ViewSonic shows 200 dpi display

prostoalex writes "On Intel Developer Forum ViewSonic introduced its 200 dpi display. The 22.2 inch 3840x2400 monitor will sell for around $8,000." Maybe there's hope for all those obsessive folks trying to run Quake 3 at insane resolutions. Provided they'd rather have a monitor than eight grand!

Comments

ebooks?

[mmoncur]

Give them 20 more years to get these down to $100 each, and ebooks might actually start selling.

Re:ebooks?

[Anonymous Coward]

I recommend that your four-year-old switch to NTFS for any NT partitions. Her disk corruption troubles will be over very quickly.

How high?

[I_am_Rambi]

The resolution can go as high as 3840x2400. That is insane. I think the question is no longer how high can the resolution go. But on the otherhand, how high can I set the resolution with having to be able to squint to see the letters that I am typing. I can barely see the letters that I type at 1600x1200. I can imagine what 3840x2400 would look like.

Re:How high?

[undeg chwech]

What we could do is invent some sort of font scaling mechanism so your letters could be displayed larger.

What's the phone number of the patent office?

Re:How high?

[guacamolefoo]

> The resolution can go as high as 3840x2400.
> That is insane. I think the question is no

On one hand, there's the (apochryphal?) saying floating around regarding memory: "640k is more than enough memory for anyone" or something to that effect.

On the other hand, I think you have a legitimate point. To some extent, I think the CPU battle is basically over for most people. For an office environment, who the hell needs more than 500 mhz? My secretary (does word processing, some light spreadsheet stuff) doesn't need to have her 300 mhz machine upgraded ever, probably.

> longer how high can the resolution go. But on
> the otherhand, how high can I set the
> resolution with having to be able to squint to
> see the letters that I am typing.

I think another legitimate issue is whether a monitor should be replaced if it absolutely does not need to. One issue of technology is "can X be done?" An often overlooked issue is "Should we bother implementing X?"

I suspect that on newer machines fancier-pants monitors will be de rigeur as manufacturing techniques improve and prices ultimately make these consumer-priced models, but should you consider dumping an old monitor (and the many pounds of lead) into a landfill or send it to China for "recycling" when the marginal benefits of new technology are minimal?

By all means, lets keep doing research and development. Let's let the market consider what to do with the technology that companies develop. Let's not forget that technology should serve us and not the other way around. At least until the machines start to think, and then all bets are off.

guac-foo

Re:How high?

[marmoset]

You're approaching it the wrong way. On a 72-dpi screen, a 12-point character can be represented by 144 pixels (I know, I'm deliberately omitting the effects of subpixel aliasing / anti-aliasing, hinting, and all those other tricks that modern display technologies use to boost perceived resolution in order to make this easier to follow) On a 200 dpi screen, over 1100 pixels can be brought to bear on that very same character. This means that the character can be rendered with much greater fidelity, so that if it's rendered at the same height as on the 72DPI screen it should be far more readable. Of course, your OS has to be smart enough to compensate for the much smaller pixels, but modern GUIs have this one figured out, for the most part.

Re:How high?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that this is a 22.2" screen so higher resolutions make sense and are actualy needed so the display doesn't look bad. try running a 22" monitor at 800x600 it's to damn big. The other point is that it's wide screen 16:9 formatted so the extra pixels just make up for the extra space.

I think that we need to see more 16:9 formatted displays and adpot them as a standard... this 4:3 ratio is from way back in the day and untill now no one's really questioned it.

Re:How high?

[Ramjet350]

Unfortunately the misconception needs to be broken that higher resolution = smaller fonts. If OSs handled it properly, higher resolution would = nicer looking fonts.

Re:How high?

[Unknown Relic]

I recently made the transition from a desktop machine to a laptop with a high-resolution LCD monitor. Before seeing it with my own eyes I never would have believed how clear, crisp and easy to read 1600x1200 would be on a 15" monitor. It's actually far easier to read than my old 19" monitor running the same resolution. And this is at the default, small, font sizes.

A lot of consumer level monitors suffer from being able to display a high resolution, but not being able to do so clearly. LCDs on the other hand have one physical element per pixel, which means that they are always sharp with no blurring between pixels.

The reason it's so much easier to read small text on paper than on a screen is because of the sharpness of the individual dots which make up that text. Reading text on a sharp, high quality LCD is amazingly similar. In fact, with some rough calculations 1600x1200 on a 15" diag screen is approximately the 200 dots per inch that this viewsonic monitor has. I've often wondered why they didn't make standalone versions of laptop quality LCDs, but now finally someone has started. I would LOVE a 22 inch version of this screen, though $8000 is a little steep for my pocket book

Re:How high?

[rtstyk]

Interesting that you should sarcastically mention the old and tired 640K limit as being enough while only 4 lines later saying that your secretary's PC would probably never need upgrading.

But back on topic. Can you imagine two of these in dual head setup? OMG...

Screen real estate is very, very important but I have to agree that 1600x1200 on 21' screen is the end of what's practical to work with comfortably. I think that the future lies in affordable LCDs with multi video output cards. What woudln't I give to have 3 21' LCDs...

Re:How high?

[SecGreen]

Your calculations might have been a little too rough. 1600x1200 is a 3/4/5 ratio, so your horizontal measure is actually 12", and the vertical 9". This comes out to be a 133 dpi density. Not too shabby, but not close enough to 200 that I'd consider it to be in the same ballpark. --sg

Re:How high?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point is more to be able to run 3D Max with insanely high res viewports.

Re:How high?

[Dahan]

Good explanation, but your math is off :) On a 72 dpi screen, one pixel is one point. A 12 point character is 12 pixels high. On a 200 dpi screen, the same character is 33 pixels (and looks much nicer).

My laptop has a 133 dpi screen (1600x1200 pixels, 15" diagonal), and text looks much better than it does on a regular CRT. I'd love a 200dpi display, although I can wait until the prices come down some :)

Re:How high?

[kfhickel]

Wrong. 12x12=144. 33x33=1089. Width counts, as does height.

Re:How high?

[Dahan]

Actually, I'm right. The point size of a font is the height of the font (specifically the distance from the lowest descender to the highest ascender, plus a bit of leading)--it's a unit of linear measurement, not areal. And the majority of fonts are proportionally spaced--and even the monospaced ones aren't necessarily square. If you want to take the width into account, you'd have a different number for every character. An "!" is usually much thinner than a "W".

So it is in fact you who are wrong.

Still not enough

[TrumpetPower!]

Seriously. 200 DPI is still not enough.

Let's take a quick survey. All those of you who'd be happy with a 200 DPI priner, please raise your hand. Right--I thought so.

I'll say that displays have matured when they're at least 1,000 DPI--though most people can still tell the difference between 1,000 DPI and 2,000 DPI.

Yes, you can play games with AA. Yes, we need resolution-independent display mechanisms lest bitmapped graphics vanish. Folks, this has all been done before--with printers. When the display engineers catch up to the printer engineers (and, granted, their problems are much harder), those problems will also be solved.

Cheers,

b&

Re:Still not enough

[sh4de]

You forget that printers and imagesetters don't render colour gradations the way monitors can. Any video card can feed the 200 DPI display with at least 8 bits per channel, effectively hiding the "low" resolution from your prying eyes.

Inkjet printers do mix the primaries (CMYK) to produce different colours, but I'd be surprised if the number of gradient steps were nowhere near the 256 per primary that monitors enjoy.

Imagesetters don't produce contone images at all. Each dot is either on or off. That's why you need 2400 DPI or more resolution to render a fine screen for high quality offset printing.

Re:Still not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

How am I supposed to read stuff in 8 point fonts when they'll be only 200 microns high?

Huh?

Re:Still not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

200 dpi black and white is not high enough, but for color it's more than most people need! Using color to antialias b&w nearly doubles the precieved resolution.

My LCD monitor with text filtering turned on looks like a printer when I sit back a little distance.

Re:Still not enough

[frovingslosh]

I'll say that displays have matured when they're at least 1,000 DPI--though most people can still tell the difference between 1,000 DPI and 2,000 DPI.

Suggesting we need 1000 dpi monitors just doesn't make sense. Even 300 dpi would be better than common laser printer output. (yes, some now print at higher resolutions, but even these are usually run at the basic 300 dpi settings because of the quality vs. speed tradeoff.) 200 Dpi with all the possible gray levels for AA and sub-pixel font enhancing technology could give results that would contrast nicely to 300 dpi laser print output.

Of course, you can complain that even 1000 dpi is not good enough for you. And then if you ever get 2000 dpi you can complain about how slow the screen updates are. I'm more concerned with seeing that $8000 price come down.

Re:Still not enough

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

Just for the heck of it, get a stopwatch and time how long it takes to print a 600 dpi graphic to your printer.

Now to try to imagine what it would be like to wait that long for your screen to update.

Now, I know that the bus between your video and monitor is faster than the bus to the printer, but the point is that as you increase resolution you significantly increase the amount of data which significantly decreases your frame rates.

Extremely rough calculations:
200 dpi is 40,000 pixels per square inch

My 20" monitor has a 15.5" by 11.75" viewable space, or 182.125 square inches

If my system were 200 dpi it would be displaying a total of 7,285,000 pixels instead of the 1,310,720 I have it displaying now, or a factor 5.55 times as much data.

Jumping to 1000 dpi as you suggest takes us 1,000,000 pixels per square inch, which on a screen the size of my monitor would equal 182,112,500 pixels, or a factor of 138.94 times as much data.

That's a heck of a lot of pixels to be calculating and transmitting and still maintaining a non-headache inducing flicker.

Re:Still not enough

[sir99]

An 8 point font should be the same size on every display. A point is 1/72 inch, so an 8 point font should always be about 2800 microns high, not 200.

Re:Still not enough

[jovlinger]

A 300 dpi printer cannot make a like 1/300th of an inch wide. However, it _can_ position this too-wide line with 1/300th inch precision.

However, a monitor can do both.

Not that this matters much: you seldomly need feature sizes that small.

Re:Still not enough

[shepd]

DVI (or whatever the pop digital interface is today) might have that problem...

VGA (arguably the most popular monitor connection standard), however, doesn't. The wonders of analog media continue. :)

Re:Still not enough

[GigsVT]

For reference, with our imagesetter, 2400dpi output res, 150 LPI line screen is used with digital images that are 300 dpi.

When monitors hit 300 dpi, they are the same quality as most printed materials.

(It would be nice to have a monitor to view our digital files at true size!)

Re:Still not enough

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

VGA (arguably the most popular monitor connection standard), however, doesn't

True, but your video card would still have to be able to handle 182,112,500 pixels regardless of what kind of monitor connection you have. I freely admit that I phrased my initial message very poorly (OK, downright stupidly), as there is no 'data' transfer between a video card and an analog monitor, but there is inside the PC between your software and your video card.

Re:Still not enough

[entrigant]

Engage brain before speaking please. A monitor can theoretically show 256 different colors per dot.. A printer can show, what, 4?... do the math.

Re:Still not enough

[mmol_6453]

A couple of things need to be pointed out:

• Printers use slow processors, so of course they're going to handle large chunks of PostScript slowly.
  
• The original AGP bus is oodles and oodles faster than even USB 2.0. Until they're using the same data transfer interface, live-graphics devices(monitors) will always be a heck of a lot faster than static-graphics devices(printers and the eventual niche-product digital picture-frames.)

Re:Still not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be stupid, a tv resolution is far far far less, yet you can get a crystal clear picture there, why would you need some insane resolution ona moniter?

Re:Still not enough

[jasonditz]

Holographic displays can't be far off at 1000-2000 dpi, can they? I mean, seems like one could just render the Fourier transform on screen and have an expanded beam of something or other lighting it up (backlit, perhaps).

Re:Still not enough

[foobar104]

(It would be nice to have a monitor to view our digital files at true size!)

Yeah, but you'll still need color proofs. ;-)

Re:Still not enough

[aludal]

try read *static* text @ "TV resolution". Even @ HDTV's 1089i(nterlaced) you'd need 3, or 4, or better 5 times bigger fontsize for readability level approaching mere 1280x1024 of a computer monitor. Nothing of the TV text is gonna be "crisp&clear" @ less than 75dpi. On the other hand, I employ my Linux on a rig containing "overclocked" Matrox G400 plus refurbished 300 MHz dotclock HP P1110 .24mm @ 2048x1536x32 for more than a year now (a good modeline, a "... X -dpi 131", or "DisplaySize 400" make it easily possible.) This is what I call "crisp&clear": a readable text of less than 0.5 mm in height. Now, after a year, it's yes, still not enough. But before going to 200 dpi on LCD for 8 grand plus ~1 grand for card with *two* TMDS, I'm looking into possibilities to get to 158 dpi first with 390 MHz dotclock Iiyama VM Pro 512 .21 mm,(~$745) plus Matrox Parhelia 512 (~$365). Anyone heard about Liunx driver development status for Parhelia?

Re:Still not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

But there IS a data transfer between your video card and monitor, even though it's an analog signal stream.

This is pretty important.

In order to display as many as 182,112,500 pixels in vibrant colors, a cable supporting 300 MHz bandwidth (which is upper range for 22" monitors today) just won't cut it anymore.

Reviewer.

[undeg chwech]

Dear ViewSonic

I have decided, today, to become a professional monitor reviewer. Please send me one of theses ASAP so I can get my new career started,

Thank you very much,

Undeg.

Re:Reviewer.

[unicron]

We used to try that shit on beer companies in college. We rarely got a reply but every now and again we'd find a case or 2 of beer waiting for us at the P.O. Box, completely wrapped up and inconspicuous. Hell, we even got bottles because they weighed less.

I've heard cigarette manufacturers are a lot more giving than the beer companies, but I never tried it.

Re:Reviewer.

[Ralph Wiggam]

In a lot of the new 2/3/5 packs of cigarettes, they have customer surveys. Fill out the survey and say that you regularly smoke thier biggest competitor's brand. They will send you a handfull of coupons to try and get your business. If you respond that you smoke their brand already, they don't need to send you anything. Smokers are the number 1 brand consious consumers. Use that to your advantage.

-B

Re:Reviewer.

[Buck2]

In bars in New Orleans, at least, there are women, working for cigarette companies, who walk around with a large box full of "sample" packs of cigarettes. She'll just check your id and hand you whatever you want.

Maybe guys take that job, too, but I never saw any.

Re:Reviewer.

[John Courtland]

They do it in Chicago too, but they are distributors for the cigarette companies. They usually hand out like 2 packs to whoever wants them. The carry around big bags. My buddy calls them "Santa Claus" and always goes and hunts them down.
"Where's Santa?", he'll say.

who in their right mind would buy this

[mazg]

Not only does this cost $8000 bucks! But it must be rather taxing on the CPU to have such a resolution

Re:who in their right mind would buy this

[Kakarat]

Professional graphic artists would buy it. Most of their work is done in very high dpi (600+) since you want it to scale and look nice when sending to the printer. Not to mention it would be nice to get a higher resolution rather than having to only see part of the image on your screen. It's definitely not designed for gaming in mind, however I'm sure there are a few people with money to burn and nothing else to do than try to run their games in 3840x2400.

Re:who in their right mind would buy this

[Anonymous Coward]

It will just follow the same path as all of the other graphics technologies. People who need more to do their work will buy them now while they are still costly. This includes the Scientific Visualization people, CAD folks, and Digital Artists. And people advertizing at trade shows. In 3-5 years when they are $1000ish and supported by the GeForce 6 then all the gamers will be picking them up. 3-5 years after that they'll just be the standard monitor.

Re:who in their right mind would buy this

[RhettLivingston]

From a CPU point of view, I run at 4800x1200 all the time because I have 3 1600x1200 screens. I don't find that it makes much of a difference at all. I do however have one very good graphics card on two of those displays (GeForce4 TI 4400). That helps a lot.

Not for PR0n

[teamhasnoi]

The last thing anyone needs to see is an acne-ridden cock-whore at 200 dpi.

'Cmon - you'd laugh if Norm MacDonald had said it.

I wonder

[cr@ckwhore]

I wonder how many folks will look at the picture of that monitor, and honestly think to themselves, "Wow, that looks like a really clear picture."

Re:I wonder

[CrazyDuke]

They've done it with advertising TV's on TV comercials for years.

They do it to advertise stereo systems on the radio.

Evidently it actually works.

Re:I wonder

[arestivo]

Wow, that looks like a really clear picture.

Where can i get the camera used to take it ;-)

Re:I wonder

[CaffeineAddict2001]

I wonder how they actually make it look clearer. Is it because they make the surroundings blurry, or put more colors, or is it simply the power of suggestion...

It has to be said...

[gatesh8r]

This with the 320 GB drives means more better looking pr0n than ever!

Re:It has to be said...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it means that the porn you used to view at near full-screen resolution with 800x600 will be about the size of a banner ad--and who wants to jerk off to those?

For eight grand

[rczyzewski]

You can start shooting at me.

This goes back to the battle of "don't you have anything better to spend your money on?" I can't understand why some people pay thousands for stuff like this but don't give a penny to charity, Church, or other organizations. If I had eight grand available, I would find a few better things to spend my money on.

Any I'm not saying the monitor isn't cool. Think of the porn people could watch.

Re:For eight grand

[RazzleFrog]

It's all a matter or perspective now isn't it. If you were worth $40 Billion and already donated a $100 million each year to charities maybe this wouldn't seem so expensive. I mean the money you spent on your computer could feed a who village in some third-world country. Or maybe that money that your company spends on giving you free coffee would be better served finding a cure for cancer? Matthew 7:1 comes to mind - "Judge not, that ye be not judged."

Re:For eight grand

[MalleusEBHC]

Because there are so many people out there who are worth $40 billion dollars, let alone giving away $100 million to charity...

Re:For eight grand

[RazzleFrog]

I think maybe you missed the point. The point is that to a poor person, the $200-300 you might spend on a monitor is the same as $8000 to you. If it makes you more comfortable, change $40 Billion to $40 Million and $100 Million to $100,000. There are thousands of people worth $40 Million (not me unfortunately).

reinvention

[sloth jr]

years and years ago ('88/'89), some companies
were trying to sell 300dpi monitors to the
desktop publishing set. No one bought them,
and they died. There's not much point in them
now, given the wide-spread use of anti-aliasing.

I wonder how useful this will be for CAD - won't
the thin lines be too difficult to see?

Re:reinvention

[be-fan]

Umm, on a 300 DPI monitor, the thin lines would be more pixels. And yes, one-pixel lines would be impossible to see. Even on my LCD, one pixel-wide text is very difficult to read.

9.2 million pixel monitor loan

[u8nogard]

That's still pretty pricey -- what makes this panel so special?

Try 9.2 million pixels, for one thing.

To Loan Officer: Ah, yes, I would like to take out a loan?
Loan Officer: Good, what type of loan are you interested in?
To Loan Officer: A Monitor Loan.
Loan Officer: ...
To Loan Officer: It has 9.2 million pixels ...
Loan Officer: Ahh, I'll...be right back...

Re:9.2 million pixel monitor loan

[jonbrewer]

Some of us paid $2200 for a 21" CRT back in the day... almost worthy of a loan.

IBM T221 is $8400

[jlund]

The article makes it sound as if the IBM is still 20k, this is not the case.

http://commerce.www.ibm.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce/Pr od uctDisplay?cntrfnbr=1&prmenbr=1&prnbr=9503DG3&cntr y=840&lang=en_US

Re:IBM T221 is $8400

[jlund]

The article makes it sound as if the IBM is still 20k, this is not the case.
The URL is: "http://commerce.www.ibm.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce/Pro ductDisplay?cntrfnbr=1&prmenbr=1&prnbr=9503DG3&cnt ry=840&lang=en_US"

It's even in stock!

Video Card

[phorm]

It might be difficult to find a 3d card that renders 3D properly at the max resolution. Actually, it might be hard to find something that renders 2D at resolution.

I'd rather go for a size 22" with a really good projector or something, instead of paying $8000 for a super-resolution display. As mentioned in the article, this would be pretty good for 3d design stuff... although the mini-pixels would probably hurt they eyes when you're trying to click on 1 little line or dot.

Then again, I only have a 15" monitor that I run at 1024x768, maybe I'm just outdated.

One of these days, my video card will have more RAM than my computer, I just know it - phorm

Re:Video Card

[SWPadnos]

Matrox Parhelia, Baby.

Supports 3 outputs (though I think only 2 can be used at a time in DVI mode).

Cooooool.

Re:Video Card

[be-fan]

You are outdated. My 15" LCD runs at 133 dpi. It makes reading /. like reading the morning paper. However, it still has to use tricks (like sub-pixel antialiasing -- ClearType) to do that. That creates lots of problems for me on Linux, because Xft really isn't as good at Cleartype-style rendering as Windows XP. When we get ultra-high-res flat panels, we can stop using all these tricks and enjoy incredible text rendering.

Re:Video Card

[phorm]

I can run resolutions a fair bit higher than 1024x768... it's just that on a 15" it gets a little bit tiny at times. I haven't heard of cleartype before though, chances are my CRT doesn't have it, as really high do cause me eyestrain with some text.

For general use, I'd rather have multiple-monitor extended desktops at around 1024x768 instead of high resolutions, although high-res is more applicable on most games (though games that truly support multi-monitor extensions kick ass).

A dual/trio flatpanel system would be nice regardless though, as would the afformentioned 22" super-resolution display, but I'm not quite that rich :-)

Not that rich... yet - phorm

Re:Video Card

[videodriverguy]

Well said - driving a display like this is not easy.
For example, it has 4X the number of pixels of a normal monitor. That means a bandwidth increase of 4X, or around 400MHz. Current cards not only cannot handle this, but the video cable technology can't handle it either. I seem to remember that at least one other display like this uses 2 simultaneous digital connections to get round this.
With MS pushing for greater than 32 bits per pixel (3 X 10bit seems popular) for Longhorn (next XP), the memory requirements will be staggering. Add to that the requirement in games that you have more than one display buffer (drawing in one while displaying the other). That latest nVidia or ATI card you bought can't handle this at all - it will require a new generation to do so.
I pushed for more research on this topic at my last company - unfortunately, the focus is so much on 3D performance that this sort of thing is left to one side.
2D will be a problem soon, as well. The push is for 2D operations to be done by the 3D engine (i.e. get rid of the 2D side). Scrolling a 4 million pixel window using a 3D texture operation will be interesting to watch.

Re:Video Card

[phorm]

Indeed. My GeForce4 had the option to make windows partly transparent while dragging. This seemed a cool function, although I don't bother using it. What confused me is that it uses direct3d to accomplish it (as the feature disables itself when another application is using d3d).

I was wondering why these such effects would be coded integrating the 3d engine, instead of a 2d pixel-blending function based on window regions?

It's not really 3d until I get a holodeck - phorm

Re:Video Card

[be-fan]

Couple of things:
1) You haven't heard of Cleartype? Where exactly have you been living? Its a software technology that takes advantage of the design of LCDs to make text look sharper. http://grc.com/cleartype.htm

2) Ideally, it would be high-res AND multiple monitors. Personally, I'd prefer the high-res. Even with 133 dpi, ClearType makes text almost as nice to read as paper. Given that I stare at text for hours a day (coding) it is quite a luxury.

Re:Video Card

[bcaulf]

9M pixels at 32bpp is 36M for a full screen framebuffer. Cards with >= 128M onboard memory are commonplace and there's nowhere to go but up. So the amount of memory isn't a big problem.

Moving a 4M pixel window in real time isn't a problem either. Actually that kind of operation is so parallelizable that the peak performance of today's hardware could be brought to bear. That's about 2.4 billion pixel per second fill on a Radeon 9700. There's enough headroom there to move a 40M pixel window at a high frame rate.

Incredible Waste of Cash

[cioxx]

Instead buy a 50" HDTV and use it for a monitor.

Problem solved.

Re:Incredible Waste of Cash

[13Echo]

That's nice, but from my own experience with 50+ inch HDTV units (we have one), they are cool for gaming, but are totally unsuitable for text. I am talking about using a real db-15 hooked up to the television with some proper discrete timing tweaks. It is still very rough on the eyes.

The fact is, HDTV units (all of them) are still not "HD" enough for use as a monitor. They work, but my parent's mid-90's Packard Bell monitor had a much more crisp image than any projection HDTV that I have seen.

A high quality projector will still get you a better image than any consumer grade HDTV.

Re:Incredible Waste of Cash

[nelsonal]

Most HDTV screens are 1080 interlaced, which I believe puts your resolution at about 1080 by 768, which is less than awe inspiring while reading text on a 50" screen. Even the really nice ones I have seen, are not ready to replace a good monitor yet. Projectors seem to be the current preference of the rich home theater pc set. The biggest flat panel monitor I know of is Samsung's 24T, I think they support resolutions of 1920*1600 or something similar. Sun or SGI might have something similar to go along with their high end workstations. Last I checked they were also at about 22" or so.

Re:Incredible Waste of Cash

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest "affordable" flat panel is the T210 from IBM, available for around $3.5K. It runs at 2048x1536.

Re:Incredible Waste of Cash

[13Echo]

You can use a program like PowerStrip to force 1920x1080i (or nearly any other suitable HDTV resolution) with your PC. This is what we did. Here are some notes:

Custom timings, custom resolutions, and HDTV.

Of course, it totally depends on the hardware you use.

Clarify - should be PPI

[ip_vjl]

Not that anyone cares, but it should be 200ppi (pixels per inch)

DPI (dots per inch) more accurately describes print devices where a number of print dots are needed to accurately describe a single pixel.

For example, to show a single 50% black square pixel - you'd need a 2x2 array of black dots (BWBW) - so if your image is 100PPI - you need a print device at least 200PPI to show the same resolution. For a monitor this doesn't really apply - as each pixel corresponds to a single pixel of image data. (Unless of course they were talking about the individual R G B elements - but the article seemed to indicate the contrary)

---

Just a pet peeve, as its often hard to get people to understand that there ARE differences between DPI, PPI, and LPI in the print world.

- vin

Re:Clarify - should be PPI

[Suppafly]

Just a pet peeve, as its often hard to get people to understand that there ARE differences between DPI, PPI, and LPI in the print world.


That may be true, but the standard way to describe monitors is dpi. Look out at the box of any monitor at your favorite computer store and they tell you the dpi.

Re:Clarify - should be PPI

[foobar104]

For example, to show a single 50% black square pixel - you'd need a 2x2 array of black dots (BWBW) - so if your image is 100PPI - you need a print device at least 200PPI to show the same resolution.

Wrongo. That's not even close to how single-color printing works. A 50% black square pixel will appear, on the printed page, as a round spot occupying about 50% of the area of a square cell. The process of rendering continuous tone images, like black-and-white photographs, as a pattern of cells filled with spots of varying sizes is called halftoning. The size of the cells you use, in cells per linear inch, is called the line screen. That's where we get the idea of lines-per-inch (or "LPI") from.

In order to draw those round dots, the printing device you use (typically an imagesetter that exposes photographic film or a metal printing plate) will use a laser to expose tiny spots in a pattern that forms a dot. The perfect imagesetter would be able to draw 256 different sizes of dots, to print what is effectively 257 levels of color, counting 0% and 100%. Obviously, to draw dots this way the resolution of your imagesetter has to be many times your line screen. A good guideline is 16 : 1. So printing a line screen of 150 lpi requires an imagesetter capable of resolving at least 2,400 spots to the linear inch. This isn't a problem for modern laser imagesetters, but it's a bit much for your average Lexmark.

Of course, it's important to realize that the idea of lines-per-inch only applies to tints or continuous tone images. For printing areas of solid ink, such as letters on a page, the imagesetter draws the shapes at full 2,400 (or whatever) spot-per-inch resolution. Film and printing plates actually have jagged edges on curved and angled edges, but because the imagesetter resolution is so high, you can only see them through a magnifying glass. And once ink hits paper, it bleeds just enough to smooth out all of those jaggies anyway.

Re:Clarify - should be PPI

[ip_vjl]

I understand how halftoning works.

My example was at the simplest level to show that printer dot != pixel, and that it takes many printer dots to show one pixel.

The process of halftoning is far more complex than my example - but was enough to show the point for this discussion.

The perfect imagesetter would be able to draw 256 different sizes of dots, to print what is effectively 257 levels of color, counting 0% and 100%. Obviously, to draw dots this way the resolution of your imagesetter has to be many times your line screen. A good guideline is 16 : 1. So printing a line screen of 150 lpi requires an imagesetter capable of resolving at least 2,400 spots to the linear inch.

Using the formula of:
levels = (printer_res / screen_rule)^2 + 1

means that a print device at 2400dpi running 150lpi will be able to reproduce 256 (257 actually) so that is good - BUT, the image you are trying to reproduce doesn't need to be 2400PPI - since a good deal of the printer dots are used just to represent a single shade.

rule of thumb - image_res = screen_rule * 2
So my whole point was that, in the case of a grayscale image to a 2400dpi printer (running 150lpi) - you only need to send image data at 300+PPI.

Which means your final printout would be:
300 PPI
2400 DPI
150 LPI
- all three would be true, hence why it is important to distinguish between DPI and PPI. Since if somebody asked, what DPI is that picture, the answer is 2400, but the resolution of the image is no better than 300 PPI.

Nothing you said was wrong, I think you just missed my point because I had used a very simple example in my first post.

- vin

Re:Clarify - should be PPI

[Ed Avis]

Why do we have to use dots per inch at all? Why not just measure resolution in micrometres (as is done for integrated circuit manufacturing, for example)? So a '75dpi' screen is about 340 micrometres resolution. Professional printing might use a resolution of 21 micrometres. And so on.

(Yeah I know dots per inch is the established standard and it's not going to go away any time soon. But I still think metric is the way to go. Alternatively you could measure dots per millimetre - but something measured in 'per unit of length' is a more complex measurement than just a unit of length. Still, often there's the feeling that higher is better (eg CPU speeds are measured in Hz, not cycle time) so maybe dots per millimetre is it.)

Re:Clarify - should be PPI

[Maledictus]

You knew I'd be around for this one, didn't you? We all love a good game of semantics. By the way, yes you DO correct the newspapers in red ink and send them back, don't lie to the people.

"Of course, it's important to realize that the idea of lines-per-inch only applies to tints or continuous tone images."

The idea of LPI applies to halftoned images. The images you see on the printed page aren't themselves continuous tone. The originals - slides, prints, etc. - were, but by the time they hit the printed page they are single or multi (most times 4 color process) color halftones. You know that, but again...we're clarifying.

"you can only see them through a magnifying glass"

About 100x. Well okay, less if you know what you're looking at.

"And once ink hits paper, it bleeds just enough to smooth out all of those jaggies anyway"

Not "bleed," - "dot gain." "Bleed" is what one does outside of trim marks and if one doesn't know how to use a cork-backed ruler at the glass-topped light table. "Dot gain" is what happens when you print on paper stock that has the relative absorbency of a paper towel and the ink spreads out like a juice spill. But you knew that, we're clarifying.

Terminology, Foo...it's all about terminology.

And semantics.

And pedantic antics.

Gotta go. Gotta read the paper. Now where's my red ink pen?

Re:Clarify - should be PPI

[foobar104]

BUT, the image you are trying to reproduce doesn't need to be 2400PPI - since a good deal of the printer dots are used just to represent a single shade.

Uh-oh. You're confusing (deliberately or otherwise) "pixel" with "sample."

In context of this discussion, pixels are physical objects, spots on a screen, transistors in the LCD. In a different context, pixels are numbers representing the color or luminance of a point in a raster, but that's a different context.

Here, it's more accurate to talk about "samples-per-inch," rather than pixels-per-inch. When you send data to an imagesetter for halftoning, you should have four image data samples for every halftone cell. In other words, your linear sample resolution should be twice your linear halftone resolution, which in turn is usually 16 times the linear spot resolution of your imagesetter.

If you're trying to clarify things, you're not doing a very good job by using the ambiguous words "dot" and "pixel" over and over again.

Since if somebody asked, what DPI is that picture, the answer is 2400, but the resolution of the image is no better than 300 PPI.

Actually, once you halftone screen the image, you have completely thrown away the excess resolution that was originally captured in scanning. The resolution of a printed photograph is its line screen, full stop. If that line screen is 133 lpi, then the resolution of the image is 133 lpi, and no more.

Re:Clarify - should be PPI

[foobar104]

Okay, now you're just showing off. And I do not correct newspapers. Not since I started taking my Zoloft.

The idea of LPI applies to halftoned images.

Bzzt. Wrong again, Mal. The idea of LPI has been applied to halftoned images. By the time the image (which was originally a tint or a contone) has been halftoned, its line screen is no longer relevant to anybody but people who correct newspapers with red pens.

Not "bleed," - "dot gain." "Bleed" is what one does outside of trim marks and if one doesn't know how to use a cork-backed ruler at the glass-topped light table. "Dot gain" is what happens when you print on paper stock that has the relative absorbency of a paper towel and the ink spreads out like a juice spill.

Hmm. Seems to me that when ink bleeds, dots gain. Wouldn't you say?

;-)

Hmmmm

[batboy78]

Lets see 73in HDTV or 22 inch monitor....... Hang on i'm thinking.

Re:Hmmmm

[martyn s]

You're retarded. Do you know what the resolution is on an HDTV? Maximum of 1920x1080 interlaced, which is really more like 1920x540, but with the proper aspect ratio.

Keep it comin

[PygmyTrojan]

I'm glad to see technology is focusing its efforts toward the pr0n industry: 300 GB hard drives, higher resolution monitors. What's next, holograms?

That must be one hella Video Card!

[St. Intrope]

3840x2400? Huzzah! But who makes a video card that pumps out that many pixels, anyway? I tried to look, but none of the cards I could find could even approach that (most were doing good to hit 1920x1200, or just 1/4 that much!)

Does anyone know of any cards that put out 3840x2400 on DVI?

Re:That must be one hella Video Card!

[BradleyUffner]

Actually I think it said it uses *2* DVI ports. My guess is that it's a special video card.

Re:That must be one hella Video Card!

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

"Driving 9.2 megapixels requires a graphics card with twin TMDS transmitters."

Re:That must be one hella Video Card!

[Anonymous Coward]

2 Matrox Parhelias 512s or an NVida Quadro could just about drive this thing. That's about it. Matrox are the 2D kings.

Re:That must be one hella Video Card!

[Anonymous Coward]

google on 3dlabs.... they've got a few.....

Need a 128mb card

[Ironpoint]

Thats a ~37 MB framebuffer and add on another ~37 MB for stencil and depth.

Really just a couple full screen passes in a 3d game would put the hurt on your VRAM.

Really a lower res would be fine by me. 2560x2048 would be great at 22 inch.

Re:Need a 128mb card

[Derkec]

Brand new cards tend to be slowed a good deal by 1600x1200 with all the eye candy turned on in a new game. I think to run at that sort of resolution, you're really looking at being a generation or two of graphics cards (and probably CPUs) before something could really take advantage of it. You might be able to run an older game on it though.

I really don't think the advantage of these monitors is in gaming. I think you'll be much better gettting one of these monitors to do graphic arts or putting a whole shitload of code up on the screen at once.

IBM has had for over a year

[peter303]

IBM has been selling 9 MP displays for over a year. I saw one at last years supercomputer convention. Its hard to read standard XWindows fonts because they are so small. High end photos (5 MP and up) are fabulous and look like prints.

This is great news...

[bradlauster]

This is great news...

I feel very strongly that lack of innovation in display technology is really holding back improvements (getting away from WIMP) in human-computer interaction.

While this doesn't change for form-factor of the display - it's still a rigid thing that you set up on a hard flat surface, the problem of resolution is an issue that's needed a solution for a long time. ...now if it was only $800 and not $8000.

Re:How high? Depends on the OS

[Gryffin]

how high can I set the resolution with having to be able to squint to see the letters that I am typing. I can barely see the letters that I type at 1600x1200. I can imagine what 3840x2400 would look like.

How high? That depends on whether or not OS developers get their sh*t together.

Current, mainstream operating systems, or more properly, windowing systems (Windows, Mac OS X, X11) all tend to assume a screen resolution, or offer limited capability to change the resolution.

• X Window System: for font scaling, allows you to choose from 75dpi or 100dpi. Woo whee.
• Mac OS X: no capability to scale the display resolution at all, despite the fact that their Quartz rendering engine, with it's PostScript base, should be able to handle the chore in it's sleep.
• Windows: While it allows the user to choose the DPI of her monitor, this seems to be applied to application fonts only; the fonts used in many user interface elements are not scaled, making it difficult to use many UI elements at high resolutions.

None of these systems have truly separated the "internal" measurement of graphic objects with their display size; all rely on an assumed point-to-pixel ratio. The cost, of course, for this level of abstraction would be performance, i.e. display speed.

But it seems to me that modern display adapters shold be more than capable of doing this. What are lacking are the APIs to make the graphics hardware do the math, and the OS support to enable this feature. I think Mac OS X already has most of the capability already; lets see if they actually take the next step.

Too small

[bobdehnhardt]

I'm currently running my 21-inch monitor at 1280x1024, and the icons and text are starting to get a little difficult to see (yeah, go ahead and laugh now - you'll break 40 someday, too). At 3840x2400 on a display marginally bigger than this one, the icons will be about 1cm square.

This thing may find a place in CAD work, but the raw resolution will be utterly useless in normal day-to-day applications.

Re:Too small

[chez69]

I have a 22" monitor that runs 1600x1200 and I run out of desktop space all the time. For me, more space is always better!

Re:Too small

[tomkarlo]

You're confusing the problem of raster icons with problems associated with higher screen resolutions.

Many operating systems are already using some form of vector icon or considering moving to it (KDE,Mac OSX)... it takes more compute time but not a lot (you only have to compute the raster equiv once given the screen size.)

Once that happens, you'll be happy using the high res screen and setting the icon size to say, 1 inch, while others might choose a 0.5 inch icon.

Re:Too small

[Phork]

here's a thought, maybe you need bigger icons. There is nothing that says icons MUST be 64 pixels tall(well, maybe windows ui guidlines, but they dont count). The idea behind these new displays is that you will use gui elements designed to be rendered on 200dpi displays, not on 72 or 100 dpi displays. So if things were done properly an incon on this monitor would be the same size or larger than one on your current monitor, it would just ne higher quality.

Re:Too small

[BigJimSlade]

That's assuming that you'll be using pixel-for-pixel copies of your icons. I imagine that, by the time this is actually affordable, maybe OpenGL accelerated desktops will be a norm. Then all your icons reside as textures on polygons and stretch to the desired size.

Re:Too small

[ChaosDiscordSimple]

At 3840x2400 on a display marginally bigger than this one, the icons will be about 1cm square.

The problem isn't the monitor, the problem is our windowing systems, be they MS Windows, X-Windows, MacOS, or otherwise. 150 dpi was the effective upper limit on resolution for so long that people started treating it like it was carved in stone.

A good windowing system (and any software under it), should assume that 1,500 dpi monitor might appear tomorrow. How will you make use of it? Don't just assume that I'll still want my text to be 30 pixels high. We should all be enjoying 150 dpi text on screen now, and looking forward to 300 dpi soon. Resolution improvements in printeres from 150 to 300 to 600 to 1200 were heralded as great improvements, but no one seems excited about nice crisp text on screen! Most modern systems handle fonts pretty well, but the setting isn't obvious or easy enough. (I've know too many people who keep MS Windows in 640x480 "because the text is bigger" instead of increasing the resolution and the font size.) Less correctly handled are icons and buttons. Apple has made some improvements by requiring high resolutions bitmaps for their new task manager bar thing. As a result, high resolution displays get nicer looking icons. Some systems support vector based icons that will scale to any size (Irix's default file manager comes to mind).

But if your windowing system shows you unusuable small icons or other widgets on high resolution monitors, complain to your windowing system/operating system provider!

Re:Too small

[NomNet]

There is nothing that says icons MUST be 64 pixels tall(well, maybe windows ui guidlines, but they dont count)

Don't count ? Er, I think the fact that Windows has a market share of 97.46% (http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1706) means they count an AWFUL lot !

404

[simpl3x]

here is the real link (http://commerce.www.ibm.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce/Pro ductDisplay?cntrfnbr=1&prmenbr=1&prnbr=9503DG1&cnt ry=840&lang=en_US). and with the matrox card it is $9399.00! drool! maybe half of that, but not $9k ouch. the apple cinema hd display with half of the resolution is $3.5k, and is the software really in place to be able to deal with this outside of special applications?

Why Viewsonic Sucks G0at Ass

[DnemoniX]

I used to love Viewsonic monitors, until the day one of them failed and I called customer service. Upon initial review of the warranty I notice that a CRT is covered for 3 years parts and labor. Great I thought! I called the tecnician. I had already troubleshot the monitor. I changed power cords, I changed outlets, I changed machines that I plugged into it. It was done. He still made me jump through hoops for the better part of a day before they told me I would need all of the following (cut and pasted from their website).

To obtain warranty service, you will be required to provide
The original dated sales slip
Your name
Your address
The serial number of the product
A description of the problem.

A dated sales slip? Even after 3 years? Come on! Ok well fine I can dig out an invoice. But they also want you to ship it back in the ORIGINAL box! Who has that after three years? This is rediculous. They wouldn't take it since I didn't have the original box! My yearly IT budget is only around $150,000 but rest assured they won't see a dime. After that I started buying HP monitors only, one goes bad, I call, no run around, they next day ship a replacement, and pay for the return shipping. Class act right there.

Re:Why Viewsonic Sucks G0at Ass

[stratjakt]

NEC is good about replacements too, I had a 17 incher blow up 4 times in a row, and they replaced it every time.

I eventually realized it was blowing up because there wasn't adequate space above it for it to ventilate properly. Lesson: Closed hutch-style "computer" furniture is bad, bad stuff.

But they never said boo, even though it was probably easy to realize it was my fault each time.

Re:Why Viewsonic Sucks G0at Ass

[Milican]

Original box? When I get bullshit like this from customer service I will usually call back. You would be suprised at how many times I turned a no into a yes. In any case, thanks for the info. I have never bought a Viewsonic, and with your info on their moronic box policy I never will.

JOhn

Re:Why Viewsonic Sucks G0at Ass

[Anonymous Coward]

To obtain warranty service, you will be required to provide
The original dated sales slip
Your name
Your address
The serial number of the product
A description of the problem.

I had a monitor (~2 years old) that just started smoking one day and I called Viewsonic up and told them I didn't have the receipt. They said that it was not a problem because they would use the "date of manufacture". I also didn't and they didn't require the box it came in.

They took my credit card number (just in case I didn't send the broken one back) and drop shipped me a new monitor. They told me to ship the broken one back to them (with a shipping label they provided) sometime in the next 30 days.

So to get a new monitor I was just out the shipping fee to have one sent to me. Not a bad deal IMO. I liked the way I was treated that day but it may depend on which CSR you get on the phone.

Re:Why Viewsonic Sucks G0at Ass

[Buck2]

I will second the "require original box" policy. My labmate's Viewsonic died and he went through the same crap. Luckily Viewsonic actually has a local presence in Los Angeles so he just drove the monitor there and handed it to them.

Re:Why Viewsonic Sucks G0at Ass

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a Viewsonic P815 go bad just one month after
the warranty expired. Well, guess what? If the
warranty has expired they won't even talk to you
about repairing it, even if you want to pay them
for the work! They won't see any more of my money.

Re:Why Viewsonic Sucks G0at Ass

[Patik]

I started buying HP monitors only, one goes bad, I call, no run around, they next day ship a replacement, and pay for the return shipping. Class act right there.

Same with Planar. I recently received an LCD monitor which had 5 dead pixels on it. I called them up, and without even asking me what the problem was they sent me a new one and paid for return shipping. Only spent 5 minutes on the phone.

Re:Why Viewsonic Sucks G0at Ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Except NEC and HP monitors both blow chunks compared to Viewsonics. We have about 250 NEC A500, A700, E700 and Accusync 120's and the failure rate is pretty bad. It has gotten better in the last couple of years but there was a transition period where we finally soured on them and switched to Viewsonic. I have a G810 on one side of my desk and an Accusync 120 on the other and the Viewsonic is much nicer. At home I have a Viewsonic GS790 and a 21" Sony Trinitron and I mainly use the Sony. The Viewsonic is my wife's, but I like them about equally.

HP's go dark faster than the others and NEC's lose their color or just stop working in the first 6 months too frequently for me. It is true that Viewsonic's return policy sucks. I still have a 19" monitor box at work in case something goes wrong with my monitor at home.

Re:Why Viewsonic Sucks G0at Ass

[Inoshiro]

"But they also want you to ship it back in the ORIGINAL box! "

Have you ever shipped glasswear by freight? No?

Maybe the people who make and ship thousands of monitors made out of brittle glass know how to pack them, and maybe they want to eleminate another variable. My Daytek monitors require you use the original boxes and materials for warrantee and shipping, and I'm right with them on that. I don't want them broken by some drunken mover, nor do they want users claiming a monitor is broken because of improper shipping.

If you really had a bugdet of $150,000 USD, you could easily have the boxes unfolded and stored with the foam, put next to the room where you keep all those Windows licence papers.

How about decent, smaller LCDs today?

[X_Caffeine]

Why is it that I can get a Dell laptop with a 15", 1600x1200 LCD for $1500, but I can't get a 15" LCD with better than 1024x768, or a 17" with better than 1200x960? LCD manufacturers really need a good smack upside the head...

Re:How about decent, smaller LCDs today?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, because you can't get a laptop with 1600x1200 real resolution? It's all about resizing and 'apparent' resolution.

Nothing's stopping me from hitting my 1024x768 panel with 1600x1200. It's just gonna suck, just like your laptop, but you just don't know that it sucks.

Re:How about decent, smaller LCDs today?

[MichaelDelving]

Dell's been selling a laptop at actual 1600x1200 for what, two years now? I got one of the first few, but didn't get to keep it when I was laid off in the great implosion. Next time you want to spout off, but really don't have a clue, please check your facts.

Video cards that can drive this?

[Raleel]

Anyone have a url for a video card that can drive this? We got some end of the year money....

Re:Video cards that can drive this?

[Anonymous Coward]

An ATI FireGL 4 can, we ave an IBM 3840x2400 monitor at work. Even though it has 3 dead pixels, it looks quite nice. Until you try and use the mouse! The monitor refreshes at 20 Hz, yes 20 Hz. Static images are great, movement sucks! Consider that before buying. I don't think it will be any good for gaming.

-tim

it's sane, 1600x1200 w/ current tech may not be

[frovingslosh]

The resolution can go as high as 3840x2400. That is insane. I think the question is no longer how high can the resolution go. But on the otherhand, how high can I set the resolution with having to be able to squint to see the letters that I am typing. I can barely see the letters that I type at 1600x1200. I can imagine what 3840x2400 would look like.

This isn't insane, although running a display at a resolution you claim to hardly be able to read might be. The extra resolution gives more dots, so you end up with easier to view type. It's easy to demonstrate how this affects things: Hold a piece of printed text with small but clearly readable text next to text o your monitor. You'll likely find (if you can read the text on your monitor) that the printed text is both smaller and more readable. The reason for this is that there is a greater dot density to the printed text, helping you to read it despite it's apparent small size. Most current monitors just don't have the dot density to match this, so once text shrinks beyond a certain point it's the compromise in pixel selection, not the actual small text, that makes it hard to read the type. A higher density monitor does help in this area. Of course, if you try to make characters the same number of pixels on he new screen then your problem only gets worse, but you can have both more pixels and smaller text, which can result in a very readable display.

Then again, maybe you just need reading glasses.

Amen.

[Anonymous Coward]

The cost, of course, for this level of abstraction would be performance, i.e. display speed. But it seems to me that modern display adapters shold be more than capable of doing this. What are lacking are the APIs to make the graphics hardware do the math, and the OS support to enable this feature.

Amen to this. [And please mod up the parent.] It's absolutely ridiculous that we're well into the 21st century, and about 30 years removed from the original GUIs developed at Xerox-PARC, and WE STILL DON'T HAVE A FSCKING LAYER OF ABSTRACTION BETWEEN A FONT AND ITS ON-SCREEN DISPLAY!!!

CS-Majors, CS-Faculties, and software engineers the world over: Hang your heads in shame.

Re:Amen.

[Gryffin]

It's absolutely ridiculous that we're well into the 21st century, and about 30 years removed from the original GUIs developed at Xerox-PARC, and WE STILL DON'T HAVE A FSCKING LAYER OF ABSTRACTION BETWEEN A FONT AND ITS ON-SCREEN DISPLAY!!!

Oh, I agree. And how.

Ideally, you'd have apps specify all graphics (including font glyphs) in real-world units (points, inches, mm, furlongs, parsecs, whatever), and the window manager / display manager would do the translation to screen pixels. Problem there is, with current OSs, you'd need to toss out all your graphics, type, and UI APIs and start from scratch. And get all your developers to do the same. Not bloody likely.

The alternative is to internally translate the idealized "pixel" of the current graphics APIs to actual screne pixels. That way, the application never notices the difference; everything it draws to the screen is adjusted to the display resolution. Problemt here is, for most displays where the actual resolution is fairly close to the idealized resolution, scaling tends to introduce lots of very ugly artifacts: jagged edges, awkward kerning and letterspacing, "one pixel off" errors, etc.

Again, though, Mac OS X's Quartz rendering engine does a pretty remarkable job with this sort of scaling; try their Screen Zoom utility (System Prefs, under Universal Access) and see what I mean. That's one reason why I think Apple might be the first to make this sort of thing work. (Ironically, the same OS won't let you choose your UI fonts or sizes. Go figger.)

Re:Amen.

[Anonymous Coward]

you'd need to toss out all your graphics, type, and UI APIs and start from scratch

Um... XRENDER/Xft ring any bells? Sure, people currently use it mainly for antialiasing their X fonts: But it does that with a whole new resolution-independent rendering API.

No to mention the ancient Display Postscript, which still works fine.

Sweet!

[tswinzig]

Now I only need to set windows to use 300x300 icons and 50pt print in order to be able to use regular software on this thing!

Re:Sweet!

[be-fan]

Or, just go ahead and set the "DPI" setting to 200... Works much better!

50pt print, btw, is 50/72's of an inch, not 50 pixels.

Re:Sweet!

[tswinzig]

The font part was a joke... on a monitor with this high or a resolution, though, you're gonna need huge icons, and generally huge EVERYTHING (graphical widgets that is) to be usable.

Limitations of the Eye

[RailGunner]

Something to think about - at 24 bit color depth, which is 16,777,216 colors for the math challenged, we've already vastly surpassed the amount of colors that the human eye can distinguish between.

So at what PPI do we surpass the ability of the human eye to distinguish the individual pixels? I run my desktop at 1600 x 1200 and it's *very* tough to see the individual pixels. At what point does it become impossible?

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[Ann O'Nymous-Coward]

Professional phototypesetters work at 1200x1200 dpi. I think visual acuity would pretty much bottom out at about 2000x2000 dpi.

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[dlkinney]

>So at what PPI do we surpass the ability of the
>human eye to distinguish the individual pixels? I
>run my desktop at 1600 x 1200 and it's *very*
>tough to see the individual pixels. At what point
>does it become impossible?

Depends on the size of the screen, doesn't it? On a monitor with a 100 meter diagonal size a single pixel would be over 2cm square. That's certainly visible to the naked eye.

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[TheAwfulTruth]

How many times does it need to be proven that this is COMPLETELY UNTRUE before people get it???? The human eye can EASILY tell the difference between a large majority of any two colors in a 24 bit spectrum seperated by only one bit. Place two colors on screen, each taking up 1/2 the screen and you will see the interface where they join through a process that is referred to as "Mach Banding".

If they are NOT touching, then you are right. But since most images are made up of colors that touch each other, it a very important phenomenon.

Also find something that draws a black like diagonally at 10 degrees across a white background and tell me that 1600 x 1200 is enough. The entire reason that there is so much attention paid to antialiasing in games, fonts and graphics programs is precisely because there is no where near enough resolution on a montior. 200 dpi is a step in the right direction but it'll be at least 300 dpi before computer displays start approaching the confort level of looking at a printed page.

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[Marx_Mrvelous]

You're right and wrong... 24-bit color is actually insufficient for all the colors we can see, when you throw in transculence, shading, shadows etc. But we can definitely use over 200PPI to improve image quality.

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[davidm25]

This is right up there with the 24fps is enough myth. Human eyes can see well beyond 256 shades per color. You can write a demo app in 3 mins to demonstrate this. Matrox has a demo where they use 10 bits per channel instead of 8 using there new board. If you see it running you will not have any problem seeing the difference. There was some Nasa research about this years ago but they looked at print and not monitors. It also verys among people and the shade ( see green better) of color.

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[AveryT]

The human eye can distinguish lines separated by about one arc-minute (1/60 degree). To truly benefit from a 2400 line display would therefore require that it occupy 2400/60 = 40 degrees of your vertical field of view. At 200 dpi the screen would be 12" high.

Considering symmetry about the viewing axis, your eyes would need to be:

6"/tan(20) = 16.5 inches from the display

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[entrigant]

Either your vision or monitor... or both.. really suck. I run a 19" fd trinitron monitor at 1600x1200 and I can all to easily see individual pixels. Hell even with AA enabled in games running at 1600x1200 pixels are still badly apparant.

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[Ann O'Nymous-Coward]

He already talked about size. He was asking what PPI = how many points _per_inch_.

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but human ego has no limits, with the human wallet not too far behind.

"LOOK AT MY LEET MONITOR!"

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been staring at my computer screen for so long that the real world seems strange for it's LACK of pixels. :|

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[Alan Partridge]

I understand that the eye can manage about 13-15 lines per degree at best.

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[Anonymous Coward]

Another way to look at it:

A reproduction of a single watercolour paint stroke can have more than 16 million distinguishable colours--all of them pale pink. A high-res photo of a clear blue sky or sunset can do this too.

Unless your display interface spends extra time dithering the colours, you might end up with visible banding in an image like this.

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[RhettLivingston]

This is a well known question on the photo boards. The answer is 180 DPI for a person with average sight viewing at arms length. View it closer than arms length, you'll need greater resolution to reach the limits of the eye. Further away, lesser resolution.

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[Ironica]

Regardless of what colors the human eye can distinguish *between*, the main issue in color is the gamut. Monitors have a much larger color gamut than four-color printing (of any kind), and we can easily see the difference. Try making neon green on your inkjet printer sometime. Or even a bright blue... half the time it will come out looking navy even though it's electric on the screen.

We face a similar issue with resolution. It's not whether we can see the individual dots, but what things look like in the aggregate because of the number of dots. Yes, there is a vanishing point, or at least an issue of diminishing returns, but we can continue to see improvements in overall quality when we can't actually focus on individual pixels anymore.

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[CreamsicleSeventeen]

This page has information you might like. Check out Figure 5 for a graph of the resolving power of the eye.

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[TastySiliconWafers]

It's not a myth at all. The human eye can't even distinguish a 1 bit difference in 256 grayscale on a properly calibrated, medical grade, 0.2 to 100 foot-Lambert gamut, 5 megapixel CRT under optimum viewing conditions (low ambient light). That same 1 bit difference wasn't visible on output from a properly calibrated AGFA DryStar laser film printer when viewed on a medical light box either (which probably has a greater luminance range than the monitor does, although I didn't bother using a photometer and densitometer to verify that). The JND (Just Noticeable Difference) turns out to be around 3 or 4 graylevels. One should not confuse the human eye's spatial resolution abilities with its luminance resolution abilities (which are not so good).

Re:Limitations of the Eye

[adrew]

I've noticed the same thing after I spent a whole day scanning pictures last week. When I got outside I noticed the amounts of detail in the trees.

We've got pathetic lives, huh? :)

It's never enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

> My secretary doesn't need to have her 300 mhz machine upgraded ever, probably.

Remember IBM? Some old company, used to make computers. They thought the same thing about the 386. Compaq ate their lunch.

Re:It's never enough.

[guacamolefoo]

>> My secretary doesn't need to have her 300 mhz
>> machine upgraded ever, probably.
>
> Remember IBM? Some old company, used to make
> computers. They thought the same thing about
> the 386. Compaq ate their lunch.

I don't dispute that. On the other hand, at some point of development, a tool becomes sufficient to do a job and the marginal benefit of replacing the tool with a "better" tool just isn't there if the old tool still works, even if there are some new features.

In the case of word processing and light spreadsheet use, I think that the marginal benefits provided by faster processors, more memory, new software, and new office suites (OpenOffice excluded since it presents a dramitc price point improvement) are simply not there. Word processing on a 386 had a lot of room for improvement - a GUI, hard disks, networking, stability, having more windows open, better resolution, etc. The whole shebang was a work in process.

Now, with an 800x600 screen, a copy of Word 97, network connectivity, a faster and larger hard drive, and a 300 mhz pentium, my secretary is pretty well set up to process words. ASCII doesn't get any bigger, and the formatting she does is not terribly complex. Her maximum document size has probably never exceeded thirty pages in a single document. Where is the marginal benefit from buying her a new anything?

If there is a dramatic improvement in design interface that suddenly requires more horsepower that will result in her having improved productivity, the cost of an upgrade might be worthwhile. Until then, there's no point.

I admit that there is often a lag in time between making capabilities available and applications taking advantage of the new capabilities. I just don't see anything out there right now that would justify spending $850 on a new 1.8 ghz Compaq Evo 310 with MS Office SBE and XP Pro.

A paradigm shift in human/software interfaces might convince me, but as long as it is a lady typing words into a word processor, I am solidly convinced that today's machines have more than enough oomph to do the job. Re the initial thread, her monitor does, too.

There are some people for whom such a technological development may have use and for whom greater resolution will be a good thing. If applications and OS software could take advantage of it, it might even have practical benefits such as reduced eyestrain (as well as the improved screen real estate someone else mentioned, though that would require ever-smaller fonts, making use difficult).

On the other hand, the dramatic, paradigm-changing benefits of going from DOS-based WordPerfect to a windowed (somewhat stable) GUI environment with network access, etc., don't seem to be in place yet to take advantage of new technology. I'll wait.

guac-foo

Twin TDMS, not two DVI ports

[St. Intrope]

IIRC, any one DVI connector can actually transmit two TDMS signals (which is necessary for this many pixels). So the reference in the article doesn't mean that it has two DVI connectors.

Of course, you're probably right about it being a special video card--I don't know of any that output dual TDMS signals.

Flamebait

[hendridm]

Ok, you were stupid enough not to 1) notice that Slashcode puts spaces in long strings and simply remove them and 2) post a similar link in the same gay fashion as to not make it a hyperlink, thus allowing the spaces to be added again.

My hat's off to both of you. It's called a Preview button.

Sorry, but it had to be said.

Great for no-glasses-required 3-D (lenticular)

[MadCow42]

At 200 pixels/inch, you could very nicely use this with a "lenticular lens screen" to display 3-D images without the need for special glasses or other accessories.

Remember those cool little "flip cards" you got in Cracker-Jacks, where the image changed when you rotated the card? Well, that's lenticular imaging. This technology is also used for 3-d imagery because the image that you see depends on the angle at which you view the image. Because your eyes each see the same point on the screen from a slightly different angle, the screen shows each eye a different image (allowing proper 3-D).

Using this screen (200ppi) and a 40-line-per-inch lenticular screen, you could see 5 different images depending on the angle you are viewing from... not bad at all.

(BTW, I write "shareware" to produce lenticular images... http://www.lenticularshareware.com)

MadCow.

Re:Great for no-glasses-required 3-D (lenticular)

[jovlinger]

I always thought it would be a great idea for 3-d games to include a l10r lens in the box, for the true 3-d effect. Positioning it on the monitor would be fiddly, but shoudl work ok: many crts give you screen re-sizing controls, and you could use subpixel positioning on LCDs.

I would suggest just interleaving two images -- or at most three. I've written about this before, but can't be bothered to fight with slashsearch to find it.

4.7Ghz - wow

[Sabalon]

The other part of the article mentioned the PIV running at 4.7Ghz. They need to get a PIV at 4.77Ghz and an 8088 at 4.77Mhz side by side.

It'd make a neat statement.

Apparently, IBM has even higher resolutions

[trentfoley]

Go here on IBM's product page, scroll down to the "Display Size:" link and click on it. This will open up a popup showing IBM's description of their Thinkpad displays.

Its pretty obvious what they meant, but what they meant is not what they said. I emailed them a few months back, but it remains unchanged to this day. Here's the text:

Display size is determined by the diagonal measurement of the TFT display (i.e. 14.1"), while resolution is the degree of sharpness of a displayed image. Resolution is also expressed in a matrix of dots such as 1024 X 768 representing the number of pixels per square inch.

* ThinkPad X Series 12.1" TFT display with resolution up to 1024x768 dpi (dots per inch)
* ThinkPad T Series up to 14.1" with resolution up to 1400x1050 dpi
* ThinkPad R Series up to 14.1" with resolution up to 1024x768 dpi
* ThinkPad A Series up to 15" with resolution up to 1600x1400 dpi

Re:Apparently, IBM has even higher resolutions

[Anonymous Coward]

I emailed them a few months back, but it remains unchanged to this day.

Unbelievable! I'd expect that from a Dell or an Apple, but IBM is supposed to be a class outfit. You emailed them, you say? Amazing that they would ignore that. Did you sign your name? I mean, when I see an email from "trentfoley" come across my desk, I sure as hell pay attention!

Simply unbelievable.

Re:How high? Depends on the OS

[sir99]

You can tell X to use any resolution you want, on the command line. I calculated my monitor at 114 dpi, for example. However, not many programs use this information, AFAICT. Ghostview (postscript/PDF viewer), mozilla, and The GIMP use it, and not much else that I can see. Unfortunately, I don't think X is smart enough to use a different DPI setting for each screen resolution.

Viewsonic monitor

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst terrorist attack in recorded history occurred nearly almost a year ago to the day, followed by a Holy War against Islam, and now Israel and the Palestinians as well as India and Pakistan are teetering on the brink of their own war, Argentina is in the midst of a financial crisis, America is considering launching attacks against Somalia and Iraq, and you people have the gall to be discussing $8000 monitors???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!

The bodies of the thousands of innocent civilians who died (and will die) in these unprecedented events could give a good god damn about $8000 monitors, your childish Lego models, your nerf toy guns and whining about the lack of a "fun" workplace, your Everquest/Diablo/D&D fixation, the latest Cowboy Bebop rerun, or any of the other ways you are "getting on with your life" (here's a hint: watching Cowboy Bebop in your jammies and eating a bowl of Shreddies is *not* "getting on with your life"). The souls of the victims are watching in horror as you people squander your finite, precious time on this earth playing video games!

You people disgust me!

Re:Viewsonic monitor

[essell]

Get over it, troll.

Re:Viewsonic monitor

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo, Dude!
Wanna buy some naked pictures of Natalie Portman?
I got video as well, but that'll cost way more.

Re:Viewsonic monitor

[MrBoombasticfantasti]

Maybe, just maybe, people should be discussing more about $8000 monitors instead of waging war on other people. I'd rather be nerfed by a horde of nerds than killed by brainwashed military rednecks. Happy is the day that guns will be thrown down and exchanged for jammies and bowls of Shreddies. Really, think about it!

Size, not resolution

[fm6]

Well, I'm not a gamer, or a doctor, or anybody else who needs that kind of resolution. But I'd kill to have a 19" by 11" LCD monitor (that's almost enough room for three full-page windows!) at an ordinary resolution. But nobody seems to be selling that. Oh well, couldn't afford it anyway.

Re:Jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called the Poconos.

I just want an affordable 1600x1200 LCD!

[Chris Carollo]

All I want is a decent 19" 1600x1200 LCD. Why I can get a 1600x1200 screen on my 15" laptop but not in a 17" or 19" desktop model is beyond me.

If anyone's got any links to 16x12 LCD desktop monitors, I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong. :-)

Re:I just want an affordable 1600x1200 LCD!

[ccg]

Dell 2000FP is a 20.1-inch LCD that does 1600x1200. It has four inputs: VGA, DVI, S-Video, and Composite. It can do picture-in-picture with the s-video and composite inputs. If you time it right (wait until Dell is having a 20% sale on peripherals, which they do often, and get a coupon code off the web) you can get one for around $1100. Regular price is $1500. Currently, it is 10% off. Viewsonic and Samsung also make similar LCD's, but I haven't seen them. The Dells are pretty nice. The pixel response time is a little slow for gaming -- the images split sometimes during movement and panning. For daily work, they are great. The only LCD I've actually seen that's better is the Apple HD Cinema display, but for $3500, you can buy THREE Dells.

Here's the link: http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.a sp?customer_id=19&sku=320-4105

ccg

Re:I just want an affordable 1600x1200 LCD!

[MeerCat]

I have an Iiyama AU4531D which is a 19 inch 1600x1200 DVI screen, costs £1,100 in the UK, and is superb (oh, and no dead pixels after 6 months use).

USB and normal features included, and it pivots to do 1200x1600 which is sort of used less often than you'd think, but nice for gee-whiz shows.

--
T

Re:I just want an affordable 1600x1200 LCD!

[MeerCat]

Sorry that was a 4831

How close are you to the screen?

[Xeriar]

Your eye has about 4 million or so cones, which are concentrated in the exact center, and taper off the further from the center (rods spread about the rest of your eye).

So, you need a bare minimum of 4 million pixels to challenge the complexity of the human eye, but because it's so concentrated on where we focus, resolution needs to be considerably higher before it becomes truly unnoticeable. No doubt some videophile of the future is going to whine about missing his 1600 dpi monitor, or something...

How soon they forget

[Anonymous Coward]

"Compaq ate their (IBM's) lunch."

Compaq reversed the IBM PC BIOS, which would be ILLEGAL these days. Then the resulting industry ate IBM's lunch.

Stupid Congressidiots should think more about what's best for society as a whole rather than protecting the bottom line of whatever individual company that buys their influence.

Re:How soon they forget

[Anonymous Coward]

Should read "reverse engineered". DAMN.

The point being that things like PC clones and VCRs were seen as a dire threats to certain little two-bit corps. They went on to produce markets orders of magnitude bigger than those they "threatened".

DPI is NOT ppi

[MadCow42]

There's a difference... 200 pixels per inch is just that... a pixel can be any shade of any color.

200 dots per inch can only really render about 25 pixels per inch (with full 24-bit color) because it takes an array of 8x8 "dots" OF EACH COLOR INK (on a printer) to be able to represent 256 shades of each color.

So, to equal 200ppi resolution on an inkjet printer, you need somewhere around 1600dpi resolution (ok, there's some "tricks" that newer inkjets do to make it look higher with fewer dots, but that's besides the point).

So, to answer your own question, a 200ppi monitor is much HIGHER resolution than a 1000dpi printer.

madCow.

Re:DPI is NOT ppi

[Tony-A]

There's a difference. Right.
Color is a property of area, not of a point. Just try seeing the exact shade of a tiny paint chip. Paint half a wall. Then try to exactly match the shade on the other half.
Resolution has to do with where or how many. A 1000 dpi printer can draw 500 lines in one inch. A 200 ppi monitor can draw 100 lines in one inch.
There are tricks that can be pulled on both sides, but translating between a 200ppi monitor and a 1000dpi printer loses in BOTH directions.

Re:How high? Depends on the OS

[Gryffin]

Unfortunately, I don't think X is smart enough to use a different DPI setting for each screen resolution.

I think the biggest problem on X11 is the font manager. It only seems to understand 75ppi or 100ppi; for any other resolution, I assume it either chooses the nearest, or tries to scale from the nearest.

I have little experience with the "official" X11, but IMHO, XFree86 font handling is still playing catch-up with Windows and Mac. It only recently gained decent scalable fonts (TrueType), and they're still problematic; the concept of scaling these arbitrarily to match screen resolution seems a long way off.

Great, Another Model I Can RMA To Hell

[The Dobber]

I have little faith left in Viewsonic monitors. I suffered through eight RMA's on an 817 series monitor in the course of two years. All, except one, failed for the same reason, just went "poof". One monitor died with 8 hrs of recieving it. The final straw was when they shipped a monitor that looked like something had broken loose inside the tube and bounced around, scarring up the back of the panel.

Each and every time I called, they professed ignorance and told me that thier was no quailty control problem with the 817. But they had an abundent supply of refurbished 817's. And I had to pay freight for each and every return. At 71 lbs, those babies weren't cheap to ship.

After about the third return, I tried to convince them to ship me a different model. They wouldn't.

Funny though, my 815, which sits on the same table, has been lite for going on 5 years now, with not a problem.

You, sir, are worse than HITLER!

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that little tidbit of information could be very useful. If you were in PRISON !

Something silly

[Anonymous Coward]

About posting a picture of a 200 dpi monitor to be viewed and evaluated on a 72 dpi monitor

End of the bitmapped display

[jovlinger]

That's just a boatload of pixles to be pumping down the pipe. I wonder how long it will be until hi-res monitors incorporate some vector rendering hardware internally, in order to assauge the bandwidth problems of dvi.

you probably don't want a full-blown postscript renderer, but something along the ideas of display postscript, or even quickdraw, would probably reduce bandwidth incredibly.

I've often mused about perhaps using proto-mpeg down the display connector as well, as scaling only needs to be done at the very last stage. However, this would be more complicated, as you'd need to be able to download new drivers into the monitor somehow. Perhaps you could write those drivers in postscript... (loop to top of post)

200 ppi is overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

I work here in a photolab and our extensive testing demonstrates that average joe can't tell the difference between an image that is output at 150ppi or 600ppi. Under 150 rez some people can tell, but they are experts at imaging. Over 150 ppi and you'd need a loupe to tell the differences.

Higher resolution is of course much better in certain situations, but digital photo printers are imaging around 255 ppi, we just send them less data.

The human eye can resolve only so much detail.

I DO like the fact that it is LARGER, but could care less about the rez.

I use a 22" lcd (Cinema Display) and find that it is still a bit small at 1600 x 1024 for some of my apps, particularly After Effects, Elastic Reality and my pron slideshow. Pro Tools is tight in a 22" display also.

I say keep 'em the same rez (lcds look so much better anyways) but make the screens bigger. \CODEC3
oh an cheaper, make 'em cheaper...yeah

Apple's Cinema Display will do the trick.

[mystrale]

Apple sells exactly that. Their 23" Cinema Display has a viewable area 19.5" wide by 12.2" high, (16 x 10) at about 100 dpi. Reviewers claim it shows very little colour distortion with changing viewing angle, and a pixel response rate high enough to show DVD video and 3D games without blurring. Nice device. Of course it costs $3500, but hey, you get what you pay for.

Re:Apple's Cinema Display will do the trick.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has a section of about 30 G4's with these monitors at quakecon. Was very nice, they played RTCW well.

Images don't work in mozilla

[fire-eyes]

Nice. On the page, that is.

check the viewsonic site

[Bizzarobot]

http://viewsonic.com/products/lcd_vp2290b.htm

There are all of the supported video cards, screen specs, etc, etc. Apparently, you can use a plain-ol' Radeon 8500 with a single DVI output to acheive the huge resolution. But with a Fire GL4, you have to connect both of the screen's DVI cables to both of the card's DVI heads. (odd for one and not the other...) Plays friendly with Apples, Penguins and Winders. :)

there are two supported:

[Bizzarobot]

http://viewsonic.com/products/lcd_vp2290bhardware. htm

ATI Radeon 8500 (mac and pc)
ATI Fire Gl4

works with Linux, MacOS, Windows

Re:How high? Depends on the OS

[Anonymous Coward]

This is probably a bad place to say it, but XFree86 is the worst implementation of X11 I've used. Both HP-UX and Solaris have supported TrueType fonts for a long time; the use of DPS makes using Postscript fonts easy and there is no problem with scaling (duh, it's postscript).

XFree86 has some clever hacks that are useful in games, but otherwise there's nothing good to say about it.

Think "other than quake" people, please...

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Please don't go on about, "I won't spend XXX money to hook up that monitor to my Voodoo2-SLI boxen." A monitor of this capability is for medical, military, research applications, etc. Not for your pr0n and lan parties. (or your lan and pr0n parties, either way).

Think brain surgery, high-res scans, super-acurate 3d models to further help reduce prototyping stages.

Maybe Duke Nukem Forever, though, cause this monitor will be around $500 by the time that game comes out.

Gender neutral

[Anonymous Coward]

"Windows: While it allows the user to choose the DPI of her monitor, this seems to be applied to application fonts only; the fonts used in many user interface elements are not scaled, making it difficult to use many UI elements at high resolutions."

A more politically correct way of saying this would read: "it allows the user to choose the DPI of his or her monitor..." or even better "her of his monitor"

just something to watch for and think about.

cheers
Anon.

Re:Gender neutral

[foobar104]

Karma to burn, baby.

A more politically correct way of saying this would read: "it allows the user to choose the DPI of his or her monitor..." or even better "her [or] his monitor"

This is a common misconception. The English language is not strongly gendered, as are some Romance or Germanic languages. For example, English articles do not differentiate between the gender, or lack thereof, of their objects. We say "a man" and "a woman," and "the man" and "the woman." As such, we have no gender-neutral third-person animate pronoun. We have "it," which is a third-person inanimate pronoun, but native speakers will virtually universally reject calling a person of unspecified gender "it."

In informal speech, evidence of the third person plural being used as a neuter pronoun goes back for centuries, but such convention has never been adopted for formal or written speech. It's acceptable to say, "It allows the user to choose the DPI of their monitor" informally, according to some authorities, but it is frowned upon in formal speech, and it is never acceptable in writing.

The only correct usage of the third-person pronoun when speaking of a person (as opposed to an animal or a thing) or unspecified gender is to use the third person masculine form: "he," "his," "him."

The original speaker was only correct to say, "It allows the user to choose the DPI of her monitor," if referring specifically and exclusively to female users. The feminine third-person pronouns cannot be used in neutral context, unlike the masculine.

Saying "his or her monitor" is redundant, and should be avoided. The masculine pronoun applies to persons of either gender, which includes women.

People who find this offensive always amuse me, because I see it quite the opposite. When you say "he" or "him," you could be referring to just anybody, man or woman. But when you say "she" or "her," you're talking about a woman, and only a woman. The clear implication is that women are special, and that they deserve a category of their own. To find it any other way strikes me as backwards.

rather have a monitor than eight grand!

[Anonymous Coward]

My old online friend "sgt.hulka" (Robert Waring, his site is at www.hulks.com) sold a box of twinkies for $5k on Ebay during a labor dispute when a major twinkie factory was shut down.

Personally, I'd rather have a 200dpi monitor than a box of twinkies!

Some people have way too much money (and Hulka is NOT one of those guys)

I'd rather the monitor than 8 grand

[bluGill]

Me, ME ME!!! I'd rather have that monitor than 8 grand.

Of course I'll bet that if I had 8 grand sitting in a bank account my tune would change, but since I'm unemployed that doesn't seem likely.

Moderators don't like the word cock-whore

[teamhasnoi]

Why was the parent post modded down (-1 Troll) and (-1 Offtopic)?

Moderators. C'mon. Use a clue. This post was ontopic, and certainly NOT a troll. Was I soliciting a response? No. Did I ask a question? No.

Was it funny? Apparently not to someone as acne-ridden as you. Was it overrated? Perhaps, since you *enjoy* the company of cock -whores .

Poor moderation is making /. stupid. Don't be part of the problem. Be part of the solution.

Read the FAQ, come back and mod this down (-1 Overrated). Geez. Do I have to wipe your ass for you too?

Slightly high-res LCDs

[tokki]

I'm waiting for slightly higher resolution LCD displays to come out, such as 17-inch displays that do 1600x1200, instead of 1280x1024 (which isn't even 4:3).

My laptop has a 14-inch display at 1400x1050, and I love it. I love the extra space, and the fact that it's an LCD makes up for the small type.

I started using LCD displays a year or so ago and I don't want to go back. I do a majority of my time on computers reading and writing, and the crispness and sharp lines of LCD's square pixels as opposed to a CRT's round dots (although Sony's dots are square, making Trinitron the best CRT IMHO). It's just much easier on the eyes, and with anti-aliasing/cleartype on XP, and Mac OS X, it's even more pleasant to read.

I've got my 1280x1024 display at home with a Nvidia GeForce 2 running Quake 3 at 1280x1024 at about 90 FPS, and the pixel latency is so low on my Dell LCD, it's as good or better than CRTs for games, which are typically LCD's weakness.

Sweet.

[Arcaeris]

With one (or more) of those new Maxtor 320 GB hard drives full of porn and this monitor, I can truly have the ultimate, realistic pleasure experience. Virtual Reality, here I come.

Or I can just play Deus Ex or Neverwinter Nights really, really big.

"What do you mean you can see all the way to Waterdeep?"

The ULTIMATE use for this would be...

[Anonymous Coward]

with my xbox running LINUX once the movement ports it over!

Which movement you ask? the movement I love more than my bladder movement! The OPEN SOURCE LINUX MOVEMENT of course!

Ow

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still smarting from the anal reaming I took at the hands of Matrox. I bought one of their hardware accelerated video digitizer cards for about $300, and they decided that it was too hard to write drivers for. So they released one last set of drivers, which took out the hardware acceleration, putting performance at the level of a $20-30 digitizer.

Don't trust Matrox.

Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

a Beowulf cluster of these!

That's fraud

[yerricde]

Fill out the survey and say that you regularly smoke thier biggest competitor's brand.

If you don't, that's fraud (as the fine print states), and you can get sent to prison.

Re:That's fraud

[unicron]

I find it hard to believe a cigarette smokers survey qualifies as a legally binding document.

Exaggerate the artifacts

[yerricde]

I wonder how they actually make it look clearer.

In some songs I've remixed, I've used a similar effect: When the artist talks about MP3 (such as in Eminem - "The Real Slim Shady"), I sometimes put short parts of the song in 32 kbps mono MP3, even when I distribute the final product in Fraunhofer's MP3 format or in Xiph.org's Ogg format. It's a dramatization.

Is it because they make the surroundings blurry, or put more colors, or is it simply the power of suggestion...

Likewise, in commercials for displays, using highly magnified screenshots is common. Exaggerating the artifacts is legal if you put some language like "Dramatization of difference between our display and the competition" in a caption with reasonably-sized text.

Re:Exaggerate the artifacts

[Anonymous Coward]

That reminds me of a sound demo that came with some game.

"This is an 8-bit recording: (music playing, sounds worse than an actual 8-bit recording)"

"This is a 16-bit recording: (same music playing, sounds just fine)"

Both wavs were 16bit of course. The "8-bit" sounded dreadful, like it was quantized at 4-bits per sample, then had noise added to it.

otoh...

[jmichaelg]

..by the time we're looking at 1000 dpi monitors, 182 mpix/sec won't be a big deal.

The parent's point is well taken - at 200 dpi, the monitor is just at fax quality. (Albeit helped by the additional color information.)

Cheaper than that...

[nojayuk]

,i>The article makes it sound as if the IBM is still 20k, this is not the case.

Compgeeks were selling reconditioned T221s for about 2500 bucks a few weeks ago.

Poorly-written apps

[yerricde]

Or, just go ahead and set the "DPI" setting to 200... Works much better!

And then watch what happens when poorly-written but mission-critical applications ignore the display resolution and force pixel-sized fonts.

Re:Poorly-written apps

[RabidChipmunk]

And then watch what happens when poorly-written but mission-critical applications ignore the display resolution and force pixel-sized fonts.

They get rewritten for the PHB with the fancy new monitor.

Re:Poorly-written apps

[be-fan]

The Windows font APIs are all point based, it would actually take wrk to bypass it and do things in pixel sizes... People still do it, don't they?

Re:How high? Depends on the OS

[Dahan]

Unfortunately, I don't think X is smart enough to use a different DPI setting for each screen resolution.

With XF86, you can use the DisplaySize setting in XF86Config to specify the physical size of your display. X will then use that and your current screen size in pixels to compute the number of dots per inch.

The visual threshold is not measured in PPI

[yerricde]

He was asking what PPI = how many points _per_inch_.

That depends on how close the eye is to the object being viewed. Obviously, it only takes half the PPI to fool the eye for an object 50 cm away from the eye than for an object 100 cm away from the eye. The eye sees in radians, and the brain converts that to metres based on depth cues.

Gates's Law

[yerricde]

They need to get a PIV at 4.77Ghz and an 8088 at 4.77Mhz side by side. It'd make a neat statement.

Windows XP would still take about as long to boot on the 4.77 GHz machine as MS-DOS 2 would on the 8088.

Gates's law: The time taken to perform simple operations in mass-market software, measured in microprocessor clock cycles, will increase in subsequent versions of a software product at a rate roughly proportional to the increase in clocks per second of newer microprocessors. Thus, given a lack of funding for increasing hardware speed and a requirement to "keep up with the Joneses" dictated by changing proprietary file formats, the speed of software halves every 18 months.

(OT) This is Slashdot, not Kuro5hin.

[Anonymous Coward]

[Politics is going on], and you people have the gall to be discussing $8000 monitors???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!

OSDN Slashdot is primarily a technology discussion site. If, on the other hand, you want to discuss politics, and you want to help choose which stories are discussed, please head to Kuro5hin.

Even then, as of this writing, Slashdot still has an active story where you can discuss the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001.

Time to break out the cluepons....

[tgd]

It seems pretty obvious he's talking about why the hell a 1600x1200 LCD on a notebook computer is $1500, but no sane amount of money will get you the identical screen in the flat-panel monitor form factor.

Record keeping in IT departments

[Maledictus]

"A dated sales slip? Even after 3 years? Come on! Ok well fine I can dig out an invoice."

Dude. You need to keep better records. I know from whence I speak because I used to just throw shit away - packing slips, receipts. I thought "Hell, I got the serial number..." I've learned and now so have you. Grab some space in a file cabinet somewhere and keep everything.

"But they also want you to ship it back in the ORIGINAL box! Who has that after three years?"

And yup, I keep monitor boxes, too. I have an IT budget that's probably less than yours, but I have the benefit of working at a company that owns monstrous amounts of warehouse space and part of that space is simply taken up with empty boxes. Another lesson learned - that lesson was learned with a leasing company that wanted everything back in the original boxes. Ugh.

Call 'em back and bitch. See if you can get a swap - they send you a new monitor, you send them the broken one in the box within 30 days or something. They might want a credit card number in case they don't get an old one back, but that's what other manufacturers have done for me.

"After that I started buying HP monitors only. ...Class act right there."

While I agree that HP is a class act, I've had no problems with other monitor manufacturers or re-branders as the case may be. If you have any 15" HP Ergos on the floor, you'll realize exactly *why* HP is a class act. Those monitors go must be made with spit and toilet paper. I'm guessing they were low bid and HP probably decided "screw it, just keep replacing 'em - no questions asked."

Re:How high? Depends on the OS

[Frank Grimes]

With XF86, you can use the DisplaySize setting in XF86Config to specify the physical size of your display. X will then use that and your current screen size in pixels to compute the number of dots per inch.

I've never gotten this setting to work correctly. Yet another reason to detest XFree86's current state.

Intel Chip Approaching 4.7 GHz

[windowpain]

Did anyone else notice father down the page that Intel is running a processor at 4.1 GHz and it crashed just as it hit 4.7 GHz?

When they do get it to work at that speed it will be running at exactly 1,000 times faster than the chip used in the original IBM PC.

Not bad. A thousand-fold increase in clock speed in about 20 years.

2.8x magnification?

[yerricde]

Something silly ... About posting a picture of a 200 dpi monitor to be viewed and evaluated on a 72 dpi monitor

Look at a 72 dpi monitor. Then look at a 72 dpi monitor under 2.77x magnification. That's the difference between 72 dpi and 200 dpi.

Re:Samsung 240T

[quasipunk guy]

Yegsh. I saw one of these at Fry's once. Slow pixel response and poor color. Again, yegsh.

Someone has to say it...

[no_opinion]

I took a look at the on-line screen shot, but it only looks like 72 DPI on my monitor...

Update speed sucks

[Namarrgon]

We saw two different examples of the IBM T221 (equivalent) at SIGGRAPH last year, driven by FireGLs and by a special Matrox card of some kind, IIRC.

We oohed & aahed at the wonderful clarity of the picture. We marvelled at the sheer detail that 200dpi can give you. We were awed at the expansive range of the viewing angle. We were even impressed by the quantity of zeroes on the price tag. Then we saw the picture change.

It does not update fast. In fact, one system took nearly a third of a second to draw the next picture, and the other took closer to two-thirds of a second. Worse, they updated in quadrants or vertical strips, and the effect was quite jarring. This is not a monitor you could use for animation.

An AC posted elsewhere here that they can get up to 20 Hz updates. If so, that's a huge improvement over what I saw, but it still sucks big time for most usage.

Yes! Now Support it in the OS PLEASE!!!

[RhettLivingston]

It's amazing to me how many people just don't get it on resolution. Resolution and text size are two completely separate issues. MS Windows is just starting too mature in this area, thankfully. It now supports much higher resolutions, but still needs some work in icons, title bars, etc. so that they draw to a certain size instead of a certain number of pixels. Suspect they'll be addressing the rest of the equation in the new 3D desktop environment.

Studies have shown that increasing resolution does far more to rest the eyes than increasing refresh rates. Apparently, our mind does a lot more to fill in those jaggies than we have been recognizing. Or, if smoothing using antialiasing is occurring, it does a lot more to interpret the fuzziness that this causes.

My dream though is still a set of glasses that can opaquely replace anything in my field of view at a resolution at least equal to the receptors in the eye. That means we need to get those 9 million plus pixels plus some down onto a tiny chip. Then we can start exploring transparent user interfaces that integrate into our world.

That 22.2 works out to '19.1 Viewsonic inches'

[mnemotronic]

Yea, I bought a Viewsonic once. Once. For $925, I got a 17 inch monitor that turned out to be a 15.4 inch monitor. Funny how the video industry seems to be overly generous when putting tape measure to tube. Must be a guy thing.

Re:That 22.2 works out to '19.1 Viewsonic inches'

[tempfile]

The visible size of tubes is NEVER the advertised one. 32" TVs only show 30" as well.

Re:That 22.2 works out to '19.1 Viewsonic inches'

[mnemotronic]

• My 3 1/2 inch floppy disk measures 3 1/2 inches.
• My 80 Gbyte drive actually has 85.899 Gbyte.
• My 100 Mbit ethernet runs at 100 Mbit.
• My 256 Mbytes of RAM is actually 268.435 Mbytes.
• My 5 volt power supply puts out 5 vdc
• My 104 key keyboard has 104 keys.
• My 1600x1200 video card can do 1600x1200.
• My 3 button mouse has 3 buttons.
• My quarter-pounder weighs 4 oz.
• The 75 MPH speed limit means 75 MPH.

In every instance, except video monitors, the actual usable value meets or exceeds the advertised value. Why is that? Why is the tube industry so intent on deceptive practices? Doesn't this bother anyone? How can they get away with it? If they were a mutual fund advertising "22.2% returns", there would be a million people lined up behind a class action suit.

Armed with the knowledge that video monitor vendors lie about numbers, I guess we should be powering our 120 VAC monitors with 220 VAC, right?
Hmmm, 220. Very deadly. You go first.

Are you proposing that since someone, somewhere knows that a particular vendor is lying about a particular number, it's Ok for the vendor to lie? Sorry, but I don't buy it. Nor will I ever buy Viewsonic again.

Another thing.

[uberdave]

Another thing that needs to be pointed out: Printers are Mechanical. Paper has to move. Toner and/or ink and/or dye has to be transferred onto the paper, and it needs to dry/cure before being ready. This is the biggest factor in the speed of the device.

Re:Another thing.

[mmol_6453]

I'd agree that it's the biggest factor, except that before printing even starts, the printer has to interperet the data it receives. For non-postscript printers, this isn't a big deal. Postscript printers have to create an image from the code that they're fed.

PostScript is a double-edged sword. On the positive side, it's making printer compatibility problems a thing of the past. On the negative side, it makes printers more expensive and slows printing times.

Using a 200dpi LCD right now

[nhw]

My Sony VAIO PCG-U1 has a 6.4" diagonal LCD, with a 1024x768 resolution - that has got to be about 200dpi or thereabouts.

It is impressively fine. I can't really imagine what a 22" version of this would look like.

Nice picture

[Fuzzums]

but how will I realy see the quality of a 200 dpi monitor when that picture is only a small picture my 72 dpi monitor?

If it wasn't 200 dpi monitor but only 100 dpi I probably couldn't see the difference.

OS X the solution?

[2nd Post!]

Perhaps that's why OS X went with 128x128 icons?

Even on a 200dpi screen, that means an icon would be good for 0.7" on the screen.

Perhaps that's also why OS X is going with wysiwyg screen fonts, with the assumption that higher resolution displays will mean better font fidelity without additional font tweaking?

Re:How high? Depends on the OS

[ianezz]

X Window System: for font scaling, allows you to choose from 75dpi or 100dpi

That's just for bitmapped fonts, since the X server knows the physical dimensions of the screen (and XFree86 seems to be the nicest implementation since it queries the monitor(s) via DDC and automatically computes the horizontal and vertical resolution). Just run xdpyinfo and look for the "dimensions" and "resolution" lines: you may be surprised.

If your display is in the 100dpi range, it makes more sense to scale bitmapped fonts using bitmaps thought for that resolution, instead that the ones though for a resolution of 72dpi (and vice-versa).

Of course, this is senseless for vectorial fonts, or if one specifies font sizes in pixels instead of tenths of a point.

Forget the high resolution

[Trogre]

I'm more interested in their "16x9 aspect ration panel".

The mind boggles.

Not insane

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do two very differnt things with more pixels

1. Increase the character density
2. Improve the quality of the font rendering

While I consider the first to be desirable, the second also has considerable value, and reduces rather than exacerbates the squinting you are concerned about.

OTOH, I agree that the price is insane. I'll wait for it to come down, even though I have lust in my heart for the display.

HDTV can't hack it

[Anonymous Coward]

HDTV doesn't have the resolution.

Re:How high? Depends on the OS

[sexecutioner]

True True,

However, our (getting old now) SGI(IRIX 6.5)workstations have fully scalable vector icons on the desktop.

Sorry, I don't know what the Window Manager is but it's nothing special, it just does the job, and it has scalable icons, which are awesome.

A video card that can drive 2 of these?

[Anonymous Coward]

DVI output.
2 of them
under XFree86
Open source drives so it can work on *BSD or *linux

Not everything in winapi is points based

[yerricde]

The Windows font APIs are all point based

Maybe the fonts are, but the rest of the APIs (for drawing lines, etc.) are generally done in pixels.

Re:Not everything in winapi is points based

[be-fan]

force pixel-sized fonts
>>>>>>>>
You know, I really shouldn't have to quote your own post for you.

See one in Action

[clones]

ZDNET's David Coursey has a sneak peak at it in action.

Go to: http://news.com.com/2014-1089-0.html?tag=vid#

Click on Intel's got wireless in hand

About 2:15 seconds in.

OS X can do it

[adrew]

I haven't tried it, 'cause I don't have 10.2 yet, but it looks like Jaguar can do it...

From Apple's site:

If you have impaired vision, Mac OS X provides a range of options to help you see what's on screen. The fantastic display option "Zoom" uses the Quartz rendering and compositing engine to magnify the contents of your screen. Quartz makes graphics and type smooth, providing a high-quality experience.

Re:OS X can do it

[Jhan]

That statement is deliberately misleading. OS X "Zoom" simply scales the pixels (with interpolation, hence "smooth"). Also, the logical resolution isn't changed. so you have to scroll around using the mouse.

Sigh. All the technology is there, why isn't Apple using it?!

200 dpi PDA screens?

[geoswan]

So viewsonic can make 200 dot per inch 4000x2000 pixel 17 inch displays? How putting some 200 dot per inch displays on our PDAs, which currently have crappy 320x200 displays. With 200 dots per inch we could get PDAs with 800x600 displays. Okay, maybe I would need to get glasses to read them.

Heck, give me on of those and you call me "four eyes".

Re:How high? Depends on the OS

[ljaguar]

I will have to politely disagree about that statement regarding windows.

Windows do allow the adjustments in fonts dpi. When I used windows, I had that cranked up to 150 to 160 dpi, just because my eyes felt better that way. (under the highest resolution of course)

Almost all application abides by it. All menu bars, all toolbars, Opera, MS Office, just about any windows widget.

I don't know what kind of programs (non conforming programs) the poster was using, but the situation has only gotten better from last time I checked.

Oddly, IE was like the only program that didn't like to follow the damn thing.

We're testing one of these

[Elazro]

ViewSonic sent a demo unit out to our group here at the NCSA. To answer a couple of questions I've seen in these posts, it has two dual-DVI inputs, so you can use two dual output PCI cards or one quad output card (The one we have is a GeForce4 Quadro, or something similar). It can be run in Linux, and the speed with OpenGL is just fine. Note that the refresh rate of the monitor is just 16Hz or so, which is fast enough for us (when we're rendering 100GB datasets, 16fps would be a godsend) but may make gamers think twice (or more).

That said, it is beautiful to behold. It has a nice wide viewing angle, and is quite bright. They sent us the monitor with a CPU with windows and a gallery of images installed. The images looked very, very nice - you could barely see the pixels at all! But for some reason even though the images were all 3840x2400, we still had to pan around them. Guess what?

OK - a trip to Monitor Properties and we are seeing it at native resolution for real this time. It was almost like looking at a very clear picture, as a previous poster wondered. We had some images of the moon's surface that were better looking than any I've ever seen before, even on print. I'd post screenshots for you if I could. It was so nice that one of my colleagues suggested to the ViewSonic people that they ship the monitor with a magnifying glass. He wasn't kidding either.

About text, like people keep mentioning, it is awful. In windows, which I find uses quite small text by default anyway, the text on the start bar was illegible without getting up close and peering. In Linux, setting an xterm's text size to Huge makes it legible if you squint. It really is a problem that OS developers need to address because its starting to bug me, even with my 1600x1200 15" laptop screen. Are the physical dimensions of the monitor availible to the OS (using EDIDs or something)?

Well, must go. -matt

Re:We're testing one of these

[Anonymous Coward]

XFree86 will actually query and use the physical dimenstions of the monitor (or you can tell it with the DisplaySize XF86Config option or the -dpi commandline flag).

Trouble is, a _lot_ of X applicaitons don't use the information. Applications that use XRENDER/Xft for rendering fonts will, though. This includes newer versions of XTerm, if you use the antialiased-font options in your .xresources rather than the old font options.
Mozilla, Gimp and Ghostscript will also use the information. KDE/Qt applications might, depending on how new a Qt you are using and your settings (turn on "antialiased fonts", and you're also turning on DPI-awareness...)

Re:We're testing one of these

[tempfile]

This is just because on your usual Windows system, the font resolution is set wrong. Windows uses 96 dpi by default. Therefore, the 200dpi display shows text only half as big (or quarter as big, speaking of area) as it should be. The setting is well hidden in the "User Defined" button of the "Font Size" (the one where you set Large or Small Fonts) setting.

Re:How high? Depends on the OS

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the legacy 75/100dpi stuff is only for bitmapped fonts. XFree86 Vector fonts are rendered based on your X server DPI setting - *provided* you don't go telling the X server "I want this font to be precisely XYZ pixels high" (which is possible).

500 lines from 1000dpi?

[EnglishTim]

Actually, I suspect that most 1000dpi printers cannot draw 500 lines to an inch, due to the fact that a dot from a 1000dpi printer is likely to be a fair bit larger than 1/1000th of an inch wide. What a 1000dpi printer *can* do is position the centre of its dots to within 1/1000th of an inch.

I reckon the smallest that most printers can print dots is about 1/10mm, or about 1/250th of an inch. Therefore a 1000dpi printer is going to be able to do about 125 lines/inch. However I would imagine that the printer is better at doing shallow slopes and curves without aliasing, as it has better positional accuracy.

mm height text?

[EnglishTim]

Maybe I misunderstand you, but how can you possibly have 0.5mm height text on a current monitor - it wouldn't even be possible on a 200dpi device!

On a 200dpi device - pixels/mm = 200dpi / 24.5 = 7.87

7.87 pixels/mm - I would say that you really need 5 pixels to have legible text, plus a gap line between the next line of text. So on a 200dpi device, the best you're going to get is text .75mm high.

To get 0.5mm text, you'd need at least 300pixels/inch, bare minimum. For nice 8x8 character sets you'd need 400pixels/inch.

No it can't

[Markonen]

All the technology isn't there. The Aqua widgets would still be prohibitively expensive to render without ready-made bitmaps.

For icons, OS X uses a scheme where each power-of-two size from 16x16 to 128x128 has a dedicated bitmap. The one closest to the display size is selected and final tweaking is done with interpolation.

This approach works for OS X icons because per the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines they are photorealistic. The blurring caused by the interpolation doesn't affect them; for widgets it would be unacceptable. This is why the icons can be scaled from bitmaps but widgets would have to be drawn as vector art.

My prediction is that instead of the utopia of totally boundless scaling, we will get the Palm resolution hack adapted to desktop systems. Just like in the 160x160 -> 320x320 migration of Palms, you can probably soon drive a 3840x2400 display with a "virtual" 1920x1200 desktop, with twice the letterform resolution, twice the widget resolution, and twice the OpenGL resolution. Bitmaps (on the web, etc) would just be pixel-doubled to appear the right size.

And then, with a special API, a program could tap into the physical resolution of the display and supply it with native pixels.

Re: 3840x2400 is still not good enough...

[Abreu]

but its a good start.

Did you know that to produce a reasonable quality printed page, you need an image with at least 300dpi resolution?

Once LCD monitors reach these resolutions, reading off a monitor will be as easy and relaxed for the eyes as reading from a piece of paper

My screen is over half way there.

[wackybrit]

Hate to point this out, but my Sharp 16" 1280x1024 screen is 112dpi across.. and it only cost $650.

Yes, it can

[Jhan]

I do realize that Aqua widgets aren't vectorized. Even so, scaling them up wouldn't be very noticeable (since we've also upped the resolution by the same amount). Vectorized graphics, including fonts, would look vastly better.

In OSX v 11 I predict there will be a settings panel where you can enter the physical size in inches of the screen, and a second setting where you can enter logical-to-physical zoom factor. Vector content will render at physical resolution, bitmaps (including many gadgets) in logical, then scaled.

After all, Apple have always been rabid proponents of WYSIWYG, and a major part of WYSIWYG is making sure that the on screen documents is the exact size of the printed document. You can't get that without knowing the actual DPI of the screen, can you?

In this utopia, a 12 point font would be 12 typographical points in any resolution, on a screen of any size. And as I said earlier, changing the resolution of the screen would not affect icon/window sizes and positions, only their resolution. Come on Apple, it's easy.

Um, you can usually buy a box from them..

[xtal]

A former roomie of mine had a similar problem - no IT budget here, but when you live in a dorm room, every little square foot counts. So, toss toss toss go the monitor boxes. When the monitor failed, they are picky about the box because most companies will have the monitor destroyed before it gets to the destination in any other enclosure. So, there was a $20 or so fee to get a monitor box (Approved) sent to him. I would imagine a polite request probably would have gotten you a reasonably priced box sent your way.

If that didn't work, a couple more calls probably would have done the trick.

YMMV. I believe the company was viewsonic, but I might be wrong.

Re:Um, you can usually buy a box from them..

[Anonymous Coward]

This is stupid. This is like Boca asking me 4 years ago to return an entire hub because the front plastic labelling the ports and lights was incorrectly printed and diagonal--they could have sent a replacement to me with a then first class stamp and No. 10 envelope. What did they ask? I had to send in the entire bleepin hub. This is after calling them and emailing them twice.

Haven't bought a Boca product since (which, from what I hear, is probably a good thing).

If Viewsonic cared, they would have sent him a replacement monitor, and he could have shipped back the bad one in the replacement's box. Instead, they decided to be unreasonable and have him jump through hoops on something easily taken care of.

220 ppi

[otuz]

ahem.. i do sometimes run my 19" at 2048x1584, that's 220ppi? (Yes, it does flicker a bit at 63Hz, but fonts are still readable imho.)

Re:How high? Depends on the OS

[Dahan]

The setting itself works fine for me (xdpyinfo shows the right resolution); it's just that nothing seems to actually use that number.