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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!
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&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
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.
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."
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
This with the 320 GB drives means more better looking pr0n than ever!
Karma whorin' since 1999
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?
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...
The article makes it sound as if the IBM is still 20k, this is not the case.
r od uctDisplay?cntrfnbr=1&prmenbr=1&prnbr=9503DG3&cntr y=840&lang=en_US
http://commerce.www.ibm.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce/P
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
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?
Instead buy a 50" HDTV and use it for a monitor.
Problem solved.
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
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.
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.
> 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
Lots of petrified grits
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'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.
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.
Anyone have a url for a video card that can drive this? We got some end of the year money....
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
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.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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!
"And like that
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?
Unfortunately the misconception needs to be broken that higher resolution = smaller fonts. If OSs handled it properly, higher resolution would = nicer looking fonts.
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.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
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.)
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
The parent's point is well taken - at 200 dpi, the monitor is just at fax quality. (Albeit helped by the additional color information.)
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 :)
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.
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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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
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.
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.
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.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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.
Privacy is terrorism.
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?
GPL Deconstructed
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.
I find it hard to believe a cigarette smokers survey qualifies as a legally binding document.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Heck, give me on of those and you call me "four eyes".
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
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
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
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.
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!
.75mm high.
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
To get 0.5mm text, you'd need at least 300pixels/inch, bare minimum. For nice 8x8 character sets you'd need 400pixels/inch.
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.
Marko Karppinen
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
No sig for the moment.
Hate to point this out, but my Sharp 16" 1280x1024 screen is 112dpi across.. and it only cost $650.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Sorry that was a 4831
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
force pixel-sized fonts
>>>>>>>>
You know, I really shouldn't have to quote your own post for you.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
What's this Submit thingy do?
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.
..don't panic
So it is in fact you who are wrong.