Slashdot Mirror
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
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.
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.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.