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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.
it only costs 18K
when you think about it, it's cheaper than a wife and kids...
I thought i was being taken to something about a 61" flat panel for $28,000 but the first link actually takes you to where you can purchase a 22" IBM flat panel for US$16,000. After finding that out, the write up starts to make sense...
marty
"I can't buy want I want because it's free. Can't be what they want because I'm me." -Corduroy, Pearl Jam
Do you think they'll get many impulse buy sales?
Ah yes, the acronyms keep stacking up. Ok, this is how I remeber it: MGA->CGA->EGA->VGA->SVGA->XGA->X SGA->UXGA, now the all-mighty QUXGA-W (I'm sure I missed a few in there, especially the Apple ones). This stands for "Quad Ultra eXtended Graphics Array [something]." Does anyone know what the "-W" means?
Why don't manufacturers use a simple naming convention instead of these hideously long acronyms (hell, "Quxgaw" sounds like a word), and use something a little more desciptive- namely resolution. I think saying "Hey, my monitor is 3840x2400!" sounds better than "I got a Quxgaw sitting on my desk!"
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
The IBM LCD will do 3840x2400
<P> forgive me for being a mister poopie pants here, because I realize how cool this thing is. Coming from a strong publishing background, there have been times I would have given my arm for one of these.</P>
<P> But unless you are doing CAD/CAM or publishing , imagine how tiny your icons are going to look at 3840x2400... that is a huge expanse of desktop. Not to mention our beloved porn, hell 800x600 pictures of Anna K bending over will be postage stamp sized... can't even appreciate image....</P>
<P> Since I haven't seen specs for the included PCI graphics card, I am going to go ahead and assume Nvidia had nothing to do with it, so don't get your Quake III ya-yas in a lather....</P>
<P> So basically, you spend the 16k+ and then you? I guess you gloat like a son of a bitch while running six applications at the same time, all in their own little piece of screen real estate....</P>
<P> Oh yeah, photography, the Nikon thing... yeah, that too.
When I used to work on Radar display I had the ultimate dev setup (few years ago this was), my own quad processor Alpha box, one 30" 2048x2048 display, and two 21" displays either side, all running off a 50k dedicated graphics generator.
One monitor is never enough, you need at least two, one the boss sees with work on it, the other playing xconq.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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.
Hopefully it comes with some clever drives to optionally scale application windows. Many apps seem to use absolute pixels for at least their UI if not the rest of their dimensions. These are all going to be half (or is it 1/1.44? I never get this right) the size that they were on a not-much-bigger screen.
This is what shows that Atheos' GL-based scalable windows are a good idea, as long as you have the texture-ram to go with it, and texture RAM is cheap after a $16k monitor.
[insert obligatory - grumble grumple win2k drivers only [and PCI only] ]
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Rather than seeing gigantic LCD panels with gigantic pricetags, how about gfx card manufacturers start playing with the idea of "virtual resolutions" ?
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
They have a cool monthly plan where you pay only 566 dollars a month, 288 required hours of slave work from your children and your soul. I figure I can get this baby easy.
So what graphics card does it use? I noticed that the specs implied that you needed dual-DVI connections to supply all the bandwidth between graphic card and LCD display. (And you can't use 2 AGP cards to get 2 DVI connections since AGP is designed to be limited to a single point-to-point bus; one AGP slot per system.) But the only card I know of with those is from Appian Graphics but even there, I don't know which 3D chipset they're using these days. (Still 3Dlabs?) Anybody know?
--LP
18k isn't too bad.
didnt someone say that 640k would be enough for everyone?
--donabal
Safety First Day?
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.
Uh... not a bad idea, I hope writing Christmas lists online hasn't been patented yet.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
it IS only a 22inch widescreen. That means it has less image height than a normal 20inch CRT.
If you read the chart at the bottom of the web page describing the T220, you will see that the T220 has a (diagonal) viewable image size of 22.2 inches, or the equivalent of approximately a 24-25 inch CRT, since CRT's are measured by the outside tube dimensions while flat panels are generally measured by actual viewable area.
On the other hand, if you only want viewable image size, you can get some pretty nice projectors or big monitors for a lot less than $16k.
With this monitor, you don't get one big framebuffer, you get four, so you'll need to run Xinerama or similar. If you want to run a game, it'll be in a single head of that card, which (on that monitor) turns into a tall strip about 1/4 the width of the display, and at the speed of a Matrox G200 card.
It looks like a great product, but I notice a few minor nits:
Vertical refresh rate: 41-56Hz. Since no multiple of 30Hz is available, playback of DVD's will not be as perfectly smooth as it could be. On the other hand, people generally do not run CRT's at a multiple of 30Hz, due to issues of phosphor image persistence and 60Hz AC power in many countries.
26.4 pounds, 7.7 inch depth, 111 Watt power consumption (so it probably has a fan). In terms of lightness, sleakness, power efficiency and quiet, this display is about a third of the way toward a CRT. So, it's not as appealing as a really expensive high tech toy.
Video card is PCI rather than AGP. With 24-bit pixels, the frame buffer is at least 26MB, and a 33MHz 32-bit PCI bus can only tranfer a maximum of 133MB/second, so the entire screen can only be redrawn from scratch at five frames per second. Maybe the PCI card is 66Mhz or 64-bit (probably not).
On the positive side, I wonder if the card that comes with the T220 can be obtained separately at a reasonable price and can drive the ITQX20's digital inputs (the 2048x1536 20.8" TFT display that is in the T210 monitor). Then you could build something for a few thousand dollars that would still be a big step up from the 1600x1024 flat panels.
Register: "Sources familiar with the W3C's patent policy have confirmed that demands for the standards body to adopt RAND licensing were initiated by IBM."
Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents, Patents....
How to Download YouTube Videos
It seems something happened to my posting - I did check it thoroughly before I posted - honestly..
Anyway - the plasma TV I was referring to is here and it is indeed 61" and $28K
Hmm, looks like Appian's latest "AppianX" uses some custom chip they might have developed, based on 3Dlabs VHDL? At least, reading between the lines of this press release where Osman Kent mentions licensing VHDL cores but the current products mentioned there use off-the-shelf 3Dlabs parts, and this press release announcing AppianX but not specifying who made the chipset and thus implying that Appian did, presumbably not totally from scratch given the complexity required, right? Ah, speculation.
Still pretty removed from whose (3D) graphics chipset goes with this display, which is what I really want to know. Kinda a relevant question for the CAD market which could afford these things, no?
--LP
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?
I'm running my 22" monitors at 1600x1200, and it's PLENTY high enough resolution for me. At the resolution the IBMs are running, you'd either have to sit 6" away, or use a magnifying glass, or turn your default fonts way, way up. Linux apps may be able to handle that but lots of Windows progs don't work right with nonstandard font sizes. And my dual flat-screen Viewsonic 22" monitors cost 1/10 as much as that thing.
however, since these are long gone from the usual retail channels, their used price has skyrocketed and the used prices are now approaching the price of the units as if they were new! guess that tells SGI that they shouldn't have retired this design. (and they replaced it with a far inferior unit that only does 1280x1024, and via analog, too!) ;-(
the downside of the lcd's is that they aren't the best for doing photo retouch work. interesting that you mentioned the nikon d1x - I just bought a used nikon d1 (original) and while its "only" 2000x1300 in output resolution, its still a darned good camera body and being able to shoot off 4.5frames/sec with no noticeable shutter lag or latency is still state of the art. but I do have to do my last stage of retouching on an actual CRT.
CRTs will never go away. LCDs are uber-cool but bright highlights get blown out when you view on an LCD. I do mostly C-coding and sysadmin type stuff at home (and only occasional photo work), so the dual LCDs pretty much fit my need. but don't think that they're a complete substitute for a CRT in all cases, 'cause they're not.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I don't think so: "Shipment dates will be established after required certifications are obtained." It's been 'near release' for several years now. As a photographer I've been watching it, but other than updates to the web site, there don't seem to have been any advances.
As another poster pointed out, lack of European approval and the bankruptcy won't help, either :-)