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Monitor One-Upmanship From IBM
openSoar writes: "So here is a solution for your lounge or media room setup and a nice display for your office. 61 inches of plasma sounds sweet but a $28K price tag doesn't. The IBM LCD will do 3840x2400 which would make me SO much more productive ;-)" Who says 200dpi is only for the labs? I'd rather have two of these than one 61" display anyhow. 3840 x 2400 would mate nicely with the Nikon D1x I also don't have.
Is there any true relationship between res and productivity. I know I FELT a hell of a lot more productive for a few days everytime I switched up a size 12 > 14 > 15 > 17 > 19 over the past how ever many years.
BUT I recently started using my 14.1" LCD laptop as my main machine simply because I found it more convenient most of the time - and I can't say, thinking about it, that I've ACTUALLY become any less productive.
Maybe I'll switch to my 19" again and report back in a week as to how much more or less work I get done! I know I alt-tab more than I used to.
How about hooking up 4 15" lcd displays at 1024x768. Costs are about $1100 for the 4 displays. Just hack (hacksaw :-)) the cases and put them in a bigger case. Yes you need 4 adapters to run them. But throw in a machine just for running an X server and you still are in the $2000 range for a 2048x1524 resolution 30" monitor.
Sheesh, my first 21" monitor (NEC) cost $3600 back in 1982.
Life is like gravity. It sucks you down.
I saw this monitor last November in Dallas, at SuperComputing 2000. It was sort of stashed away inside the IBM booth behind some of their big iron. It was big and bright and sharp, and I got the story of its origin from an IBM guy standing nearby.
Warning: the person who told me this may have been a salesman. I can't claim to know this to be absolutely true.
According to the IBM guy, the folks from Livermore National Labs wanted, for some reason related to monitoring or surveillence or something like that, a monitor that could display four HDTV-resolution images in a tile. IBM tiled four 1920x1200 images (HDTV's 1920x1080 fits nicely inside the 1920x1200 display standard) on one monitor and sold bunches of them to LLNL for a red-blooded American fortune.
At that time, IBM called the monitor "Big Bertha." That was the official name and everything; they had data sheets printed up to hand out at the show.
And everything everybody has said so far is true: at that kind of resolution, your desktop icons are about a quarter of an inch across. And xterms? Forget it. You've gotta set the font size to 36 points just to be able to read it comfortably!
But then they IBM guy opened up a full-color satellite image of some city or other-- I forget which one. He full-screened it, and then used the mouse to pan and rotate around it. I actually got dizzy; it was like looking through a window. It was AMAZING. I've never, ever seen anything like that before.
Of course, to push about 10 million full-color pixels around in real-time like that required something more that a $99 graphics card; the monitor was hooked up to an SP node or something similarly impressive.
But damn, what a show.
My last job, I had a big editor's monitor, one at work and one for my home, both about 21", and at first it was great bcs I could have all kinds of documents, graphics, etc. open at the same time. But after a while, I started getting a persistent "crick" in my neck from craning my neck to see the stuff at the top of the screen. It even hurt to sit on the couch and watch TV on a big-screen across the room. I couldn't just crank my desk chair up a little higher, because I am somewhat small in stature, and have to crank it low enough to keep my feet on the ground. Post-Tech Wreck, I started a new but similar job and was a little disappointed with the 17" monitor that came with it. But I'm getting just as much done, and my neck doesn't hurt all the time. So I think there may be an optimum size, perhaps related to user dimensions.
What would Rain-in-the-Face do?