told that the ghost will go away after as much time as it was on the screen to begin with (if the menu bar was there for eight hours, its ghost will fade after eight hours), and that's been borne out by my experience.
How cheap would a B/W printer be?
I see your point, but it depends on what type of printing you do. I work with black and white "laser" printers that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (I don't really know how much, you'd have to talk to Xerox about the price, the bean counters could tell you though). What, that much? Well yea, but they rip and print 180 pages a minute. They are variable data printing monsters, but if you've got several million b&w unique pages to print, that's what you need.... It's all about finding the right piece of equipment for the job.
1) Minimal demand
2) Lower per unit profit margins
The first problem is that ultimately most people want to buy color LCD panels. It's not worth it to most LCD manufacturers to bother with the small segment of people who would be happy with large black and white LCD panels.
The other issue is that with Black and White, because it is simpler technology, ultimately their profit margins are going to be lower per unit. That means that they have to sell that many more in order to make a profit. If they charge enough to recoup their investment it wouldn't be that much more for people to shell out for the color display.
To see how these economics work, look at the price of processors in the market. There's a certain optimum point where you get a significant amount of power for a low price. If you reduce the power of the chip, the price doesn't drop much because. So you end up in the bizarre situation that you could pick up a K6-300 for just slightly more (or maybe even less) than an old pentium 60. It's just all economics.
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During a trip to the Far East a couple of years back, I was very surprised to see the number of laptops that appeared on office desks. I commented on it to my guide who then pointed out the obvious; Laptops represented a **HUGE** proportion of office desktop market for one very good reason, the amount of desk space occupied is much smaller (primarily because of the screen) and (at that time) there was no other option then to get a "space saving computer" -- the proper name when referring to the laptops over there (which btw, rarely leave the office or even get unplugged).
Further, a friend in Japan tells me that the number of relatively new tube monitors appearing on the street during garbage day has risen dramatically over that last year as everyone is trying to recover a couple of extra square feet and are moving in troves over to LCDs.
Something else to consider is that most applications are not optimized to work in a B/W environment. I know very few developers who have considered, let alone tested the appearance of their applications in a B/W environment. For example, how many developers have a monochrome monitor on their desktop (or even in their dept.) to test against???
Colors, especially monochrome reds/greens/blues appear nearly identical in B/W, yet these are often used together as background/foreground colors in dialogs and are rendered largely incomprehensable in a monochrome environment --appearing as dark grey lettering on a darker greys/black background).
My first laptop 10 years ago was monochrome and the number of times I had problems even then (when monochrome displays were everywhere) was daunting. Yes, if an application is "monochrome" aware you wouldn't have a problem, but the number of apps that fall into that category now has seemingly all but disappeared.
Yes, things like Linux do have support for a serial console, but that won't help you if you need to get at the BIOS. There are a few BIOS's that support serial consoles too, but they're rare.
And then there's NT. Alas, people do run servers on NT, and NT has no concept of a serial console that I'm aware of.
I think this is very true. Go to any trade show and the companies are trying to look good. This means all of the slickest hardware they can find. Optical/wireless mice, small keyboards, lighting, and flat screens everywhere.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
In my experience the pixels last a long time. I have a laptop that is over five years old now. It has only one dead pixel which was there from the beginning, and the screen is left on basically all the time. As for my new laptop, it too has one dead pixel which appeared the second time I turned on the computer. I can live with one as long as no new ones appear.
It seems for some reason that one or two dead pixels seem common place, but once the bad ones die off when the monitor is new, the rest seem to last a long time from what I have seen.
Why would you need a console monitor on a server? Run a serial cable from your laptop or pda into the server's serial port / alternate console port and chug away. Here in my office all of my servers are headless and have their serial ports plugged into a portmaster.
We ordered 40 flat panel View Sonics, and 1/4th had to be sent back because of what we called, "Hay Screen" which looks like someone took a fist full of hay and smashed it up against the screen from the inside. With those stats, we expect the rest to fail within the next year or two, after they are out of warrenty. At that point all we can do is throw the $1000 plus monitors away.
I suspect it's because the whole 'LCD on the desktop' industry deal is still very much a special thing for people who want a slick front office. Yes, I know people (more then average around here) use them for solving real problems when a big CRT won't do it, but I'd say at least 80% of units sold goto vanity applications. Vanity means color.
Here's some information regarding ISO standards fro LCD's flat panels. (All this info is from technical documentation I got from Fujitsu-Siemens Computers.)
ISO standard 13406-2 is a completion of ISO 9241-3, -7 and -8, which already regarded LCD's. Classes I to IV are defined in ISO 13406-2.
Class I (theoretical) allows for no pixel faults.
Class II allows for 2 "light pixels", 2 "dark pixels" and 5 "other faults", per million pixels.
Class III allows for 5, 15 and 50 respectively.
Class IV allows for 50, 150 and 500.
"light pixel" is when a pixel is >75% lighter.
"dark pixel" is when a pixel is >75% darker (or "death", I presume).
"other fault" is, well, for other faults (e.g. a subpixel is defect, giving the pixel a distored hue - think color-stuck pixels).
Class II is considered acceptable for office use. Classes III and IV are not.
For a 1,024*768 panel, which is 786,432 pixels, that makes 1.57 light pixels (rounds up to 2), 1.57 dark pixels (rounds up to 2) and 3.93 other faults (rounds up to 4).
This give a maximal number of defective pixels of 8, which is 0.001 % of the screen surface.
This data is very useful when you're a techie on the field and you're being annoyed by some customer who keeps asking for a new monitor because his/her got one or two death pixels. You can tell the monitor still meets the industry standard and therefore will not be replaced.
As for the ViewSonic monitor, I suppose ViewSonic was pretty nice to you when they replaced your "defective" monitor.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Yet no body sells them because they would make less money on them.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Actually, what you want is grey scale, not 1 bit Mono.
You can see the effect by taking any BW photo, and convert it to 1 bit color.
You also see this in printing. Laser Print IS 1 bit color, more or less, but you get true photo-grade at about 1500 dpi. Contrast this with grey scale, say on a screen, where 70 - 100 dpi is adequate for a photo, if you are using grey scale. 100 dpi in 2 bit color is horrible.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The medical industry uses high-end LCD's in radiology departments. Resolution and brightness are the most important factors and you pay for it. Check out these puppies: http://www.dome.com/products/cx/cxdisplays.html
I'm not sure how todays displays differ from those of older laptops, but I have a PowerBook 170 from almost 10 years ago that is still looking great. At the time we were extatic to have found one with no bad pixels (they were few and far between at the time), and I can say for sure that the same is true of that screen today. It should be noted, however, that that was one of the earliest shipping Active Matrix screens, and monochrome, but it would be hard to find a 10 year old Apple Cinima Display (drool) to check.
Narrative
I can only speak from my own experience: