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Panasonic Dual-LCD PC
FreeBSD-RockS writes: "Panasonic released a desktop PC called Panacom LC/W with two 15-inch (1024x768) LCD monitors arranged side by side. The LCD screens can be arranged so that they can be used either in a portrait or a landscape form. The new model will be put on sale on March 8 and the retail price through direct marketing is around $2000 USD."
I can think of only about 5 ways Taco could fix those damn page-widening posts.
He hasn't done a single one yet.
I love trolls as much as the next guy, but this ruins it and makes me browse at 0.
Fight back!
Manual page breaks in all posts, now!
Because larger LCDs increase cost exponentially. With two 17" displays, you get exactly twice the screen real estate for exactly twice the price. With one 18" or 19", you get a tiny amount more space (less than an inch or two, respectively, along each side), for...about twice the price. Dual-head video cards/drivers are pretty much a solved problem, so there's not really any "issue", and rotating LCDs is pretty damn easy, much easier than rotating CRTs, which have been around for many, many years. So, basically, you're getting a huge amount of display space for no emotional cost, and far less monetary cost than buying one enormous screen.
This is a self-referential sig
If you've been to a financial firm you see 2 and 4 monitor getups all day long. I use one from 9-5 every day.
s si onal.html
Consider the total real estate available to me. I have an 18" LCD with a total area of about 168 square inches (usable). Plus a pair of 14" LCDs for nearly 200 square inches. The point being, for a large spreadsheet the 18" is clearly superior. If however, you need to watch two things at once (2 web pages or 2 spreadsheets or 1 and 1 whatever) the two smaller screens are FAR superior. It all depends what you're using the screens for.
http://www.bloomberg.com/corp/profservice/profe
The link in the story was already slashdotted so I found some pics on Panasonic's Japanese homepage
I like the pic at the bottom of the page showing how you can flip one screen around facing away from you so that two people sitting at a table facing each other both get a screen.
With a multi-tasking OS, one user could use the mouse and the other the keyboard and work on seperate tasks.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
You might want to check out this site. Quintuple-head anyone?
Apple's LCDs are among the best available, but for critical work, even they are not always good enough.
While the gap is closing, LCDs simply lack the wide color gamut of CRTs. Of course, all the other benefits of LCDs vs. CRTs apply.
Digital photographers are a very picky bunch, and most still prefer CRTs. I use my Mac for exactly this, and I'm using a CRT myself. I'll more than likely get an LCD soon enough, but I won't be tossing my CRT out just yet, either.
I have two 19" flat CRT Trinitrons at home connected to a Matrox G450. I highly suggest this card (or the G550) because it comes with good software for possitioning popup windows correctly instead of splitting it in the middle of two displays. It's nice not wasting an addition PCI slot as well, and both monitors have equal hardware pushing video to them. It also makes the display appear as one monitor to Windows, where as having two video cards actually show up as multiple devices to Windows. This allows the Tasktray to span across both monitors, and my active desktop as well. With multiple video cards, you have a master desktop that is just like a single desktop, then all the rest are just additional space to move windows to. I guess it depends on your personal taste, but I like having the displays appear as one to Windows.
My only word of caution: Having an odd number of displays is highly recommended as you won't have the border of two displays in the center of your vision. It's very distracting.
Dell 19" Trinitron
Matrox G450 (because it has dual VGA instead of dual DVI like the G550)
Image of my 3200 x 1200 desktop (with GTPlanet active desktop (that I made))
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
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SONY. Because caucasians are just too damn tall.
It still looks mostly like a glorified laptop to be honest. But the fact is, as many have pointed out, nothing really new. Aside from Bloomberg, Massmultiples (www.massmultiples.com) has been doing this for quite sometime with 2,3, and 4 flat panel setups.
I started with an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder and Rage something-or-other as the secondary card. This worked fairly well, except the TV on the AIW wouldn't work unless I rebooted Win2K with just one video card. To play games I at least had to disable the second display (didn't have to reboot, though). But for regular Windows apps, this worked great; apps maximize to just one monitor, popups don't cross monitor boundaries, most things just worked better.
Not happy with the performance on the second display (PCI instead of AGP) I splurged and got a Radeon 8500 with built-in dual-head. And yeah, the performance is great... but the dual-head support is utter crap. The DVD playback can't full-screen properly, apps get confused about which monitor (or both) they should maximize to, the mouse pointer behaves erratically near the monitor break, and you can't set the two monitors to different resolutions. Oh, and the software gets confused about how to use both monitors across reboots; sometimes forgetting the bit depth, always forgetting that a 2560x1024 display should span two monitors, not be constrained to one. ATI has yet to patch any of these problems.
The LCDs themselves... well I use flat CRTs at work, and I prefer the LCDs, even for graphics work. The sharpness of LCDs is extraordinary; it's especially unforgiving of JPEGs, as I can see a lot more distortion on these than I can on a CRT. It did take me a while to get the color balance decent, though--and even longer to get both monitors to match each other. But I can fit two of these on my desk without having to use industrial-strength support. The two together weigh less than a single 21" monitor.
The Panasonic unit looks interesting but it's probably going to be a very niche item. Most people can't justify two monitors in their minds, even though once you use one seriously for work, you end up liking it quite a bit. (You can pry my second monitor from my cold, dead fingers.)
People are never as simple as their stereotypes. This applies equally to Christians, Muslims, and Emacs-lovers.
Then simply go to Mass, Inc. and pick a system with up to 4 15- or 18-inch LCD screens. I'll take the C3H18, thank you.
(This was posted previously on Slashdot, but it took me a while to find it.)
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
This is something people seem to disagree on.
A large monitor is great. A bigger monitor is better.
But for somethings.. 2,3, or 4 displays can be handy... especially when you really aren't after one big desktop (like, for widescreen movies, spreadsheets, etc). or graphics (because you end up with color variances between displays, etc).
Multiple monitors can be very handy... like, one web page open in one to read documentation... and my editor on the bigmonitor....
Every multi-head setup I've had involved a central, main screen (19" or 21") and smaller, 17 or 15 inchers on the sides.. these were usually used to just stick monitoring windows, slashdot.. whatever on . The central big one is for the work.
This side by side setup looks great for office work.. not great for games.
The software I love is x2vnc. It allows me to put a single keyboard on my unix box and use windows. I do all my web stuff and most of my media stuff in windows. I do all my xterms and emacs and such in unix. You can cut and paste back and forth without a problem. I love this setup as I get the best of both worlds without any real hassles. Check it out.
http://www.hubbe.net/~hubbe/x2vnc.html
I've been using some manner of dual head system for a few years. Once you get used to having the real estate, it's hard to go back. I now have a pc with one big AGP-connected monitor and a secondary 17in runnig on a pci card, which is great for non-graphics intensive stuff like a terminal window, mp3 player, contact manager/schedule, but mainly for displaying documentation or assignments or other useful info while i'm coding on the bigger monitor.
Anyways, my point was that i end up using my extra monitors for simple stuff like showing a text document, which could easily be done by an old laptop or obsolete pentium desktop you have lying around. So, you can use x2vnc or win2vnc to link the computers together. I use this to set my laptop next to some other display, and i can mouse over, even copy and paste, like both displays were on the same system.
I don't much like the look of this Panasonic set-up, looks like a novelty rather than a productivity boost. Try http://www.panoramtech.com/ for a better solution...
That was classic intercourse!