Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Monitor One-Upmanship From IBM

Posted by timothy on from the awful-lot-of-justifyin' dept.

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.

2 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Confusing write up. by supine · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  2. I've seen this monitor in person. by foobar104 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.