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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!
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
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.
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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Then again, I only have a 15" monitor that I run at 1024x768, maybe I'm just outdated.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
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)
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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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately the misconception needs to be broken that higher resolution = smaller fonts. If OSs handled it properly, higher resolution would = nicer looking fonts.
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.
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.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!