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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!
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Then again, I only have a 15" monitor that I run at 1024x768, maybe I'm just outdated.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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Unfortunately the misconception needs to be broken that higher resolution = smaller fonts. If OSs handled it properly, higher resolution would = nicer looking fonts.
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.
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
They get rewritten for the PHB with the fancy new monitor.
This is not a political statement. This is not legal advice. It's a frick'n Slasdot post. However: I'm Running For
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Increase the character density
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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.