ViewSonic VP2290b Super High-Res Monitor

Svenne writes "Ok, TrustedReviews have put up a review of the amazing ViewSonic VP2290b TFT display which has a massive 9.2Mpixel resolution. Check it out here. I'll take two ;-)" Pricewatch lists vendors selling this monitor starting at a bit more than $6,000 -- video card is extra.

Comments

Toys for the rich

[ackthpt]

At $6000, what a deal. Just hook that baby up with your Blue Light Special and you'll rule your block with an iron fist.

Now, if there were only something worth watching on TV... Oh, the TdF is coming up, but usually the resolution is on par with VHS, unless they do something vastly different this year.

I'm still happy with my 1.3 megapixel 500:1 contrast 17" LCD. Anything wider and I get some weird feeling my head needs to be stretched. Has anyone else noticed something like that? There was something about a big convex display that didn't cause that sort of sensation.

And that 3840x2400 resolution should give your graphics card a workout trying to render your FPS games at biggie frame rates. At what pixel density do you fail to notice a difference in image quality, anyway? I turned on one pixel on my monitor and can hardly even see it!

Re:Toys for the rich

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess it will be 2 years till I see one of these on my desktop.

time is a great friend for the not so rich.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Noose For A Neck]

You find anything wider than a 17" display too wide to comfortably view all at once?

Perhaps you should view your monitor for farther away than 3 inches.

Re:Toys for the rich

[ackthpt]

I guess it will be 2 years till I see one of these on my desktop.

But if you worked at some of the places I had, you'd see it on an executive's desktop with amazing speed. It does confound me that budgets can be razor thin, but the person least needy of this sort of thing is the first to "evaluate it." I did graphic and forms designwork on an el-cheapo Dell CRT.

Re:Toys for the rich

[MindStalker]

Hmm, blue-ray.. in july.. hmm yummy... hmm don't know why HD-DVD is even being released, whats the point.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Solar Limb]

Interesting you say this. I have an HP L2335 23" LCD, and I find it big to the point where I had to rearrange some of my home office furniture so as to create more space between the keyboard the the LCD. I can only imagine what Apple's 30" and this monster Viewsonic must be like.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Mysticalfruit]

It always works this way...

Those who need never get what those without need recieve...

We've got sysadmins around here working on 450mhz p2 systems while there are VPs on their 3rd new laptop this year...

Re:Toys for the rich

[X_Caffeine]

FPS's? TV? dude: this display isn't made for you.

Read the Viewsonic product page: ideal for satellite imaging and digital content creation. Says nothing about a playable framerate (with a friggin Matrox Parhelia!) or watching bootleg anime DiVX movies.

This is a problem common to Slashdot readers -- "if it doesn't work for me, it's obviously not good for anybody."

P.S. after a year on a 23" CRT I can't imagine downgrading to anything less; a friend of mine uses two of them!

Re:Toys for the rich

[LurkerXXX]

You aren't really going to want to run your FPS games on this monitor. Even if you had some insane video card that could pump out a decent # of frames per second at that resolution.

Look at the response time in the specs: 50 ms. EEK. usually 'slow' LCD's have ~30 ms response times. Good gaming ones have 16 ms times. Expect to see a bit of ghosting on that monitor when playing FP Shooters.

Re:Toys for the rich

[pottymouth]

"Anything wider and I get some weird feeling my head needs to be stretched."

No way! I use two 21" CRT's pushed together to get a nice wide screen and I feel fine. Of course my wife has always claimed I've got a big head....

Re:Toys for the rich

[TyrranzzX]

Nvidia's coming out with a tech that allows you to setup multiple graphics cards that paralell process your games; you can have 2 or 3 cards in a machine with PCI-X and they'll all work together to render a picture together. I can definatly see each card working on 1/3 of the screen or something.

I'd bet graphical artists would love that kind of a moniter though. With something like that, you'd almost never see the pixels.

Re:Toys for the rich

[ackthpt]

FPS's? TV? dude: this display isn't made for you.

That never stops anyone from using any technology or the latest and greatest for other than its intended use.

Read the Viewsonic product page: ideal for satellite imaging and digital content creation. Says nothing about a playable framerate (with a friggin Matrox Parhelia!) or watching bootleg anime DiVX movies.

And a few of them will find their way into those jobs. The rest will be bought by or for people who don't absolutely need them but absolutely can't resist.

This is a problem common to Slashdot readers -- "if it doesn't work for me, it's obviously not good for anybody."

No, it's an insight into the behaviour of people in general. Who actually buys "good enough"? If you do, you find in about 3 years time that it isn't. It was only good enough for then, but eveything else moved on.

P.S. after a year on a 23" CRT I can't imagine downgrading to anything less; a friend of mine uses two of them!

As if to underscore my point... who really needs a 23". Once they've been to to big city it's so hard to keep them down on the farm.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Carnildo]

Look at the response time in the specs: 50 ms. EEK. usually 'slow' LCD's have ~30 ms response times. Good gaming ones have 16 ms times. Expect to see a bit of ghosting on that monitor when playing FP Shooters.

Is that 50 ms full-cycle (off-on-off) time or rise time? Most consumer-oriented models list rise time, since it gives smaller numbers. Most professional models list full-cycle time or both rise and fall times.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Noose For A Neck]

Oh, I agree, I have a 19" monitor and it is just about perfect for me, size-wise. However, there's a hell of a difference between a 23"(!!) LCD and a 17" one. Frankly, I'm jealous :-)

Re:Toys for the rich

[chefmonkey]

At what pixel density do you fail to notice a difference in image quality, anyway?

The number that I've found is that the resolution of a human eye (for an individual with 20/20 vision) is about 60 pixels per degree, or about 140 pixels per inch for a screen 2 feet away from your eyes. (Reference: buried in this article. So, thinking about your 17" monitor: 17" diagonal with a 4:3 width-to-height ratio... oh, that's a 3-4-5 triangle. Never noticed that before. Anyway, that's 13.6 inches across, or 94 pixels per inch. So, you'd need to either sit further away than 2 feet for the monitor to exceed the average human eye resolution. On the other hand, if you could run it at 1904x1428 (not exactly a standard resolution, but still...) then you'd be there.

Working out the numbers for the megamonitor is left as an excercise for the reader, once the site that lists specs recovers from the slashdotting.

Re:Toys for the rich

[doctor1]

"Of course my wife has always claimed I've got a big head...." That's not what she told me... ;^)

Re:Toys for the rich

[LurkerXXX]

Well, it doesn't seem to specify, but it is listed on the same chart as all the other Viewsonic monitors...

See their PDF.

Re:Toys for the rich

[ryanvm]

After a year on a 23" CRT I can't imagine downgrading to anything less; a friend of mine uses two of them!

Guys, I wouldn't recommend doing that. Look what it's done to
his friend.

Re:Toys for the rich

[PhoenixFlare]

No, it's an insight into the behaviour of people in general. Who actually buys "good enough"? If you do, you find in about 3 years time that it isn't. It was only good enough for then, but eveything else moved on.

Maybe you've just been lucky or are choosing to ignore it, but what he mentioned does happen quite often, actually.

One good example would be the constant disbelief by many Linux zealots here that there's any reason to use Windows, forgetting the whole gaming aspect.

Or maybe when a new version of KDE or something comes out, and the whining begins about how there's too much eye candy, everyone should just stick to bare-bones or the command line, etc.

Heck, just read the comments on the recent story about standardized plugins - more than a few "I don't want any animation or rich content, therefore this project is a waste of time" comments from more people that can't understand why anyone would want more than a simple and/or bare-bones experience.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Toys for the rich? I thought most slashdotters were smart enough to know that it rarely remains that way.

I remember a time when people said that about the original Pentium. Nobody ever needed that amount of power. /sarcasm

And that 3840x2400 resolution should give your graphics card a workout trying to render your FPS games at biggie frame rates.

Fine. These are supposed to be for high end professional use, not gaming. Gaming will be eventually.

I don't have the money, but I want to see a 300dpi display. That's what I'd consider near-laser-quality such that the detail you see on the screen is closer to what you'd see on a printout. The standard 90-100 dpi isn't enough. I have a 125 dpi laptop display and I love it.

I turned on one pixel on my monitor and can hardly even see it!

I'd rather have the dpi go sub-perceptive. I can see individual pixels just fine.

Most fonts are rendered one pixel wide on the standard displays. Can you not read them? Of course, I hope the rendering is properly scaled, I like high dpi for the clean lines.

Re:Toys for the rich

[urbaneassault]

from the article, the 50ms is listed as full-cycle time.

Re:Toys for the rich

[xmas2003]

I run dual 19" LCD's (similar to your dual 21" CRT's) and while this isn't too shabby, it's kinda annoying when one is working on stuff and it spans more than one screen (even though my bezel's are less than 1"). For instance, here's a 3,108x300 pixel panorama from Longs Peak Colorado (the original is 17,797x1,1718 pixels) and being able to streatch thigns across the screen is pretty darn nice at times. Good luck with your wife! ;-)

Re:Toys for the rich

[General Alcazar]

As a graphic designer, perhaps because of necessity, I find that I am sensitive to resolutions of about 225 - 300 pixels / sq. inch at typical reading distance. Actually, at higher resolutions, I can still sense the difference. It's hard to describe, but when I look at 600 or 1200 dpi images, even though I definitely cannot pick out the individual dots, I can still see a difference.

I have always dreamed of a monitor that could render at 300 dpi - the most typical print resolution. Have you ever noticed that there is a dramatic difference in reading a book, and reading on screen? Of course, we all have. I believe that the higher resolution of the type on paper makes for a much easier and enjoyable experience. I think this is why I sometimes print out longer documents in order to read them. It is subtle, but type on paper is much easier on the eyes. It was interesting to note that the author of the article complained that type on screen rendered too small. If monitors like this become popular, I imagine we will see a revolution in onscreen typography.

One of the funniest things about the article was the screenshot showing the display rendering an image - as if you could duplicate the resolution on other monitors!

Re:Toys for the rich

[severoon]

At what pixel density do you fail to notice a difference in image quality, anyway?

Ah, a subject that to answer properly requires a foray into many frontiers: physical, biological, psychological, mathematical...a true opportunity for /.ing geek-speaking fun.

You're right, though, at some point the human eye can no longer discern a "real" difference between two screen resolutions, though it's apparently higher than we thought before digital cameras came along. Now that the professional photographers have come along with their interpretation of digital images versus 35mm film, I've read that digital images have to be much better, resolution-wise, than 35mm film to equate to the same level of image quality.

What's that, you say, that doesn't make sense! Well, as it happens, 35mm film is coated with photosensitive crystals that, when exposed to light, chemically react with the film substrate and expose it. These crystals are randomly oriented and have no discernable pattern. Images falling on the backplane of a digital camera, on the other hand, are captured onto a predefined grid pattern, usually a repeating rectangular grid, sometimes a hexagonal one, but nevertheless a repeating grid.

The human eye is very adept at picking up repeating regular patterns, even very tiny ones. The individual dots themselves may be too small to see, but lines in the image nearly align with some direction in the grid, but not quite, lines are formed that suddenly jump from one grid row to another and we notice it (much like if we took a length of the Great Wall equal to its thickness, we could not of course see this block from space, yet we can see the wall as a whole). With 35mm film no such jump occurs from one grid row to the next because no such grid exists. Similarly, on a monitor, consider just how slightly off convergence must be to cause you great annoyance and eye strain.

(I recently came across a technique in Photoshop called "loosening edges"...a way of adding a tiny bit of random noise only to all the edges in an image that are very nearly horizontally or vertically aligned that actually improves the image.)

Besides just issues concerning pure resolution, there are many other issues that affect image quality, things viewers can be both conscious of and not. At some point increases in resolution go unnoticed for the most part, but images on a higher resolution matrix will seem more dimensional, somehow more real and less confined to a plane. This is a psychological effect that has to do with the ability of the monitor to exactly reproduce blur. Yup, if the parts of the image that aren't in focus aren't exactly blurred the same way your eye would perceive things, your mind picks up on the differences between the distance ratios and expected blurs, and some part of your brain becomes remotely aware that something's off.

We are, of course, in the realm of fine structure in this whole discussion. 15 years ago, talking about the difference between EGA and VGA (any of you kids out there remember EGA?) was like comparing soda to wine. Now we're comparing a fine Montrachet to a more inexpensive but high-quality Napa Merlot; as we spend more time drinking high-falutin' wine, the difference becomes important enough to pay big bucks for.

sev

Re:Toys for the rich

[chefmonkey]

Of course, you'll always have individuals with better than 20/20 vision; I have 20/10 in my right eye (last it was tested, anyway), which means I'd have to have 4 times as many pixels as the numbers I cite above. Given what you say, I'm going to guess that you probably have somewhat above-average vision as well.

On a separate note, I've given a lot of thought to the paper-versus-monitor thing, and I'm not convinced that it's all due to resolution. I think a large part of what makes the paper experience so much more pleasant for me is that the paper isn't glowing at me.

Play around with this a bit. Take a few pages from a book and photocopy them onto transparancies. Now, project them onto a wall -- not necessarily large, just onto a wall somewhere. My experience is that doing so is much more similar to reading a screen than reading paper.

On the other hand, our videocamera has an option to turn off the LCD backlight and use ambient light to view the image. I've found that doing so makes it much easier on the eyes over long periods of time.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I would guess at 22" this one would be not much different than yours. Doesn't seem all that hard to imagine.

Re:Toys for the rich

[shawn(at)fsu]

No, it's an insight into the behaviour of people in general. Who actually buys "good enough"? If you do, you find in about 3 years time that it isn't. It was only good enough for then, but eveything else moved on.

It's also likely that if your always trying to be on the cutitng edge then you ned up buying something that doesn't catch on or become the defacto standard in which case you are equally screwed.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Anonymous Coward]

Got ya beat, I have a Celeron 400 with 256MB Ram, 6GB hard drive. The boss has a 2.4GHz Laptop with DVD-R drive 40GB hard drive and 1GB ram. What does he do? Check email... once a week.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Alioth]

As a software developer, I *highly* value my 1600x1200 21in display. A 17in display wouldn't be the same, especially at 1280x1024. I use lots of desktop real-estate.

It's old school though. It's a Sun 21in Trinitron display. I've not yet found an LCD that I can afford that beats (or comes close to) this excellent CRT. I bought it used, and I've had it for 3 years. I'll probably keep it till it dies. The drawback is its large depth to house all that glass.

Re:Toys for the rich

[skiflyer]

Think medical imaging. Doctors who can read X-Rays with no film... or pictures of the back of your eye which are as good as what they view in a scope.

$6000 can be made up pretty quickly by eliminating some of this necessity. Not to mention being able to send it half way around the world for review near instantly.

Also there's the obvious issue of professional imagery, or surveillance.

Plenty of applications for a device like this, desktop monitor is just not currently one of them.

Re:Toys for the rich

[ron_ivi]

Perhaps you guys need to justify your needs better. "All" you have to do is convince the CFO that he'll get a better ROI buying you the big-screen flat-panel monitor than the sales-VP.

Hint: Tell me the ROI of:

A sales guy using a 3GHz laptop with a nice monitor making your software look 3X faster/more scalable than it really is, vs.

An IT guy with a 3GHz laptop making all the software he chooses too bloated to run on most of the other employee's systems.

I know which purchase request I'd approve.

Re:Toys for the rich

[dasmegabyte]

Sounds like your company sucks balls. Here, the developers get new top of the line machines every two years, at which point their old machines trickle down to the QA team, whose machines trickle down to the frontline support staff.

Or maybe you just don't understand what the "needs" are. As a sysadmin, you don't really have to do any heavy duty processing on your machine, nor is your work going to get completed any faster if you do so. Now, at our company the sales staff get new machines at the same time as the developers, because we want them to put the best face forward at conferences and such. Also, sometimes we, uh, don't optimize a product before they show it off, and they're running both the client and server software on the same machine. If your VPs do a lot of selling, they may get new laptops every few months to show how cutting edge you are. Call it a waste if you must, but their laptops are trickling down fairly quickly to the general populous, and they're serving a somewhat legitimate use before hand.

Re:Toys for the rich

[EvanED]

That never stops anyone from using any technology or the latest and greatest for other than its intended use.

I'll agree in general, but not in the specific case of gaming on this monitor. The review specifically stated that due to the very low refresh rate (41 Hz or 25 Hz depending on the mode) games at least would suck. Movies might be okay with 41... depends on how the 30/24 fps line up with the refreshes, but my expectation would be that they would suck too.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Man Eating Duck]

From the article:

...in the VP2290b?s case this comes in at 50ms (25ms rise, 25ms fall).

Re:Toys for the rich

[dasmegabyte]

What I think is appalling is the assumption that because a person does not personally need a thing, that it is unneccessary and worthy of contempt. Come on, you guys -- you don't REALLY think that the whole of the economy is built around your personal needs, do you?

I mean, as a man, I personally have no use for tampons, but I can understand where some people might find them rather helpful.

Incidentally, an 8 megapixel display would be very useful for those of us who like digital photography. Right now, I have a choice of seeing my shots at actual resolution, or being able to see the whole shot. A monitor like this would make it much easier, and much faster, to detect things like distracting moire effects, JPEG noise and spot blemishes.

Re:Toys for the rich

[caspper69]

Actually, Nvidia and Alienware are both working on solutions that accomplish this goal. Nvidia's solution is their own (called SLI, probably because they gobbled up 3d Labs -- remember the Voodoo2 boards you could link up?), while Alienware's is (video card) manufacturer independent and based on technology from Metabyte a/k/a Wicked3D. The performance is promising (with gains from 70-90% on various benchmarks).

You can read about Nvidia's solution here, and Alienware's here. The problem is that two x16 PCIe slots are required (PCI-Express, not to be confused with PCI-X which is a different beast altogether). Right now, the only manufacturer shipping PCIe enabled boards is Intel, and even they didn't last too long (see The Grantsdale Recall), but none as of yet have two x16 PCIe slots, other than the "x2" motherboards which are custom OEM to Alienware. I'm sure that in the near future the major tier one motherboard manufacturers like Asus and Gigabyte will provide these solutions as well, but it remains to be seen what kind of price premium can be expected (other than the cost of a second video card!).

Re:Toys for the rich

[Man Eating Duck]

Actually, at higher resolutions, I can still sense the difference.

Working in print production, I know what you mean. At lower than 600 dpi at least, I can instantly see it (600 dpi being a normal resolution for production prints).

Still, I don't know if resolution makes up for the whole difference between screen and print. Even good LCD's have a certain 'tireing' quality. I'd prefer reading a very long printout at 96 dpi than the same document on screen (in fact, I tried such a printout right now :). It would've annoyed me, of course, but been more easy on the eyes.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, that was nice until you spelled POPULACE as populous. Makes me cringe every time.

Re:Toys for the rich

[dasmegabyte]

Makes me cringe because I know the difference. I'm very, very sorry. I normally proof read slashdot posts (strange occurance, heh?)

Re:Toys for the rich

[caswelmo]

I see it more as a problem with the way we've been trained to use computer monitors. Up until now we must look at this small screen area & fit everything we're working on into that area. If we want to see something else, we must bring it to the front.

But in the real world I think we tend to work in a larger space. I tend to spread stuff out over my desk to get the big picture.

It might just take some new "training" to get used to a bigger/wider monitor. Maybe move your chair away a little bit & allow your head to swivel somewhat as you view your workspace, instead of just moving the eyesockets.

As I write this, I'm starting to picture the big "Minority Report" screens where he's all over the place. Man, I would love to have a wrap around screen for my desktop so that I could immerse myself in what I'm working on.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Hatta]

What sysadmin needs anything exept ssh and vi anyway? Powerpoint takes a lot more horsepower.

Re:Toys for the rich

[acehunter]

60 pixels per degree corresponds to the center of your vision. The visual elements in the eye consist of rods and cones. The rods take care of low-light vision and only see in black & white. They have a high concentration in a ring around the center of the retina, and a low concentration in the center. The cones process higher light levels and register colors. They are concentrated in the center of the eye, which is why you notice detail well when looking directly at something and poorly when the object is in your peripheral vision.

If there was a way to change pixel density on the display so that the density was highest in the area where someone was looking, and lower in the peripheral zone, then image quality could be maintained with a much lower number of pixels and much lesser video bandwidth.

Re:Toys for the rich

[jo42]

One place I worked the CEO had a 21" TFT (when they where still rather new) running at 800x600 because he was nearly blind. Still wonder how he drove that BMW around without killing himself or someone else...

Re:Toys for the rich

[horza]

Read the Viewsonic product page: ideal for satellite imaging and digital content creation. Says nothing about a playable framerate (with a friggin Matrox Parhelia!) or watching bootleg anime DiVX movies.

What are you on? Everyone knows that blurb is just something you use to sell it to your boss. Your boss knows it's just so you're ready for Doom3 and Half Life 2. We're not that naive...

Phillip.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Wakko Warner]

This thing is really for high-end CAD and photo/video work. IBM showed us their version of it back in December or January, same LCD panel with a different chassis and badge. If you want something cheaper, look around and you can find Dell 20" flat panels for 700-800 each. I got two with poker winnings for just over $1400 shipped.

- A.P.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Tony-A]

The old obsolete Techtronics 4014 had a display resolution of 4096 by 3072.
Not only was the display writable, it was also readable.

Progress?

Re:Toys for the rich

[geigertube]

I'd give my left nut for one of those monitors.

When I paint in photoshop, the one thing I really miss about natural media is being able to always see the whole picture at once. Its easy to get caught up in one small part of the painting when you are painting digitally, and have the piece fall out of balance. Having to zoom in and out all the time is kind of a pain in the ass. But, man, this thing would be ideal. Make it touch sensitive and it would be the ideal digital canvas.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Anonymous Coward]

ideal for satellite imaging

Um.. roger that pig pen tango five.. we've got a target locked on the Viewsonic monitoring bird three, but he's moving out of our window. Suggest mind control ray.

3.. 2.. 1..

Dammit! Never mind.. image enhancement shows a tinfoil hat.. he's impervious.. moving to next target.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a problem common to Slashdot readers -- "if it doesn't work for me, it's obviously not good for anybody."

I think we see where this is going...

wait for it!

steady...

steady!

In Soviet Russia, Viewsonics monitor YOU!

Re:Toys for the rich

[Kris_J]

P.S. after a year on a 23" CRT I can't imagine downgrading to anything less; a friend of mine uses two of them!

I've got 5.77 million pixels working for me at the office and I'd have to say that when something needs to be done fast they're mighty useful.

Re:Toys for the rich

[Anonymous Coward]

No, 41 Hz refresh rate isn't the problem, the 50 ms pixel response time is the problem. A refresh rate above about 30 Hz is faster than you can see. The only reason for a CRT to go faster is to reduce visible flicker, but it isn't necessary with an LCD. There's also no reason to have a higher frame rate than 30 fps in a video game, you simply won't see it (though with a refresh of less than 60 Hz, you want the frames rate to be synchronized with the refresh rate to avoid tearing).

Re:Toys for the rich

[Anonymous Coward]

20/20 or 20/10 or 20/400 is usually referring to how well your eye can focus, not your ultimate visual acuity. 20/20 is simply average. Loss of acuity can lead to lower results on a vision test, but the difference with that is it isn't correctable. It is very unlikely that you have 4 times the number of rods and cones in your eye than normal, which would be the limiting factor in how fine a resolution you can see from a certain distance, even if the optical part was perfect.

Product link

[Karamchand]

ViewSonic's Product Info about the VP2290b.

Re:Product link

[Anonymous Coward]

This thing is the same as IBM's T221.

http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/P roductDisplay?catalogId=-840&langId=-1&partNumber= 9503DG5&storeId=1

Re:Product link

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent link repaired.

Re:Product link

[Jim_Maryland]

The device is rather expensive ($8K) and you'll need high-end graphics cards, but they produce nice results. A company produced a solution that used 4 Dell PCs, 3 of these panels (driven by 3 of the Dells), and one plasma screen (driven by 1 Dell and it combined the results of the 3 panels to show an overview) to create a cockpit for fly through scenes. Quite an impressive demo, but very expensive.

We also used a couple of these as the second head to a dual head workstation setup for geospatial demonstrations. Using it as a second display can be tricky, moving windows from screen to screen. Applications also seemed to perform slowly on that screen (video card wasn't quite ready for this level, but was the one recommended by IBM staff).

Personally, until these come down in price and graphics cards adequately handle all applications, I'll go for several panel displays (see this interesting one from Panoramtech for a "cockpit" like display).

Tell me

[harley_frog]

Why should I shell out money for a monitor that costs more than my Harley?

Re:Tell me

[Anonymous Coward]

If you paid less than that for your Harley, maybe you aren't part of the intended audience.

Re:Tell me

[gl4ss]

because it's super high res?

obviously the product isn't for you though.
or me.

it's still something to drool at.

Re:Tell me

[garcia]

Because LCD panels don't kill you when your machine crashes.

Re:Tell me

[wookyhoo]

Well, maybe *you* shouldn't. Nobody is making you.

But, maybe those who have cash to spare, want (or need) that kind of displat, and aren't interested in having a Harley should.

Tell me, why did you even make that post in the first place? :)

Re:Tell me

[ackthpt]

Why should I shell out money for a monitor that costs more than my Harley?

You bought a cheap Harley.

At least there's an option for you to be buried with it.

Maybe you could have one of these great monitors put in place of your headstone, showing you smiling away in your heyday as you cruised the american road. I wonder when we'll get like that.

Re:Tell me

[Anonymous Coward]

Some things in life can't be explained. Either you understand them or you don't.

Re:Tell me

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh?

Re:Tell me

[ZeroGuard]

Mmmmm :drool: I'll take two.

Re:Tell me

[Anonymous Coward]

now /THAT/ is funny! Mod Grandparent down and mod parent up!!!

Re:Tell me

[Anonymous Coward]

:: snotty voice :: 'cause your HARLEY can't get you girls like this monitor can :: snotty voice ::

Oh...wait...
D'oh!

Re:Tell me

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly.

Re:Tell me

[tgibbs]

Why should I shell out money for a monitor that costs more than my Harley?

Probably only if the work you do on it pays for the Harley.

Re:Tell me

[Sique]

YOU don't need to buy this monitor. But for instance computer tomographic pictures come in a resolution of 3840x2400 pixel. So if you wonder why this display has exactly this specification: Now you know. IBM's T220/T221 with the same resolution and the same panel was marketed to exactly this target group: medical picture analysis.

Re:Tell me

[Anonymous Coward]

you've apparently never used a microsoft product. the cranial injuries induced by smacking one's head against the monitor after losing two weeks of work to a win crash can induce death.

Re:Tell me

[Anonymous Coward]

Vague, very vague memories of times long gone.

Seriously..

[Anonymous Coward]

who needs 9.2Mpixel resolution for porn?

Me!

Re:Seriously..

[Anonymous Coward]

who needs 9.2Mpixel resolution for porn?

You know, you could find a REAL woman and see her in the beautiful resolution of 10^1000980 atoms per square inch. You even get to touch something that feels softer than plastic!

Re:Seriously..

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a point. Buying a real woman would be cheaper as well!

Re:Seriously..

[beerman2k]

who needs 9.2Mpixel resolution for porn?

Who doesn't?

Re:Seriously..

[bairy]

Well there's the obligatory porn gag.

The only problem with 9mp porn, or any other picture, is in .bmp format, EACH of the pics would be 35mb, or about 9 mins over 512k broadband. Even in .jpg they would take a while. Fine for one pic, but if you're picking up a collection, you'd have to wait aaages.

On another point, with so many pixels crammed into a relatively small monitor, even stretching/zooming in on a small picture (say 1024 res) would look fine.

Re:Seriously..

[Jeremy Erwin]

You could watch four HDTV streams at once, satiating your porn needs in one-fourth the time.

for that price

[bunburyist]

For that price you can get several decent quality LCD TFT monitors and a Dual-view Nvidia card going, which is pretty nice. Movies on one screen and work on the other ;). Linux support is sketchy for dual-view in my experience, but it'd probably work if you follow the instructions! either way, this is likely only cool if you're doing some sort of digital photo/movie editing.

Re:for that price

[npistentis]

or as the website indicates, "satellite imaging."

Re:for that price

[Anonymous Coward]

Actualy having 2 monitors is *extremely* usefull. Especialy if u r coding, eg step through the code on one screen and watch the output and the variable values on the other. Or have the API documentation on one screen while coding on the main screen. Its also usefull doring every day kind of things, eg i have my mp3player and my IM on the second screen while i surf the net.

Re:for that price

[stratjakt]

This is for pro graphic artists, and serious photo/movie editing.

You want to be able to manipulate that raw image from a 5 megapixel camera, have it all onscreen at once (no scaling).. Have it look closer to the printed output, etc..

Sheesh, I wonder how many more "all i do is write perl scripts, jerk off, and read slashdot, why should I buy this" posts are going to be made.

Re:for that price

[Anonymous Coward]

you must be new here

Re:for that price

[j-turkey]

All i do is write perl scripts, jerk off, and read slashdot, why should I buy this? ;P

Re:for that price

[j-turkey]

All i do is write perl scripts, jerk off, and read slashdot, why should I buy this?

I just thought of a good reason to buy it! First, I can pack more porn onto a single screen. Not only that, but I'd have enough screen real estate to write perl scripts, read slashdot, and jerk off to internet porn at the same time!

Tecnology roolz!

Re:for that price

[bhtooefr]

Anyone want to tell me whether this is possible? I'm considering running Opera and games in monitor 1, and Kopete and my Fluxbox slit in monitor 2. The trick is that the card for the second monitor will be an old ISA card, and it'll run at both a different resolution (640x480 vs. 1280x1024) and color depth (4-bit vs. 16-bit) from the main monitor.

Re:for that price

[tbone1]

Sheesh, I wonder how many more "all i do is write perl scripts, jerk off, and read slashdot, why should I buy this" posts are going to be made.

Six and a half.

Re:for that price

[blixel]

Linux support is sketchy for dual-view in my experience

No doubt. I had a Matrox Parhelia triple-head card with 3 LCD monitors. (Screenshot/Photo Screenshot/Photo) [MS Flight Simulator 2004 under WinXP Pro]

Linux support for the Matrox card was deplorable, so I sold it and bought an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. The ATI card's dual monitor capabilities were very quirky. Too much B.S. to explain. Plus the UT2K4-demo ran like crap under Linux (low framre rate) and looked like ass compared to Windows.

I was told NVidia was the best option for Linux. Their drivers were allegedly way better than ATI's. Sounded good to me.

So I got rid of the ATI card. (It burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.) Actually I didn't get rid of it, I just put it in my wife's computer. Let me tell you, Frozen Bubble and LBreakout really stress out that card. What a great value. (I'm kidding, in case you couldn't tell.)

So then I bought an NVidia 5700 Ultra GeForceFX for my machine. The dual-head video works (basically), but X has never been slower. I can't believe how DOG slow X is. I dual booted over to WinXP a couple of weeks ago - the first time I had seen Windows in many, many months. I was sickened at how increadibly fast it is. Almost enough to make me give up on my Linux fantasy.

Fortunately for me, I'm so blinded by my hatred for Microsoft that I'll continue to suffer under Linux. Things will get better some day. Right? [sigh...]

Re:for that price

[Anonymous Coward]

2 monitors? Hell, I've got 3 on my system and don't see why anyone would have problems setting up such a thing. All you need is a *good* PCI 3d accelerator to use as the 3rd screen or get a AGP card with more than 2 heads (I think you can get 4 on a card). Also, I've acquired over 100 monitors at an auction recently, so does anyone have an idea for a way to hook up 64 screens in an 8x8 matrix running at 1024x768 per 15" screen?

That's a 50 Megapixel display.
If only there was a way to drive it :-)
(and seamlessly mount the CRTs)

Re:for that price

[los furtive]

My sentimonies exactly!

Re:for that price

[sindarin2001]

It's definatelly possible. I run an NVidia GeForce 2 MX 400 on one display at 1600x1200 and a Matrox Millenium at 1024x768 (granted both at the same color level). There are a couple of different options for setup. The first is to use Xinerama...basically treats the whole setup as one big display (problem is that apps usually only will visually run as fast as the slowest card...so the ISA prolly would slow it down a whole lot). The other option is to treat each as a separate display. Email me at chuvaere -AT- montana -D0T- EDU and I'll send you my XF86Config file (have an example of both). One thing that may be a source of problems is that older PCI (and presumably ISA) need to be booted off of in order to be used (this can be set in your BIOS setup).

Re:for that price

[Dogtanian]

All i do is write perl scripts, jerk off, and read slashdot, why should I buy this? ;P

I like the moderation for this one:-

Score:3, Informative

Mmmm. Technically, I guess it must be...

Re:for that price

[JDevers]

I have a 9800 pro and definitely don't see the slowness you are experiencing. Are you sure you had everything setup correctly? My desktop is roughly the same speed in X as in XP...

Frozen Bubble is written in Perl, I doubt your graphics board was the slow part ;)

Re:for that price

[tekunokurato]

Hm... good point... I was considering going dual, but hadn't thought about the spec ramifications of doing so. Since I'm kind of a linux n00b anyway, any suggestions on where I could find more info on what I'd need to do?

Re:for that price

[slimak]

Agreed. I have a Go5200 in my laptop setup for dual display and it feels about the same as windows -- even a little better with SMP. The biggest pains are having the two displays with different resolutions, and not being able to switch between single/dual displays without restarting X.

Re:for that price

[Koatdus]

So then I bought an NVidia 5700 Ultra GeForceFX for my machine. The dual-head video works (basically), but X has never been slower. I can't believe how DOG slow X is. I dual booted over to WinXP a couple of weeks ago - the first time I had seen Windows in many, many months. I was sickened at how increadibly fast it is. Almost enough to make me give up on my Linux fantasy.

I had the same problem with my NVIDIA card when I finally got tired of RH9 and installed FC1. I upgraded to the latest NVIDIA driver at the same time. (I think that it was NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5328-pkg1.run).

SLOW, SLOW, SLOW...REALLY SLOW! Slow enough that BZFLAG was not even playable! Slow enough that full screen video looked like Real Player used to look when you had a 28.8 modem!

Much wailing and nashing of teeth.

Fortunately, I still had a copy of NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4363.run sitting in a "save" directory, ( OK I admit it I am a pack rat). I installed 4363 and my video was back to normal speed. I tried several Nvidia drivers and everything above 4363 was unbearably slow. Nvidia needs to take away their developers fancy new vidio cards and make them use ones that are a couple of years old. (Rolls up a newspaper and...BAD PROGRAMER! BAD!)

I did have a problem with an error message - cc_mismatch error. I believe it was because 4363 did not recognise the version of GCC that was in FC1. I found that to get around the cc_mismatch error when I want to compile the nvida driver I just do the following: (thank you google groups)

# export IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH=1
# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4363.run

Re:for that price

[DrJimbo]

Linux support is sketchy for dual-view in my experience

I've had great Linux support from Nvidia. It took me just a couple of minutes to edit my XF86Config and twin-view just worked. The instructions were clear, easy and accurate.

In an unrelated matter, I had a memory leak that was associated with OpenGL. It was due to a bug in the version of the Linux kernel I was using. Nvidia sent me a patch for the kernel and it fixed the problem. And this was at like 10 pm (22:00) on a Saturday night.

Re:for that price

[blixel]

Are you sure you had everything setup correctly? My desktop is roughly the same speed in X as in XP...

Are you running a dual head configuration?

Frozen Bubble is written in Perl, I doubt your graphics board was the slow part ;)

Check my message again. :) I didn't say Frozen Bubble was slow on that machine. I was making a joke that the only thing my wife does on her computer is play Frozen Bubble. A game that hardly requires the power that the ATI 9800 Pro has.

Re:for that price

[blixel]

I installed 4363 and my video was back to normal speed. I tried several Nvidia drivers and everything above 4363 was unbearably slow.

I didn't think to downgrade my video driver. But I've tried so many other desperate things that seemed like a complete waste of time (and were) so downgrading is worth a shot too. I'll try it now.

Re:for that price

[blixel]

Actually - as I was going to go download the older driver, I noticed there was a new NVidia driver for Linux .. as of today. (In fact - within the last couple of hours because I've already checked today.) I think I'll try it first. Just thought I'd let you know about the new driver though.

Re:for that price

[blixel]

Why do I even bother?

(The newer drivers are no better. The older ones won't install.)

Re:for that price

[Anonymous Coward]

Way TOO informative.

Re:for that price

[bhtooefr]

Can you get a quad-head PCI card?

If so, fill six PCI slots and one AGP slot. 7 * 4 = 36. You'll have to use two computers with integrated NICs and figure out a way to share the desktop. Integrated video will also help - 37 per board instead of 36.

Re:for that price

[JDevers]

Are you running a dual head configuration?

Yea, sort of at least... I've got a TV permanently attached as well as a 19 in monitor. The TV is setup as the second head (:0.1) for movies and the like.

Sorry about the Frozen Bubble confusion, I read your comment in a hurry :)

Re:for that price

[blixel]

Are you running a dual head configuration?

Yea, sort of at least... I've got a TV permanently attached as well as a 19 in monitor. The TV is setup as the second head (:0.1) for movies and the like.

Hmm... I've never tried a setup like that. But here's the thing. With a single screen, X is slow - but usable. With dual-head, it's just painful. When was the last time you took a good look at Win(98/2K/NT/XP)? Maybe you've forgotten how responsive it really is. I know I did. I knew X was sluggish on my system, but when I dual booted over to Windows recently (for the first time in so many months), I was completely blown away at how responsive everything was.

I'm *seriously* considering switching back. I don't want to ... but ... trying to convince myself that Linux is somehow "better" is becoming a more ridiculous argument all the time. I can protect myself from viruses ... and in my experience WinXP was at least as stable as Linux has been for me. In my opinion, WinXP was more stable actually. Linux will hard-lock on me fairly regularly and I'll have to unplug my computer to reboot it. So ... I don't know what the benefits are any more. Just a sense of idealism I guess.

Re:for that price

[JDevers]

I play games in XP a LOT, so have a decent bit of up-to-date XP experience.

I won't argue the stability aspect, XP itself is quite stable. Some of the apps aren't so, but the majority of those problems are probably driver issues more than anything else.

I've never had Linux hard lock on me though (I've used Gentoo as my day-to-day desktop for about eight months now and various other distos before that). I've had issues, but no true hard locks.

Re:for that price

[DMUTPeregrine]

So you can write perl scripts WHILE jerking off and reading slashdot.

Re:for that price

[ArsonSmith]

This sounds like a great auto "First Post" response to all product anouncements.

Re:for that price

[j-turkey]

So you can write perl scripts WHILE jerking off and reading slashdot.

Yeah, I'm a pretty serious wanker. ;)

Re:for that price

[blixel]

I've never had Linux hard lock on me though (I've used Gentoo as my day-to-day desktop for about eight months now and various other distos before that). I've had issues, but no true hard locks.

The lockups I'm experiencing are apparently due to a known bug with the nForce2 chipset. The 2.6.6 kernel release addressed the issue, but it's still a problem. Some info about it.

Re:for that price

[JDevers]

Yea, I remember reading about that... My previous board was an NF2 (now in my wife's PC...funny how we all do the same thing, isn't it ;) and now I have a KT600 which I picked up mainly for the flawless Linux support (and a pretty decent feature set as well).

Re:for that price

[blixel]

My previous board was an NF2 (now in my wife's PC...funny how we all do the same thing, isn't it ;)

hehe ... yeah. I put Mandrake on my wife's machine and set everything up for her. (E-Mail, bookmarks, address book, home page, instant messenger, Open Office, etc...) She has requested that I put Windows back on it several times. Her main complaint with Linux is that she can't play a lot of stupid little games that she runs into online. (Which I always argue is an advantage to Linux. No spyware/malware. But end users don't understand [and don't care].) And she too complains that's it's slower. Which I obviosuly can't debate. And the funny thing is, her Desktop is a LOT faster (more responsive) than mine because she only has 1 screen.

now I have a KT600 which I picked up mainly for the flawless Linux support (and a pretty decent feature set as well

I'll have to keep that in mind. After all I've bought 5 different video cards in my quest to have a fast dual-head Linux Desktop experience. Motherboards are cheap in comparison.

Re:for that price

[JDevers]

My wife's PC is pretty much used ONLY for games, so it still has XP on it. Of course, she plays good games not web games =)

Yea, I think my mobo was only like $60-70 at Newegg. It even acurately IDs my mobile Athlon (completely open multipliers and it overclocks like a dream ;) and on my NF2 board it was just recognised as a generic Athlon and didn't properly set the multipliers by default.

Re:for that price

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus the UT2K4-demo ran like crap under Linux (low framre rate) and looked like ass compared to Windows.

Wow. I got a decent frame rate with a Radeon 7200 on a 600MHz machine under Windows. They must have some seriously shitty Linux drivers.

Re:for that price

[mdielmann]

If item 2 is done with visual aids (of sufficient quality), then yes. If the visual aids are of poor quality, then bleeding of eyes may occur.

Is there any point....

[jarich]

Is there any point to posting a picture for me view on my lowly monitor? ;)

Viewsonic support sucks

[cloudmaster]

Better hope you don't need to make a warranty claim on that - it'll take weeks to get your monitor back (they don't cross-ship big monitors), and they'll promise you'll get a new replacement *this* time but send another refurb that'll blow up within a few months, *again*. Not that I'm bitter or anything... :)

Re:Viewsonic support sucks

[Ruprecht the Monkeyb]

Experiences vary. I bought a refurb Viewsonic 21" CRT years ago on an on-line auction (and this was pre-Ebay, so it was a *long* time ago), and it has never given me a days grief. Guess the tech who worked on mine was having a good day :)

Re:Viewsonic support sucks

[Carnildo]

Someone who owns this monitor is probably going to get much better service than someone who bought a 15" el cheapo. After all, if you've purchased a $6000 monitor, you're likely to make more large purchases, and Viewsonic doesn't want to risk driving you to a competitor.

Re:Viewsonic support sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

You bought a P225f didn't you? : )

FZzzzt... KA-BOOM!

Re:Viewsonic support sucks

[csirac]

So get IBM's T221 instead - 3 years warranty, IBM support.

Re:Viewsonic support sucks

[svallarian]

Funny enough, we've bought some here at work.

If it's a black viewsonic montior, it's crap and will die a horrible death within 6 months of purchase. (usually by the electron guns shaking so hard you can't read the screen at all)

However, if it's a white viewsonic monitor, it'll work fine (3+ years straight with no problems)

Go figure. But yeah, their warranty does suck. The've sent us 6 or so of the black ones and every single one of their replacements have had trouble.

Steven V.

Re:Viewsonic support sucks

[cloudmaster]

I've had problems with a pair of P225f monitors - that's their top-end 22" "graphics quality" CRT for those who don't follow the high-end CRT market. Perhaps I should've mentioned that in the original post.

Warning, rant ahead:

No matter. I called them after they'd had the thing for 12 days and was told that it could take up to 12 days to process a monitor for return, and that mine was being tested "today" out of coincidence. The testing monkeys could've opened the box, spelled the distinctive "electrical component blew up" smell, and moved on in about 5 minutes, total. 10 minutes if they'd hooked it up and noticed that it didn't turn on.

They didn't have a replacement in the warehouse (whatever), and I was gonna have to wait a couple of weeks to get one. I sent an email to the marketing director politely explaining that my company was not going to buy any more of their monitors if they kept the montor's graphic artist out of work for another week. It took them 9 days to get me a replacement, after I had to explain that I needed one that was not black because the one I sent in was not black.

Viewsonic can go screw themselves for making me wait 3 weeks for a damned refurbished monitor, twice. I will never buy one again, and I'm gonna make sure that anyone who values my opinion doesn't buy one again. There are plenty of other manufacturers who take customer satisfaction seriously *before* the customer has to contact the company. I use KDS monitors on all of our workstations now, because they're priced reasonably, perform well, and the company has *excelent* customer service. The cross-shipping thing is super handy. I've never had a user with a KDS monitor be without their normal monitor for more than two days.

To the easily influenced: Buy KDS monitors now. Throw bricks through Viewsonic's windows whenever possible.

Re:Viewsonic support sucks

[cloudmaster]

Viewsonic stuff *used* to be pretty good, but like so many manufacturers, they've gone downhill in a hurry recently. I've got a Viewsonic that's older than probably half the people who post here, and it's still working - but the new stuff's just cheap crap, IMHO.

not new

[Anonymous Coward]

there've been super-sized monitors around for a while. I've come across 50" CRT monitors before today. They cost tens of thousands of dollars. Somebody must be buying them. What interests me is how do they find a video card to drive these things.

With respects to this LCD monitor, I'd hate to know how they honour a dead-pixel warrenty.

Re:not new

[bhtooefr]

Well, you basically trick the card into thinking it's driving two monitors. I think that's pretty much how the GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL works (it's the card that you need to drive a 30" Apple LCD).

Re:not new

[Jeremy Erwin]

You can drive two 30" displays with a single 6800 Ultra DDL card. Each of the card's DVI ports is twice as fast as a normal DVI port.

Re:not new

[bhtooefr]

Yes, now I remember. It's essentially two DVI channels over one port...

Yeah

[Pikhq]

But can it run Linux? :-p

Re:Yeah

[Stevyn]

Yeah, but you have to manually compile the kernel module as EZcompile doesn't support it ;)

Slashdotted Already...

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be the 9.2 megapixel screenshot on the home page.

Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[daviddennis]

The reviewer noted that text was too small to read, and you would have to use another monitor for pallettes and the like. I would think that would be a little clumsy - I know I feel that way with my current dual monitor setup (one 23" Cinema Display, one NEC 17" LCD). I would think you could increase the size of the text - I know that's pretty easy with MacOS X since icons and so on are designed to size proportionately.

It needs the same two DVI channels as the new Apple Cinema Display 30" but it's much higher resolution. The higher refresh rate of the 30" should make that the sounder buy for people like me who are more interested in video than image editing. That makes this an awfully specialized tool even for those who have the bucks.

Still, being able to see an entire image at full resolution on a screen is quite the cool trick. I'd be envious of its owner but wouldn't buy it for myself - and I will buy the 30" Cinema Display once my finances are in better shape.

D

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[parallax7d]

The review may not have adjusted the OS DPI settings to compensate with the higher pixel density. Even if they did that alot of text would be hard to see still.

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[notsoclever]

I know that's pretty easy with MacOS X since icons and so on are designed to size proportionately.

Unfortunately, that's a myth. OSX does not use vector graphics for the UI itself, and the various UI elements are definitely pixel-based, even icons they're provided in a number of resolutions all the way up to 128x128, giving them the illusion of being scalable, which can be used for some cute tricks like having an icon which actually changes to different images based on how large it is. But icons are basically just MIPmapped polygons, and that's as close as anything in the OSX UI gets to DPI-independence.

Also, there's no built-in way to change the system font sizes, and using things like TinkerTool to do it can mess things up (since pretty much all of the UI elements are fixed pixel-size still).

To make matters worse, for the few things which are DPI-aware (such as viewing PDFs in Preview.app, and for display-oriented font sizing and so on), there's no way to actually specify your display's DPI OSX insists that all monitors are 72dpi (the old Mac standard) even though pretty much every Apple display sold today is around 100dpi (the only exception being the 14" iBook which is still around 72dpi), so when it tries to display things at "actual size" they're actually shrunk down quite a bit.

With the way that Cocoa works, they could conceivably make the UI truly DPI-independent in the future, but AFAICT Carbon is a lost cause.

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[daviddennis]

One thing I didn't realize when I posted my original note (trying to make first post, don'tcha know) was that it's a 22" monitor, which is smaller than my current Cinema HD Display. That's amazingly dense, more than double the pixels of Apple's 30" display (9.1 for Viewsonic versus 4.1 for Apple) but about half the surface area.

I think I'd rather have a larger monitor than one this dense. You'd have to have pretty darn good eyes to see the pixels the monitor's displaying on your behalf. If you can't read the text, are you really going to notice the difference between this display and one half the resolution?

D

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[Bishop]

One of my pet peeves with OSX is the hard coded 72dpi display output. Both X and Windows are more flexible in this regard. I was shocked. For an OS that is supposed to have excellent font and graphic capability I had assumed that changeing the display's dpi would be basic functionality.

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[armitage_23]

I saw one of the IBM monitors at a tech conference. Images were beautiful. You could hardly see the pixels.

I jumped out of the demo loop they had running to the Windows desktop. Even with the font size set to "Extra Large", it was difficult to read.

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[mczak]

Actually, no, the Apple Cinema Display 30" only needs 1 dual-link DVI connector (with the new Mac Geforce 6800 you can hook up two of them) - this thing needs two dual-link connectors, unless you want to reduce the refresh rate in half...

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[Steffan]

• You'd have to have pretty darn good eyes to see the pixels the monitor's displaying on your behalf.

That's the whole point. You don't see the pixels. Have you spent so much time behind a monitor that you're disappointed when you go outside and the world isn't pixelated?

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[JackAxe]

You can change the system font size with "View Options." But it only goes up to 16pt, But still, it can be done.

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[notsoclever]

That doesn't affect the menu bar, and it doesn't change other UI elements' sizes like scrollbars/etc. You can use TinkerTool to change the menu bar font but that still won't change the menu bar size.

Most of the Apple UI elements are fixed-size pixel images. They're very pretty pixel images, but they're actually less flexible than the UI elements in Win2K and earlier (which were drawn using GDI calls IIRC, and certainly weren't pre-rolled bitmaps).

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[parallax7d]

If you can't see the pixels, how could you read slashdot then?

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[JackAxe]

I hadn't even thought about that. Even OS9 could change the menus font and it's size. I guess this is why Apple went with a 30 inch.

Anyways, hopefully Tiger will add those options back.

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[dfghjk]

Text is not too small to read on this monitor regardless of what the reviewer may have said.

The Apple display is likely to be better for video not only for its refresh but also for its lower dpi. Wouldn't mind having one, but for still imaging the VP2290 is great.

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[Doppler00]

From what I've read on how Windows Longhorn will handle fonts, it seems like they are re-designing it to address this issue. I hope most OS's start doing this for resolutions over 1280x1024. Of course, then you have to wait for years of legacy applications to support this too.

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[Anonymous Coward]

Theoretically, Windows has always had the capability to scale UI elements. Dialog boxes are laid out in "dialog units", which are based on the dialog's font size, and menus and titlebars scale to fit their fonts. Unfortunately dialog units are set by the application, but most things should work fine if the OS were to override that. (and actually, if they use the "MS Shell Dlg" font or whatever it's called, it might work that way... I'm not sure.)

But then there's the whole trend to make every app and its brother skinnable, which doesn't play very nicely at all. (oh, and the OS, of course) Applications are free to disregard the OS's efforts to be user friendly.

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

In Windows XP, the visual styles (skins) actually include multiple DPI versions of the common UI elements. Try changing to 120dpi and watch what the titlebar does. The major problem in Windows today is that most apps still hard-code pixel counts.

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[notsoclever]

I knew the stupid "skinned" looks were like that, but nobody I know actually uses those. :) Or is it for Classic as well?

In any case, Win2k and earlier used GDI calls for most things, aside from the window decorations which were stored in a truetype font anyway. :)

Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical

[Doppler00]

Ever tried using Excel on a 1600x1200 laptop screen that is only 14"? Sure you can scale the font up, but the button bar buttons are still small because they are standard 16x16 pixels, and the labels on the rows and columns are microscopic.

They really do need to redesign the software to make everything vector based, and then cache the images for the particular resolution you are using.

For legacy applications, give the user the option to scale the window 100, 150, 200% and use antialiasing to smooth it out.

No thanks

[Quasar1999]

One monitor that does less than the 10 monitors I could buy for the same price? Why? I can get 10 17" LCD monitors for the same price. I could arrange them in any sort of grid pattern I want, even factoring in the extra cost of video cards to drive them all, I still end up with WAY more screen realestate. So why would anyone need a single monitor that does this resolution, and not use multiple smaller, cheaper ones to acheive the same, if not better, resolution?

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck running 5 video cards in a machine...

Re:No thanks

[stratjakt]

Not the same thing, at all.

It's not about size or real estate, it's about pixel density and picture clarity.

Graphic artists would kill for a monitor with pixel density closely matching that of a printer (2400dpi or so).. That's not here yet, but this is closer.

Think WYSIWYG.... to the X-treme!

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you want your doctor looking at your MRIs across 10 monitors. You would hate for him to miss that cancer that formed in your brain because it was so close to one of the edges of one of his 10 17" screens that have over an inch of gap between them.

This is obviously for a niche market right now, Joe Blow on the street isnt getting one!

Ryan Secrest .......... Out!

Re:No thanks

[whitelines]

It's the pixel density. Higher pixel density means sharper clearer images. Most screens are only 72dpi, a nice photo is 600dpi or higher. More resolution packed into a smaller space means you can have "close to life like"(TM) images on your screen. Not to mention super sharp readable text.

It's actually a pity that display's haven't really kept up in the "Moore" sense with the rest of our hardware, most of us are still chugging along with 72dpi...

Re:No thanks

[fraudrogic]

Well, first of all, your not going to get 5 AGP cards to fit into one machine (you can jam them into the PCI slots but that's probably bad). So the solution is to use multiple computers and what about combining the imagery from each computer? Combiners are expensive. So I think that to say you can get 10 monitors to do more than what this monitor can do is kind of a stretch.

And I'm not a video expert so I'm not sure what the issues are involved in playing a DVD at that resolution. I'm also pretty sure that even the almighty GeForce FX6800 Ultra or the ATI 9800xt is going to have a problem rendering Far Cry or Half Life or Doom3 or whatever at those resoutions at a decent frame rate.

Re:No thanks

[protohiro1]

Specialized usage. It is not priced for consumers. This is probably going to be marketed to the medical field, where very high resolution monitors are very useful for view medical imaging. In fact, the low resolution of most LCDs is what is preventing hospitals from switching to an all digital solution for xRays. Your 10 17" LCD solution would not be useful in a hospital setting (or for view satallite images or any number of other special usage).

Re:No thanks

[Politicus]

It's not about size or real estate, it's about pixel density and picture clarity.

So high res that your icons may look puny. Hence the included software:

Liquid View® Software included free

Enlarge desktop icons, fonts and toolbars--even MS application toolbars--up to 200% for easy legibility.

Re:No thanks

[GigsVT]

You only need 300dpi to rival printed material.

2400 dpi is standard for 1-bit halftoned images, for an image where you can have 24 bits per pixel, 300dpi is plenty to be the same as most printed work.

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

So why would anyone need a single monitor that does this resolution, and not use multiple smaller, cheaper ones to acheive the same, if not better, resolution?

Why ? To demonstrate how big his willie is ...

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't want my Janet Reno b3av3r shot divided into seperate panels.
It just wouldn't be romantic.

My goodness

[Noose For A Neck]

That certainly blows away Apple's new offerings.

It's good to see that manufacturers are finally shipping higher resolution stand-alone LCD displays - until now, most high res displays were limited to laptops. For example, my roommate's Dell laptop had a 16:9 screen (something else you won't see in desktop monitors) and a ridiculously sharp screen, something on the order of 1400 horizontal pixels on a 17" screen.

What I'm really wondering, though, is what the refresh rate on these monitors is. I've seen some massive LCD screens before, but they all seemed to suffer from a low refresh rate, which made playing any kind of video or other motion graphics on the screen hard or impossible to do due to ghosting.

With resolutions that high, I think this monitor will primarily be geared toward medical imaging applications rather than for video display or gaming. I can't even imagine a modern video card that could drive that kind of resolution (NVidia's new dual DVI card?), much less a game that would support resolutions that high. Oh well, I can dream...

Re:My goodness

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called 'response time' for LCDs and measured in ns, not hz. Unfortunately the product page does not list this spec, so it is probably pretty slow.

Re:My goodness

[Anonymous Coward]

1400 horizontal pixels on a 17" is nothing, several manufacturers offer those on 14" screens. What you probably saw was a Dell WUXGA screen (1920x1200).

Re:My goodness

[kingjosh]

If you're going to spend $6000.00 on the monitor, might as well spend $2799.00 on the video card! 3Dlabs just announced the WildCat REALIZM 800, a PCIe card with DVI-dual link and 640 MB of on board GDDR3!

Re:My goodness

[Anonymous Coward]

These displays are not fast -- they are optimized for viewing satellite images and/or photo retouching. The dual DVI link is required because a single DVI doesn't carry enough bandwidth to display 9 megapixels so the paired card is required -- and the paired card is $2500 or so.

After watching these for the past year (and seeing one live at NAB) the Apple 30 with the NVIDIA is the one to watch.

Also, IBM shipped a version called the (T90 I think) and it's available in online discounter channels for about $6k. Essentially the same display in a little cooler package.

Re:My goodness

[mcg1969]

That certainly blows away Apple's new offerings.

Hardly. This is only a 22" screen, so all the extra resolution is going into detail, not screen real estate. It seems to me that you really wouldn't want to fit much more on this screen than you would, say, a 1920x1200 22" screen. You won't want to make the fonts any smaller than they already are! So instead, you'll probably just use larger fonts so the result is a smoother picture. But is that really necessary for most practical work?

So I would say that Apple's 30" monitor, which will truly provide more useful screen real estate, is a far better choice for most people than this one.

Maybe this monitor will be useful for folks working on 4K video editing.

Re:My goodness

[Noose For A Neck]

That raises another interesting question, then - isn't this display at or past the limit of resolution high enough for the human eye? The percieved aliasing on any screen is proportionate to how far away you are viewing it from. I've already seen displays with a lower resolution than this, and they look flawless from a little less than 2 feet away. Do the people who use these displays prefer to get their face really close to the screen and squint instead of just enlarging the image?

Re:My goodness

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm just wondering how does that "blow away apple's new offerings"?

i know that apple's are a little less quality.. and by that i mean, compared to apple, viewsonic costs twice as much, and isn't twice as good in pixels... so for the price of one of these, you could have TWO 30" apple screens. *shrug* just a thought.

oh yeah, both have to have the dual card to run. craziness.

Re:My goodness

[Noose For A Neck]

What do you mean, "Isn't twice as good in pixels"? I've never seen a "good in pixels" rating on a monitor before (except maybe one that a CompUSA salesman told me about, but that's another story). However, I do know that the Viewsonic is a much higher resolution screen than the Apple 30" display. That kind of resolution on a 22" display is effectively photo-equivalent until you have your nose pressed up against the screen.

Re:My goodness

[Anonymous Coward]

> isn't twice as good in pixels...

Actually it is. The Viewsonic has more pixels than two Apple 30" displays.

Re:My goodness

[bhtooefr]

The paired card is $599 at the Apple Store. It's called the nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL. From the look of it, it's a PCI-E card, too, so you can do that SLI thing on it if you can find a board to do it (maybe the G5 has two PCI-E x16 slots?) ;-)

Re:My goodness

[roca]

It's nice for reading a lot of text.

This kind of monitor is also very good for people in medicine. Think reading X-rays.

Re:My goodness

[mcg1969]

Good points, definitely. The x-ray application makes a lot of sense to me.

The question is this: would you rather have a 22" screen at 3840x2400 or a 30" screen at 2560x1600? Particularly when the 30" screen is cheaper? It just seems to me that the majority of people would prefer the 30" screen, though as you point out there may be applications where the resolution is more important than the screen size.

The poster I replied to suggested that this blows away Apple's offerings. I'd say it's a far closer call than that, and indeed Apple will win for some, even if price is not an object... and if it is, Apple's definitely on top.

Re:My goodness

[WuphonsReach]

It's good to see that manufacturers are finally shipping higher resolution stand-alone LCD displays - until now, most high res displays were limited to laptops. For example, my roommate's Dell laptop had a 16:9 screen (something else you won't see in desktop monitors) and a ridiculously sharp screen, something on the order of 1400 horizontal pixels on a 17" screen.

Toshiba Tecras can be bought with a 124dpi 4:3 ratio screen that is 1400x1050.

Set the DPI setting in Windows to 120dpi and switch to slightly larger fonts and text gets quite crisp. The downside is that there are lot of websites that specify text size in pixels, which means that you'll be writing a lot of nasty notes to webmasters.

A 200dpi laptop or desktop display would be extremely sweet. With the advantage that scaling up a 800x600 display setting would look a whole lot better then trying to scale that up on existing LCD screens.

Re:My goodness

[WuphonsReach]

3Dlabs just announced the WildCat REALIZM 800, a PCIe card with DVI-dual link and 640 MB of on board GDDR3!

Good grief... and I thought 256MB of RAM on a video card was crazy. (Actually, I thought that back when we first hit 32MB on a video card and one of my machines only had 32MB.)

Of course, given the fact that they put 640MB on the card, we can now cue the "nobody will ever need more then 640MB" jokesters.

Re:My goodness

[WuphonsReach]

That raises another interesting question, then - isn't this display at or past the limit of resolution high enough for the human eye?

Considering that the original (IBM) 200dpi displays were built for medical imaging (e.g. X-Rays), no. Think back to how a doctor interacts with an X-Ray in the office. They need to be able to see the entire image all at once, yet have the ability to look closer at a suspicious spot. If the resolution is too low (e.g. 100dpi), suspicious spots won't show up clear enough to be spotted. And panning around a zoomed image is a slow and error-prone method.

Now for the real-world... I have a 125dpi LCD laptop display. It is a lot crisper then a 96dpi LCD would be. A 200dpi LCD would be rock-solid and extremely easy on the eyes for reading large blocks of text. The ultimate limit is probably somewhere around 300-400dpi.

High quality 3D displays

[GillBates0]

I hope they combine this technology with 3D displays. The main concern with the glass-less Sharp 3D display is that the resolution reduces by half in 3D mode, because only half the total pixels are viewed by each eye.

With 9Mpixels at their disposal, they could develop some very high quality 3D displays. Ofcourse, the total number of pixels is an arbitrary measure without mention of the display size. If they're spread over a large area, resolution will still remain low (and no, I couldn't RTFA though I wanted to).

Re:High quality 3D displays

[Rolker]

Well, we did mount two off them on a frame along with mirrors to give us a stereo display. To drive them, we use a 4 machine linux cluster. Each display allows up to 4 inputs, so we connect each monitor to two machines. The cards used are NVidia Quadro 3000G, which provide genlock. One of those could be driven from one ouput, but at full resoluiton, one dvi channel only allows enough bandwidth to drive the monitor at about 10hz. Using 4 inputs allows us to go to its maximum of 42Hz.

Stereo scenes look amazing in this setup. The only issue is the ghosting we sometimes see due to the slow response of the pixels, but it hasn't been a big issue for us.

So, if you are looking for a stereo display approaching the eye's "visual resolution", two of those will do the trick!

Re:High quality 3D displays

[Sycraft-fu]

This particular display is 22.2" so amazingly high resolution. The idea behind it is for special apps that require superfine display. At normal viewing distance it will literally exceed the resolution of your eyes (assuming 20/20 vision). One adantage being you can lean closer to your monitor and actually see more detail.

Certianly not something any average consumer would want to use, but they do have a niche market.

Re:High quality 3D displays

[bhtooefr]

The Viewsonic product page says it's a 22" LCD. So, it's got a VERY high DPI - much better than Apple's 30" (which is lower res to boot). However, ultra-high DPI LCDs typically have higher response times, and therefore aren't as good for stuff like, oh, games or movies, two of the main areas where you'd use a 3D display.

Re:High quality 3D displays

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple calculation shows that the Viewsonic is about 200 dpi, the Apple 30" display is about 100 dpi. 100 dpi is probably as high as you need to go for "normal" display use. Higher resolution will be nice for things like electronic paper for reading, which doesn't need refresh. 200 dpi, at 4 times the bandwidth of 100 dpi for the same size display, will probably be a specialty niche for quite some time. This same display would have all the same desirable characteristics if it was twice the size, except it would take twice the space and probably cost even more.

dead pixel warranty?

[rexguo]

At 9.2M pixels, what are the chances of dead pixels? How do I even spot one??

Re:dead pixel warranty?

[Rainier Wolfecastle]

At that resolution, does one dead pixel even matter?

Re:dead pixel warranty?

[Chairboy]

If you can't spot it, then it probably isn't a problem, right?

Re:dead pixel warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

The odds probably approach 1.

Re:dead pixel warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize that means the probability is .5 right? Saying 'the odds' of something and 'the probability' of something are NOT equivalent, although theree is an easy formula for converting between the two.

Re:dead pixel warranty?

[dfghjk]

Mine has one. It's easily seen but causes no problem or distraction.

medical imaging

[Anonymous Coward]

because when someone crashes their Harley, the doctors want top-notch video cards and monitors to review the scans. This is a photo-realistic monitor.

Super hight res monitor?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't realize I had to have a special monitor to display super high res mode on my II GS....

Wait, what year am I in?

Obligotory reply...

[Hel Toupee]

My Pr0n looks just fine at 1600x1200, thank you!

21" CRT all the way, baby!

Re:Obligotory reply...

[Paulrothrock]

Except you start glowing from all the radiation. But maybe some chicks like that sorta thing.

Chicks! What am I thinking?!? This is /.!!!

Re:Obligotory reply...

[mdvlspwn99]

Try lugging that 21" backbreaker up 4 flights of stairs and you'll think twice about how much you love CRTs. :) Ah memories of moving into dorms ...

Though for 6 grand, I could buy a few 21" monitors and pay some people to move them for me.

Re:Obligotory reply...

[DeepDarkSky]

Yeah, on this monitor, your full-sized pr0n will look like thumbnails.

Maybe you don't need it...

[NotQuiteReal]

...so don't buy it.

I don't think Viewsonic would have made it if they didn't think they could sell it.

I sure wouldn't want to live somewhere where a commitee decides what products people need.

A Four HD picture-in-picture display!

hmm SLI

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Nvidia's SLI implementation could make some sense with this, if you got the money to blow on the monitor, you got the money for 2x Geforce 6800ultras... right?

Rebranded IBM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this just a rebranded IBM T221?

Re:Rebranded IBM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is... although IBM also uses the same panel made by IDTech. Furthermore, IDTech will be launching its own monitor soon that uses this panel...

Re:Rebranded IBM?

[fishybell]

Probably not. Although their specs (ibm vs. viewsonic) are identical, the the Viewsonic isn't a rebranded IBM, and the IBM isn't a rebranded Viewsonic.

I gaurantee that they both use the same LCD component, from the same manufacturer, and probably from the same fab, but they didn't just rebrand eachother's product.

Re:Rebranded IBM?

[Anonymous Coward]

ok, my mistake. It's not a rebranded IBM - it's just that IBM released its monitor before ViewSonic and so many will be fooled into think that it's IBM rebranded. To clarify, both ViewSonic and IBM have branded the IDTech panel...

high pixel density is cool....

[remou]

it's just I don't think I need 22.5" and 9 millions of them....

a 19" (or 20, with anything bigger I have to start moving my head at desk distance) 5mp would do. Not quite the density and not quite the size and hopefully REALLY not quite that prize...

oh well, like so many things, just a few years away...;-)

Re:for that price (yes, it's off topic)

[PitaBred]

Linux support may take a bit of work to get going for multiple monitors, but X applications handle multiple displays much better than Windows apps.

Good price!

[Anonymous Coward]

... and here for the last 48 hours I thought I was going to have to buy that overpriced Apple crap. At last! A more affordable, PC-compatible alternative! Another job well done, boys.

Megapixels sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Megapixels are a stupid measurement of resolution. If i buy a 9Mpixel screen does that mean i can have a resolution of 9x1000000? or 1000000x9? or maybe 1x9000000? Wow that has gotta be a long monitor!

Pricewatch

[Wireless Joe]

I notice one Pricewatch vendor is offering these for $10*

*$5990 s/h charge applies.

Re:Pricewatch

[nanter]

Hate to have to return it considering how shipping and handling is not usually refunded.

A $10 refund on a $6k monitor. Ouch! :-)

Re:Pricewatch

[thomasdelbert]

Guess I'll have to go there and pick it up.

- Thomas;

Re:Pricewatch

[bughunter]

And don't forget the bastards' 25% restocking fee... OUCH!

Re:Pricewatch

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory Dilbert quote:

1. I AM COMP-U-COMP.

That's a lotta monitor.

[djtripp]

The gross weight of this thing is nearly 40 pounds. But did you realise that it's a 23" monitor with a 200ish ppi resoution. So it's not the biggest, just the highest resolution. Still very cool, but not my bag of chips. And for $6000, i could almost get 20 new Apple 30" Oh to dream... oh to be a viking...

Re:That's a lotta monitor.

[PitaBred]

I think your math is wrong, sir... because if the new 30" displays are $300 each, sign me up for 5 right now.

Re:That's a lotta monitor.

[DHR]

Let us all know where you get Apple 30"'s for $300

Re:That's a lotta monitor.

[Anonymous Coward]

20? Eh? Sign me up for that pricing program! I think you meant 2.

Re:That's a lotta monitor.

[djtripp]

D'OH! Those rouge zeros....

And I will let everyone know when I can find $300 Apple 30's (After I get my 20 of course)

Re:That's a lotta monitor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Rouge zeros are certainly harder to read than black ones...

(sorry, I had to)

Re:That's a lotta monitor.

[djtripp]

Dman tihs kyebaord!!!!

Re:That's a lotta monitor.

[JackAxe]

That would be a great savings and would take the edge off the purchase of a new G5 and 6800 to drive it. =)

Comparison to Apple

[mblase]

The 30" monitor Apple announced the other day measures 2560x1600 pixels, which comes to 4.1 megapixel resolution -- although it does require a graphics card with two ports, so connecting two such monitors gives you an ultra-widescreen 8.2 MP display.

ViewSonic's specs says theirs offers 3840x2400 pixels, quite a bit higher than Apple's -- but it's only 22.2" diagonal compared to Apple's 30". Whether higher resolution or larger workspace is more important depends on the individual, of course, but I personally would prefer fewer pixels in a larger screen -- that kind of ultra-high-density DPI isn't the sort of thing I can imagine needing if I were a graphics pro.

Re:Comparison to Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't need a twin port video card, it needs a new double DVI card. This means that there is twice the amount of data going though 1 connection, not 2 connections with a single amount each

think more along the lines of one USB2.0 socket rather than 2x USB1.1 if you don't get my meaning

AndyboyH

Re:Comparison to Apple

[Moebius Loop]

Actually, two 30" flatpanels would still be 4.1 megapixels. That's millions of pixels, per inch....

Re:Comparison to Apple

[aquabat]

The megapixels number refers to the total number of pixels on the entire screen. If it were per inch, then there would be 2560x1600 pixels per square inch, which is not what they are saying.

Re:Comparison to Apple

[Azghoul]

It's good to know that you don't need real high DPI :) but consider their target market: Satellite imagery. They will likely sell a boatload of them to NIMA and various other agencies with names you'll never hear on TV, and their users will be very happy to have them.

Re:Comparison to Apple

[Moebius Loop]

oh right...uh....now i feel silly...;-)

Re:Comparison to Apple

[gnu-generation-one]

"ViewSonic's specs says theirs offers 3840x2400 pixels, quite a bit higher than Apple's -- but it's only 22.2" diagonal compared to Apple's 30". Whether higher resolution or larger workspace is more important depends on the individual, of course, but I personally would prefer fewer pixels in a larger screen"

We've got a 4800x2400 pixel monitor at work (several of them, for aircraft cockpits), and you're not going to be able to read any text in any program or OS on that screen.

Even moving the mouse from side of the screen to the other takes about a minute of dragging...

Re:Comparison to Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

so connecting two such monitors gives you an ultra-widescreen 8.2 MP display.

No, it gives you an ultra-widescreen 8.2MP display with a big fat silver strip going right down the middle which is exactly where you wanted to put your xterm.

The sooner people figure out the big advantage of triple-headed setups, the better...

Re:Comparison to Apple

[dfghjk]

Having one, I can certainly imagine it. What I couldn't imagine was how good it would be. 200 dpi is fantastic for image editing. Of course, if Apple didn't make it then it couldn't be good...

Re:Comparison to Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

He was saying that the video card that is required to run it has two ports. Those two ports (both DVI dual-link) can be used to run two 30" monitors.

Re:Comparison to Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't see the details unless you stick your head up about 1 foot from the monitor, I'd rather either have a larger screen with lower resolution, or just use software to zoom in. Ok, so maybe they're used to working with photographs and magnifying glasses, but wouldn't a larger display at 100 dpi be easier to use? Much less squinting...

Overkill

[Dozix007]

Unless you are in graphic design, and can afford the extrodanarily expensive card to do it, this is complete overkill. I have done some work in Flexo design, and know that you don't need such ultra high resouloution. Then again, it comes with the trend. Apple is doing it with their Uber-Sized monitors too.

Re:Overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

But at least Apple provides screen area rather than just resolution...

No improvement

[fijimf]

I checked out the screen shots, and they didn't look any better than my current display.

Human eye?

[Black Parrot]

Does anyone know at what point the resolution becomes finer than the human eye can perceive? Is this monitor there yet?

Re:Human eye?

[Shinglor]

Does anyone know at what point the resolution becomes finer than the human eye can perceive? Is this monitor there yet?

That would depend on the distance that it's viewed from.

Re:Human eye?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was something on one of the Discovery channles (i was probly watching wings) on a windowless cockpit with hi-res displays that slightly exceed the ave human eye. i think it was about 200 pix/in

Re:Human eye?

[Anonymous Coward]

just rembered... its not in pixles per inch cause that depends on how close you are, they mesured in pixles per arc second so i think the 20/20 human eye is about 200 pixles/arc second, and that would be at the focal point our periferal vision is much lower

Re:Human eye?

[lockefire]

According to this:

Consider a 20 x 13.3-inch print viewed at 20 inches. The Print subtends an angle of 53 x 35.3 degrees, thus requiring 53*60/.3 = 10600 x 35*60/.3 = 7000 pixels, for a total of ~74 megapixels to show detail at the limits of human visual acuity.

Re:Human eye?

[Quasar5150]

In theory, the human eye has a resolution of about 1/60th of a degree (treating the eye as a 2 mm circular aperature). 1/60th of a degree is about .0003 radians. So at a distance of 12 inches, you can resolve two things that are

D= 12 * .0003 = .003 inches

apart. So viewed from 12 inches away, a monitor with more than 1/.003 = 287 pixels/inch exceeds what your eye can resolve. The 22" Viewsonic has 204 pix/inch and the Apple 30" has about 94 pix/inch.

You'll know its time to upgrade…

[Anonymous Coward]

...when the number of dead pixels allowed by the new display's warranty approaches the total number of pixels in your current display.

It's all in one's Mentality

[quadra23]

Pricewatch lists vendors selling this monitor starting at a bit more than $6,000 -- video card is extra.

Sounds kinda like those advertisements for the latest kids toy...batteries not included. Mind you, for most kids toys the batteries are too much more of an expense, especially compared this this monitor. The idea that they would sell the monitor for 6K and no video card is insane IMHO. Like most tech things, I think I'll wait several months before even considering to buy it.

Interesting thing about new products such as this is the price is so high not that the product is worth that money, but because someone ACTUALLY wants to pay that money for it so they could say they bought it at such great expense. "I got the first of [insert device name here] and I paid X dollars for it!" aka "Look at my check book and my willingness to pay for something at any cost even if it's not worth the price tag".

Anyone think it's anything else then a mentality? I am very strong about this because it seems like a Blinding Flash of the Obvious (BFO) that you'd actually have to look away from not to notice.

Re:It's all in one's Mentality

[Dogtanian]

Sounds kinda like those advertisements for the latest kids toy...batteries not included.

Do they still do that in the US? That used to be the case in Britain years ago (ie when I was a kid), but nowadays virtually *everything* comes with batteries, even cheap-ass goods (albeit in such cases the batteries are usually "Tochiba" or "Hichabi").

One versus Many

[sjbe]

why would anyone need a single monitor that does this resolution, and not use multiple smaller, cheaper ones to acheive the same, if not better, resolution?

I'm not saying your wrong or that there is anything bad about using multiple monitors but there are reasons to want a single screen, such as:

• Desktop space. Multiple monitors take up more space than one.
  
• Power consumption. This thing might be a power hog (I have no idea if it actually is), but 5 smaller monitors will almost certainly consume more power.
  
• Aesthetics. In general, one large high res monitor looks nicer, even if functionaly it doesn't matter.
  
• Easier for some tasks. A single screen makes it much easier to work with large images (CAD, graphics) than if the image is spread over multiple screens.
  
• Features. High end monitors often have some nifty features that lower end monitors don't.
  
• Color calibration. Tougher to make 5 monitors calibrate to exactly the same color than it is to make one.
  

I'm sure there are other reasons. I'll readily grant that a 30" high $ monitor isn't for everyone, but there are reasons to prefer it over alternatives.

Re:One versus Many

[Mysticalfruit]

While I'd say 10 monitors is a bit nuts, as a user of a duel monitor system under linux, I can confidently say that it's awesome.

1. Duel monitors is a cince to setup under linux.
2. Once you get used to 2048x768 (or whatever 2x your current workspace is) it'll be hard for you to go back to one monitor.

Just doing stuff like having the docs/spec open on one monitor while you code on the other is worth it.

The one drawback is the space. Two 17" CRT monitors side by side take up a fair ammount of table space. My solution was to move my workstation and monitors off of my desk and onto a seperate bench table.

Re:One versus Many

[sindarin2001]

One thing I've noticed about dual displays is that, since I am no longer hampered by working space, I can do a million things at one (ok...maybe a little exagurated there...but a lot). When I go to work on a single display setup (happens often at work) I end up having to do things one...at...a...time. Basically I get hyperactive because I can't work at the speed that I'm used to.

Dual monitors is very very nice (especially for coding...pull up APIs on one display and have your IDE on the other...very nice). It also works really well with maya (put all of your tools and stuff on the left and work on the right).

Re:One versus Many

[Erwos]

A cinch to set up? I think that's a bit of a stretch. I've done dual-monitor in Linux with both dual-view cards and two heterogeneous cards, and it's never been _that_ trivial. It takes maybe 15 minutes of Googling and man pages for me, which is not too bad, but it's not "a cinch", at least compared to WindowsME.

The biggest argument in favor of multiple monitors is that you don't have to play software games to make windows behave in a logical fashion - they won't maximize to the entire combined frame-buffer, for instance, just to the physical monitor. nVidia's Windows drivers have some sort of grid tool that you can use to alter that behavior, though, and simulate it on a single monitor.

However, if I just needed a lot of real estate for _one_ application, the 30 inch Apple monitor would be heavenly, I'm sure. Actually, I wouldn't mind buying two and getting the best of both worlds, either!

(side note: lots of Windows games don't like to play nice with two monitors, and don't lock the mouse to the window in full screen games)

-Erwos

Re:One versus Many

[Anonymous Coward]

For "cinch to set up", try a Mac. Apple's been doing multiple monitors right since about 1985. It's amazing to hear people STILL talking about problems with multiple monitors, changing color depths and resolutions without rebooting, etc. The one thing they haven't done very well is pushed applications to be dpi-independent (or even pushed system elements to be dpi-independent).

I'll Ask What's Really Important

[stinkyfingers]

Does porn look any better on this thing?

Because...

[sczimme]

the monitor won't leak oil everywhere and wake up all the neighbors with its loud exhaust? :o)

/has a 1981 GPz550 in storage

Re:Because...

[Anonymous Coward]

A Hardley is the world's best selling motorized wheelchair for hippies and wannabes, and for those who would rather buy a reputation than earn one.

VGA, SVGA, XGA, ...

[bfields]

"QUXGA-W"? Who comes up with these names? I mean, is there really anyone for whom that makes more sense than just "3840x2400"? --Bruce Fields

Re:VGA, SVGA, XGA, ...

[devnull17]

XGA is 1024x768. It's pretty much standard on (lower-end) laptops these days (and probably desktops, too, for that matter).

Ultra XGA, or UXGA, is 1600x1200. That's about as good as consumer-level equipment gets at the moment.

Then there's Wide Ultra XGA, or UXGA-W (although I usually see it written as "WUXGA"). Essentially the same as UXGA, but with a wider aspect ratio (1920x1200).

The "Q" most likely stands for "quad."

So yeah, it does make a little sense. That being said, if I mention this to someone, I'll probably go with "3840x2400," myself.

Re:VGA, SVGA, XGA, ...

[Cecil]

Thank you.

Monitor manufacturers seem to have abolished this ridiculous and pointless practice around the time of SVGA.

LCD and laptop manufacturers, on the other hand, seem completely enamoured with the confusing and impossible-to-compare names. Now, they seem to be testing the waters with calling it by 'megapixels' instead. This makes sense with digital cameras, as they all share a common aspect ratio. It does not make sense with displays. Not that that will stop them.

Re:VGA, SVGA, XGA, ...

[appleLaserWriter]

Interestingly, video people often use "QVGA" to mean Quarter-VGA - 320x200.

Re:VGA, SVGA, XGA, ...

[dasmegabyte]

Well, the resolution alone doesn't tell you much without also knowing the shape of the pixels and the ratio of horizontal to vertical. I could conceivably make a 1024x768 monitor which was 16x9 widescreen, either by making pixels which were wider than they were tall or by spacing them farther apart horizontally than vertically.

When you see "XGA," what you're seeing is the maximum resolution as well as the aspect ratio and the pixel size all rolled into one. So it's a different statistic than just the resolution. This is an important distinction...I have an older digital camera which takes shots at 1280x1024, but not at 4x3 (it's a little wider than it is long, its normal res displays properly but its resampling sucks), and I have to resample the shots or they look stunted!

Re:VGA, SVGA, XGA, ...

[jensen404]

This makes sense with digital cameras, as they all share a common aspect ratio.

No they don't. Some are 3:4 and some are 2:3.

Re:VGA, SVGA, XGA, ...

[bfields]

When you see "XGA," what you're seeing is the maximum resolution as well as the aspect ratio and the pixel size all rolled into one.

Thanks for the explanation, I hadn't realized that. (But I'm confused by "pixel size"--does that have any meaning independent of aspect ratio? Are there people who care whether their pixels have pointy edges or something?)

I'd still prefer "1600 x 1200, 4:3 aspect ratio", or similar. Maybe the names make sense for stuff like movies and TV, where there really are a limited set of formats that don't change often, but for computer monitors they seem to be proliferating.... It's annoying have to relearn all this alphabet soup every time I get a new laptop.

--Bruce Fields

Re:VGA, SVGA, XGA, ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but I would have rather seen QWUXGA.

XGA is common enough (thanks IBM).
UXGA is also very common now
WUXGA is the wide-version of this (Samsung make some WUXGA panels, the 240T for instance)

QWUXGA is _four_ of these.

Re:VGA, SVGA, XGA, ...

[dasmegabyte]

Are there people who care whether their pixels have pointy edges or something?

Yes. Pixel size has a large effect on the final picture. The widely spaced, slightly more rectangular pixels on a TV serve to soften and darken the image when compared to a computer monitor. An LCD will display the image even more sharply. This is not as big an issue going forward as it is going backward. An image designed to look smooth on a TV might look like blocky crap on an LCD...hence why emulators often have interpolation modes to make your display more TV-like. Furthermore, pixel "squareness" changes the resolution as well. Consider the issue of a 4:3 aspect ratio. On a PC, you acheive that with 320 horizontal pixels and 240 vertical ones. On an NTSC TV, you achieve the SAME aspect with 352 horizontal pixels -- meaning that if you have an NTSC TV signal, you either have to crop or resample the video before it will display with proper aspect on a computer monitor. PAL signals use the same horizontal resolution and visual aspect ratio, but due to yet another difference in pixel size they squeeze 288 vertical pixels into their video (which means British television is slightly higher resolution than American TV, but we get 5 more frames per second than them). This is of course ignoring further differences due to interlacing and so on.

The whole point of this is that different viewing tasks and different available components call for different display formats. The computing industry needed to tell the display industry that it wanted square pixels in 4:3 or 16:9 formats. Hence, VGA/XGA/SXGA monitors etc, as opposed to NTSC/PAL/SCART/HDTV, etc.

Re:VGA, SVGA, XGA, ...

[Cowclops]

Contrary to popular belief, 1280x1024 isn't 4x3 ANYWAY. Do the math. 1280x960 is the proper 4:3 resolution. Thus if you're using a 4:3 CRT, and you want something 1280 pixels wide, 1024 pixels tall would give you the wrong pixel ratio.

Re:VGA, SVGA, XGA, ...

[dead sun]

Personally, I think it's for geek scrabble. How else do you get rid of so many pesky high point letters at once? Now, if they can only manage to throw in a Z I could have one heck of a triple word score and use all seven of my tiles. That's an extra 50 points!

Re:VGA, SVGA, XGA, ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean 320x240. :)

Re:VGA, SVGA, XGA, ...

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, too many years of typing 320x200 makes it hard to type anything else...

Can emulate monitors that are 1/4 the price.

[richmaine]

I was amused to note on the product page, that it includes free software to magnify things by 200% so that they are large enough so that you can see them, thus emulating monitors that are 1/4 the price. I could buy one of those 1/4-price monitors and do the same without the software. :-)

Yes, I'm aware that I've stated it with a bit of a slant. Still. Heck, I find the usual fonts a bit small at 100dpi - probably just my old eyes, but they are the only ones I have.

powered by Microsoft IIS5

[Anonymous Coward]

The Professionals choice of
Service Unavailable

Dead pixels anyone???

[Anonymous Coward]

Because im sure this LCD would have PLENTY of them.

I sure hope Viewsonic have a decent dead-pixel policy, otherwise i know i wouldnt consider buying one.

A single dead pixel is enough to drive me back to a good old CRT.

(me hugs his perfect Samsung 172T LCD)

Towel

[SuperKendall]

So if you can't spot a dead pixel it's a problem because...?

Monitor Issues

[karniv0re]

Their website must be made to only be viewed on their moniter, because I'm not seeing anything on mine.

Re:Monitor Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

It's being fixed as of now, brb folks :-)

Re:Monitor Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like the first sale will pay for some bandwith for getting slash dotted

Re:My baddness

[Anonymous Coward]

> That certainly blows

I'll agree with you there. Besides, IBM did this already with the Roentgen project.

> away Apple's new offerings

Yeah, I'd like to take away one of Apple's new offerings (or two, for the price of the Viewsonic). Since they have high refresh rates and the Viewsonic reportedly (gizmodo.net) doesn't, I would probably like it enough to ... Oh, I don't know, buy another one with the money I've saved by not buying the Viewsonic.

> ridiculously

Hmm, qualified agree

Re:Too much of a good thing?

[Dogtanian]

Won't this move online porn into the realm of disgusting?

Not unless they increase the scan resolution *and* use good quality lenses. Oh, and use less compression.

Anyway, most online porn *is* disgusting and/or downright boring.

Higher Resolution than Reality

[Greyfox]

Finally monitors have higher resolution than reality. As we all know, reality is only 8 megapixels. I think that's worth a measly 6 grand...

good for medical imaging applications

[Anonymous Coward]

good for medical imaging applications etc, they need the high resolution.

Re:monitor sunning linux

[KimiDalamori]

In general, your Monitor will not run linux. But it would be nice of them to release a linux driver for their (no doubt proprietary) custom vid card needed to run this monster. Actually, I'm more interested in what kind of 3D acceleration this bad boy gets. Think UT2004 and sniper shots on l4m3rz so far away you barely look like a pixel to them.

A New Addition

[Anonymous Coward]

Perfect! Thank you very much. I have been keeping my eye out for the latest and greatest since I bought my two 21 inch flat panels last month. I felt there was something better -- and this is (probably) it!

The monitors should be arriving a couple days. :-D Ahh...it's nice being a rich kid.

Mono site looks ugly in opera D-:

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think they'd be hip enough to consider "alternative browsers" since they are working on something related to linux.

Monitors exceeding software limitations

[MobyDisk]

We are quickly reaching the point where the resolution of the display is going to experience bottlenecks from other components.

1) LCD panels with high resolutions (>1600x1200) need 2 or more DVI connectors. Yuck!

Programmers need to be aware of these or their applications will not function in the near future.

2) Many software assumes a specific DPI
A program that is meant to run at 1024x768 at 96dpi will look like a postage stamp when you get a 300dpi display device (coming soon). A 16x16 icon will be the width of a human hair. Software needs to know that pixels aren't a valid measurement -- You need pixels and DPI.

Mac's got this right from the start. Applications don't display based on RESOLUTION, they use the monitor's SIZE. From there, you can increase or decrease the zoom level (by changing the resolution). PC users scoffed at this, but they will be the ones needing a magnifying glass to use their applications.

3) Much software assumes a specific aspect ratio (4:3 and square pixels)
Open up Microsoft Word or Photoshop or Paint and draw a circle. It assumes a circle is the same number of pixels wide as it is tall. Well, that's great if your display has square pixels. That wasn't true at the old 320x200 or 640x400 resolutions of the old days. It has been a safe assumption for about 10 years now, but it isn't always true anymore. For example, if you use an LCD with a 5:4 aspect ratio (like 1200x1024) but run it in a 4:3 resolution (like 1024x768) things will be squished.

(I find it amusing when someone tells me how great a DVD looks on their LCD display, when Windows Media Player is stretching the image to the wrong size because it places black-bars on a screen that doesn't need them).

Re:Monitors exceeding software limitations

[Anonymous Coward]

1) LCD panels with high resolutions (>1600x1200) need 2 or more DVI connectors. Yuck!

not true, they just need the new dual link generation of DVI.

from http://www.ddwg.org/dvi.html:

Dual Link
Dual Link DVI supports 2x165 MHz (2048x1536 at 60 Hz, 1920x1080 at 85 Hz). A dual link implementation utilizes all 24 of the available pins.

Single Link
Single Link DVI supports a maximum bandwidth of 165 MHz (1920x1080 at 60 Hz, 1280x1024 at 85Hz). A single link implementation utilizes 12 of the 24 available pins.

Re:Monitors exceeding software limitations

[ad0gg]

2) Many software assumes a specific DPI A program that is meant to run at 1024x768 at 96dpi will look like a postage stamp when you get a 300dpi display device (coming soon). A 16x16 icon will be the width of a human hair. Software needs to know that pixels aren't a valid measurement -- You need pixels and DPI.

Icons, toolbars, and other gui widgets will just move to vector graphics and instead of using pixels to define size, you'll use some other unit that represents actual viewable size.

Re:Monitors exceeding software limitations

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are not limitations in the software -- they are evidence of poor coding practices. Big difference.

Re:Monitors exceeding software limitations

[mczak]

Well you're correct, though this specific display really wants 2 dual-link connectors, unless you're satisified with half the refresh rate - of course it has a REALLY high resolution.

Re:Monitors exceeding software limitations

[gnu-generation-one]

"2) Many software assumes a specific DPI"

Software? How about websites?

Read your news in 416 pixels of width, no matter how many pixels your monitor supports!!

Re:Monitors exceeding software limitations

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I'm not bothered by the multi-DVI connection, that bandwidth is needed. Actually, it appears that Apple used a double DVI standard which sends the 2x the DVI signal over one connector. Not too shabby.

I suspect that the DPI issues will be resolved before these displays become commonplace.

I too hate the 1280x1024 resolution. It should have been 1280x960 in the first place, or be 1365x1024.

One thing I've read in a few places is that Mac OS X doesn't do dpi scaling properly. I've seen places that claimed that W-XP does, but that also depends on software that handles it, even some of Microsoft's own software doesn't handle it well.

Re:Monitors exceeding software limitations

[Nurgled]

Windows will let you choose a DPI setting for your monitor, and will let you do it visually by holding a rule to the screen and scaling an on-screen rule to match. However, it still assumes square pixels and some apps are hardcoded for 96dpi (Windows default) and so they will still appear small or, worse, controls will hang out of the client area of their containing window.

They could easily add a new vertical DPI setting to go with the horizontal one, but apps which try to do their own DPI scaling rather than letting Windows do it will break wonderfully! No doubt Microsoft will "fix" this by having apps declare that they know about variable DPI and, in the case where they don't, have GDI transparently scale things... or some other similar compatibility shim.

Re:Monitors exceeding software limitations

[Anonymous Coward]

The resolution independent app thing is interesting. It's best to break up the components of an typical WIMP GUI and see whether they can be resolution independant (typically meaning text/borders/icons/pointers as vectors and relative units - not necessarily real world units). Text is already vector - all operating systems do this. Toolkits supporting non-pixel measurements are rare. Apple got it kinda right with display pdf, but stuck to pixels for icons.. QT/KDE hasn't really approached this although supports SVG for icons. Gnome has SVG icon support, and GTK has some support for relative measurements. Regular Windows has no support, XAML does. MyXaml which is quite cross-platform supports this, and is probably the best cross-platform vector toolkit around.

Re:Monitors exceeding software limitations

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are not limitations in the software -- they are evidence of poor coding practices. Big difference.

They're limitations in the software, caused by poor coding practices. Or, more accurately, caused by focusing on the present (where you get your money from) rather than the future (where you can charge your customers to fix the results of your poor planning).

Re:Monitors exceeding software limitations

[mdielmann]

[asbestos unserwear]
I've written a screensaver (round one) in VB (round two) that drew circular elements (round three). I specifically used scaling features built into VB to make sure my circles were circular. But I did work in pixels (round four) because my screensaver wasn't meant to be viewed in any different manner.
[/asbestos underwear]

Mirror

[Shachaf]

The website was getting slow, so here's a mirror:

Page 1
Page 2
Page 3

/.'D

[orbit0r]

Service Unavailable

mirrors anyone?

worked with them before, thumbs up

[madmethods]

I'm pretty sure these panels are made by IBM and were first sold as the IBM T220/T221, introduced back in 2001. I had the pleasure of working with the prototypes well before that, and they're truly amazing displays. They're sized to be able to mimic two 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper side-by-side at a jaw-dropping 200+ pixel-per-inch resolution. Color, contrast, brightness, viewing angle, and especially black level were all better than anything I had seen at the time (but that was 2000, 2001). They do stretch the refresh capabilities of the cards and the DVI interface, though, so for those FPS games you might want to look elsewhere.

Spec

[Anonymous Coward]

ViewSonic VP2290B 22.2-inch LCD monitor ;Black Specifications
General
Display type Flat panel display:TFT active matrix

Diagonal screen size 22.2 in

Viewable screen size 22.2

Compatibility PC,Mac

Width 21.5 in

Depth 7.7 in

Height 17.3 in

Weight 25.1 lbs

Features OnView,XtremeView

Software included LiquidView

Controls Brightness,
Image
Max resolution 3840 x 2400

Image brightness 235 cd/m2

Image contrast ratio 400:1

Max vertical view angle 170

Max horizontal view angle 170

Max sync rate (V x H) 85 Hz x 91 KHz

Image aspect ratio 16:10
Video Input
Input device type None

Digital video standard Digital Visual Interface (DVI)
Power
Power supply included Power adapter

Operational power consumption 150 Watt

Operational power consumption (standby) 15 Watt

Have some at work

[lava_dot]

We have some of these at work. Both the ViewSonic branded ones and a few IBM ones on loan T221 They look really nice and have a DPI of close to 220dpi. The setup we are testing is a T221 a 21" CRT and 21" B&W monitor all on the same computer. We really want to get 2 T221 on the same computer but can't do it yet.

Great Monitor!

[Anonymous Coward]

My console apps never looked better!

Re:for that price (yes, it's off topic)

[jimicus]

A couple of years ago I'd have agreed with you. But Mandrake (no idea about others, I'd hope much the same holds true) have done some wonderful work in making their X configuration tools xinerama capable - to the point where minimal tweaking is needed.

I have hand-hacked an xinerama-capable XF86Config and can offer this advice if you really want to do it the hard way - don't.

Not new, not the only 9MP one either...

[csirac]

The IBM T221 has a resolution of 3840x2400 in 22.2".

Whilst its RRP from IBM is $8,399 USD you can find some resellers advertising them for $3,999 USD on froogle such as this.

The Iiyama AQU5611DTBK is also a 22" 9.2 Megapixel device.

You need two DVI cables to run these things at a decent screen update rate (no screen flicker, it just takes lots of digital bandwidth to pump that many pixels) when using all those pixels. The cards required are around $1,000 and I've seen Matrox and Nvidia configurations mentioned with the IBM display, though I'm sure ATI's FireGL cards could do the job, software willing.

So, are we going to get a news post about the IBM and Iiyama displays too?

Check this article which talks about the Matrox Parhelia 256HR for use with all three. It's from September 2003.

Re:Not new, not the only 9MP one either...

[Dabel]

And if you're around Orlando Florida, check out the IBM monitor at Epcot center. It's on display at Innoventions!
It's really easy to walk by the display without realizing exactly what the big deal is, I almost did myself. Stop and look for a second and you notice really fine print text, and super-sharp MRI scans from an LCD.

If you want up to date info about displays, check out SID. There's a good article about SID 2004 with lots of juicy info for display buffs here.

The gist of SID 2004 is more flat, more size, more resolution. For people that caught that article when it came out, it verified the rumors of Apple's new 30" display.

Re:Not new, not the only 9MP one either...

[dfghjk]

$2500 for the HR256 and PCI only? No thanks! You can get an AGP card that drives these displays for far less than $1000.

Re:Not new, not the only 9MP one either...

[Anonymous Coward]

IDTech released this product back in 2001 when it listed for about $20,000 and vendors like Viewsonic have been shipping it in it's current form since 2002.

If the industry had adopted Open LVDS back in 2001 like Silicon Graphics and National Semiconductor proposed, instead of the Silicon Image-proprietary TMDS-based DVI pushed by Intel, displays would be cheaper (no need for TMDS-to-LVDS converters in every panel--LVDS is the native interface for almost all LCDs) and we wouldn't be dealing with these ridiculous dual-DVI configurations.

Viewsonic

[Obiwan Kenobi]

Their reputation precedes and urinates on any product that they create. If you have a Viewsonic monitor you know of what I speak.

They are cheap, flimsy, dim, hard to calibrate, and go out quickly.

I know if I was spending six grand on something, it wouldn't have Viewsonic's name on it.

Re:Viewsonic

[W2k]

That's news to me. I'm not a Viewsonic owner, but I was under the impression that Viewsonic bought out Nokia's computer display segment. Nokia's monitors were always awesome (I own a 446XS, best CRT I ever used) so I would expect Viewsonic's monitors to be among the best, as well.

Do you have any actual evidence, even subjective (links?) to back up your statement that Viewsonic monitors are bad?

Re:Viewsonic

[csirac]

As with any company, Viewsonic's cheap-arse economy crap is just that, whilst (I assume) their professional stuff can be good. Other companies like Panasonic have different brands for different market segments; in Panasonic's case, the Technics and Quasar brands are used for more "professional" stuff so as to avoid confusion.

During my time as a PC repair technician, I can attest to the fact that certain (cheap) models of 15"/17" Viewsonic monitors are crap. For cheap CRTs, I recommend Hitachi - the 19" CM721Fs are great for the price.

Viewsonic does have good stuff. But for a 9.2MP 22.2" LCD, I'd rather the IBM T221 as I've already mentioned in a few posts already ;-)

Re:Viewsonic

[Tore S B]

They are cheap, flimsy, dim, hard to calibrate, and go out quickly.

Agreed... I got one second-hand at unversity, and it's horrible. It was a very high-end model, and it was/is impressive to look at. But the entire image is out of focus. It's bad enough that I have to run it at 800x600 to read the text. Very bad with a 21" viewing area. It's from 1997. A monitor should last that amount of time, no matter what. It has been demoted to my bedroom DivX monitor.

Re:Viewsonic

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had a Viewsonic E771 for 4 years now (17"). Still works perfectly, never had a problem. Hell, I spilled coke down the back of the thing a couple years back and its still chugging along.

Sounds like parent has been smoking case plastic.

Re:Viewsonic

[Rathian]

My personal experience:

I too used to believe that that VS were the best money can buy, until I bought one.

A few years ago I purchased a ViewSonic GS815, 21" CRT monitor. It worked OK, but the problem is the screen didn't fill up the full available area when first powered up - after the monitor came up to temp it filled the full display area. Strike 1.

Called ViewSonic, exchanged it out for a different one of the same model - same damn problem. Is THIS the best I can expect from VS?!? Strike 2.

Last year it blew - fortunately it was within the warranty period. I had to ship that heavy SOB back on MY NICKLE - they repaired it and shipped it back. I should've let that SOB just sit and totally fry so it couldn't be fixed at all. Strike 3.

To add insult: I was playing NWN which dropped my refresh rate down to 60Hz - suddenly it goes wacky on me again and compresses the display down to a column in the center of the screen. Every time it drops to 60Hz I get the column. Fortunately I run my normal desktop at 85Hz where the problem doesn't rear its ugly head but still, it's annoying, very annoying.

To further salt the wound: My "Repaired" monitor waited until just after the repair warranty time to exhibit said problem. Calls to VS have been largely unhelpful and unsympathetic. Oh, and I'd have to send it in again on my nickle. (yet another $50)

The whole time this has been going on I've still had my old MAG Innovision MXP17F, it soldiers on and on and just keeps working with hardly a hiccough in the nearly 10 years I've used it.

Would I buy another ViewSonic based on my experiences with the GS815? HELL NO!! It was a POS, the service has been lackluster to crappy, and you pay a premium the name.

Re:Viewsonic

[MonkeyCookie]

I've been very happy with Viewsonic. I owned two 17" Viewsonic monitors and never had a problem with them. A year and a half ago I got a 19" Viewsonic LCD, and I've been enormously pleased with it.

It's interesting to hear someone regard Viewsonic products as crap. I usually hear hear good things about Viewsonic.

I guess that no matter which company you pick, there's always someone who's had bad experiences with it.

Re:Viewsonic

[BrookHarty]

I've had 2 viewsonic monitors burn out on me, but I've been buying viewsonic for years. But my 19 inch burned out, and my 21 inch has alignment problems.

Time to go with another vendor, since im still using tubes. I'll switch to LCD's when 20 inch LCD's dont ghost.

Re:Viewsonic

[dfghjk]

Of course, since this is a badge-engineered IBM display he Viewsonic name is pretty much irrrelevant.

Re:Viewsonic

[alienmole]

It's from 1997. A monitor should last that amount of time, no matter what.

Oh please. Are you suggesting that out of all the monitors which Viewsonic manufactured SEVEN YEARS ago, it's not acceptable for any of them to have degraded since then?

I can only assume that you're as dim as the monitors you're complaining about.

I hope they put the resolution to better use than

[nih]

Service Unavailable

Apple's leadership in monitors....

[Anonymous Coward]

...didn't last long! This is *MUCH* better than the 30" cinema

Re:Apple's leadership in monitors....

[JackAxe]

This monitor has been out for over a year now.

But you just wanted to take a childish blow at Apple.

Re:Apple's leadership in monitors....

[Anonymous Coward]

But 'child' and 'apple' always go so well together...

Re:Apple's leadership in monitors....

[JackAxe]

Buy a Mac and dissipate your ignorance.

How can you trust

[Anonymous Coward]

trustedreviews.com's reviews if all it says is
Service Unavailable
!?!?!

For imaging

[csirac]

It isn't the size, it's the DPI and sheer number of pixels.

Also the IBM T221 or the Iiyama AQU5611DTBK displays are (worthy) competition. I'd go for the IBM display myself.

Take a look at IBM's list of potential uses: ...
* Engineering--view and rotate large 3D models e.g. automobiles and aircraft
* Gas & oil industry--seismic imaging for exploration, production and reservoir management
* Geographic Information Systems (GIS)--mapping, satellite imaging, asset management
* Medical assessment--radiography, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound, nuclear medicine, fluoroscopy, and angiography
* Publishing--pre-press, service providers, digital museums

These are meant for scientists and doctors, not UT2004 frag fests.

ViewSonic/Apple comparison

[javaxman]

All I can think to do is compare this to the recently announced, equally outlandish Apple 30" monitor specs.

It's vaguely interesting, even if I'll never be able to afford either. A few highlights :

ViewSonic : 22.2" 3840x2400 $6,000
Apple : 29.7" 2560 x 1600 $3,300

The ViewSonic page is completely devoid of response time stats... any ideas why?

What application requires that kind of pixel density, by the way?

Re:ViewSonic/Apple comparison

[Cecil]

What application requires that kind of pixel density, by the way?

Congratulations on following the link:

...it is aimed at the professional imaging market where analysis of high-resolution imagery is key. You know the stuff. Satellite reconnaissance, space exploration, CAD, GIS, medical/science imaging, and so on.

"Optimal resolution" != Native resolution....

[GuyFawkes]

the manuf blurb talks a lot about "optimal" resolution and makes ZERO mention of native (true) resolution, as such I'm guessing this is a 1920 x 1200 TFT with on board GFX card (same as proper industrial kit) that takes the input RGB and translates it into the TFT specific driver signal.. see ginsbury.co.uk etc) so in other words... marketing bullshit.

Re:"Optimal resolution" != Native resolution....

[GuyFawkes]

TROLL???!!!!

How the FUCK is raising a valid question about the native resolution of a TFT trolling?

Stupid cunts.

Re:"Optimal resolution" != Native resolution....

[EvanED]

RTFA... it's right there in the table on page 3. Native resolution, 3,840 x 2,400.

Re:"Optimal resolution" != Native resolution....

[dfghjk]

You would be incorrect in guessing that (and stupid as well).

Re:"Optimal resolution" != Native resolution....

[dfghjk]

Looks more like you stated "marketing bullshit" to me. Where was the question in the original post? I suppose "troll" was chosen since "moron" was not an option.

I'm done buying viewsonic

[drinkypoo]

I bought a Viewsonic PF790 and it looked great. Then it died. I sent it in and they sent me back a monitor that died one year out of warranty. My next monitor will be whatever's cheap, since I know buying the expensive display doesn't mean it'll last, either.

Not _meant_ for you

[csirac]

Take a look at the IBM T221 and look at the listed example applications.

These things are meant for scientists and doctors, not consumers like you and I.

well well well

[timts]

the review said it's better for his graphic work, but I think he is still better off with two 21inch dell LCD.

Never happy

[paradaxiom]

Jalal Werfalli: Now, in my book, that is a dream resolution to work with especially when image manipulation is the focus of your work. For me, I would love to edit and correct my photographs on this display purely because there is so much desktop space. For instance, I could easily display, at full resolution, the RAW images captured with my camera's 6.29 million pixel CMOS sensor. No need to use the zoom tool here - just the complete picture in all its glory at my finger tips!

Yes, but now you need a better digital camera ...

other vendors have had several years

[peter303]

IBM has been showing a 25"-9MB for at least two years; Mitsubishu at least a year.
A direct PC screenshot looks like a postage stamp. My near vision was not acute enough to resolve many of the details. I'd probably see it better on a large screen.

Re:Errr...

[tiger99]

Not so sure about that. My criteria would involve comparing a full-size drawing (A0 size in Europe, don't know what they use in the US) to what you can see on the screen. CAD has hitherto been very inefficient because you don't have full visibility and resolution simultaneously. This may get close to it. I don't have exact paper sizes to hand, but multiplying up from A4, which IIRC is 297*220mm, A0 would be 1188*880mm. Now, I have seen 0.2mm drawing pens used, maybe even 0.15mm, which suggests that you would need about 6000*4500 or maybe 7500*5600 approx, to get what can be done with pen and ink.

I observed 20 years ago that CAD would become more efficient when the equivalent to a drawing board was available, now we are close but not quite there yet. Put a touch screen on this, with decent software to follow the stylus, and it would be getting fairly close in terms of usefulness.

I had no idea how long it would take to get this far, of course. However, it is a commendable achievement.

Now, as my Dell laptop, now about 3 years old, has a 1600*1200 screen, why can't I get at least as much resoultion in a cheap desktop LCD? I think there are marketing issues as well as technical involved somehow. I have never used less than 1280*1024 at home, it seems the bare minimum for serious work, even wordprocessing, yet they still sell utterly useless 800*600 screens, both LCD and CRT. It is a strange business.....

In several years, when and if they are affordable, I will want one. Hopefully the graphics cards will be up to the job by then, it obviously needs an entirely new interface design. But we might be back to the days, not seen since the 286 era, of Autocad taking 20 minutes to move a layer in a drawing......

CPU and bus designers beware, there will be new constraints to satisfy, you may need a 1024-bit wide memory bus, for example.

Heavy!

[Fratz]

I didn't read the article, but someone told me it was over 4,600 pounds! I don't care what the resolution is if it's that heavy!

(Damn ambiguous terminology)

I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, before I go onto the VP2290b's performance you may want know how this display actually works. Well without getting too bogged down in the details, let's begin with saying it's not your typical "plug in one cable and you're off" display. In fact, around the back behind a couple of removeable panels are a pair of dual TMDS DVI-D ports which have to be connected in the correct order using the two DVI cables provided by Matrox. These cables both come with 60-pin LFH-60 connectors at each end which support two DVI cannels, the reason for which will become clear later. Once these are in place, it's just a question of installing the driver CD and running the setup program.

That tells me that they are using a quad monitor video card from Matrox all hooked into one quad monitor. So basically they took four monitors, cut out the distance between em, and taped em together to get this bad boy.

sorry, porn lovers

[Errtu76]

What can be an issue, however, is liquid crystal response time and in the VP2290b's case this comes in at 50ms (25ms rise, 25ms fall). At this speed, movement portrayed on the screen did smear which might be an issue for those where video editing and gaming is important. That said, the VP2290b hasn't really been designed with this sort of use in mind and its true focus is more about static image editing

so it's nice for photoshoppers and flash people (no, i'm not gonna say flashers with this subject), but that's about it.

Re:sorry, porn lovers

[dfghjk]

...and anything else not requiring 60 fps video. Web browsing, word processing, etc are all fine.

A resolution gripe

[ToadMan8]

Two things:
First of all why can't one find a 19 inch LCD that does 1600 x 1200 for a reasonable price? They barely exist at all and consumers of menial computers keep buying dumb 17 inch ones that run at 1024 x 768 and 19 inchers that are plugging away at 1280 x 1024. I have no interest in giving up my SyncMaster 950p until I can get a comparably sided LCD for 400 or 450 or so that runs at least 1600 x 1200.

Next gripe, why do people never post high resolution images of anything online? Jump on Google image search and try to find a 1600 x 1200 or even 1280 x 1024 of basically anything (cityscapes, famous people, logos, whatever). The only thing that big is geek vacation photo gallerys and NASA photos. And they are nerds. Does everyone else not appreciate high resoultions or is their equipment so crappy a 1024 pixel wide image scrolling two pages over. Maybe those fucking IE toolbars have taken over their shit so much they only have a 800 pixel wide view. Gaaa.

Re:A resolution gripe

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they don't want to have to pay the bandwidth charges associated with putting high-res pictures up

Perhaps they don't need high-res for the pictures of the family reunion where Aunt Rose baked her apple pie for everyone

Perhaps they only have 1024x768 equipment that having higher res pictures doesn't make a difference

Perhaps they don't want cheapskates like you ripping off their work in high quality.

Re:A resolution gripe

[alecks]

You may want to look here for high-res images: iStockPhoto.com I agree with you on 1600x1200 17" or 19" LCDs.. I'd love two.

Re:A resolution gripe

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha. Love the way your post starts and then ends majorly bitching. Also getting a dig at IE. excellent.

You are of course, completely correct.

Doom3

[Slayer_X]

Excellent, finally We can play Doom3 without limitations
xD

Re:Doom3

[JustNiz]

...except framerate.
That resolution would kill the GPU's 3D rate deader than a very dead thing.

Rant!

[Dogtanian]

A Hardley (sic) is the world's best selling motorized wheelchair for hippies

You mean former-hippies from California who had rich parents to subsidise their basically self-indulgent middle-class take on the whole counter-culture thing (and I'm sure that at the time they were deluded enough to think that they meant it)? The same types who went on to become the uber-capitalists they were always destined to be (I won't call them sell-outs because they were never genuinely buy-ins) but still "retain" their hippie "roots"?

The same types that admen market expensive Audi cars to in psychedelically-coloured adverts, "inspired by Jimi Hendrix"?

In other words, those responsible for promoting the 1960s as *the* decade, those that would never admit they are growing old, but indicating otherwise by clinging to an idealised past that never truly existed (yep, you know you're old when Jimi Hendix inspires you to buy a new car instead of a new guitar)?

Let's cut this rant short with the general ambience I'm trying to create:-
Ben and Jerry's hippy ice cream, brought to you in horrendously overpriced "cute" little tubs by the conglomerate they happily sold out to, naming their ice cream after Jerry Garcia.

Interesting

[csirac]

... the sid.org link is great!

My perfect display

[Omnifarious]

This is exactly the display I want for coding work. I can't understand why people complain about text size! That's an OS defficiency, not a display problem. More resolution is never bad. The OS should let you scale all the fonts on the display.

I would love to have this display and work with all anti-aliased fonts, even in my editor windows, even if I had to give up emacs (perish the thought) to do it.

Meh.

[Bluesman]

I'll just sit further away from the LCD screen that I have.

Whoa! Instant perceived resolution increase.

great!

[Nspace13]

the pimples on some free porn girl's ass just got clearer

Microsoft Response

[gafferted]

In response to these displays, Microsoft have announced that the GUI for Longhorn will be even more chunky than XP.

Re:monitor sunning linux

[Dogtanian]

In general, your Monitor will not run linux.

Yeah, but it won't be that long before someone hacks their super-sophisticated 2006-era monitor to run Linux by itself.

That's kind of meaningless; musical birthday cards will probably have enough power to run Linux by that time too...

I agree. some points

[DRWHOISME]

LCD's are like microchips. A real son of a B___ to manufacture. We need OLED or plasma for larger screens if you want affordability.

Your second point is true. Nobody does because i guess it's bandwidth concerns. You actually have website owners telling people to avoid slashdot linking because of this. They get rate hiked I guess.

Multimonitors and X

[Bishop]

Some of the old ISA VGA cards would not work with another VGA card. A modern PCI card should not be a problem though. YMMV.

For the setup you are looking for I would skip xinerama and go straight for the old multimonitor support. The downside to multimonitor is that you can't move apps from one screen to the other. On the plusside both displays are treated seperately so fullscreen games and such should work as you want.

I found that KDE did not have good multimonitor support. Konq in particular did not like starting on the second display. KDE Xinerama support wasn't stellar either. Dialog boxes would apear between monitors, and fullscreen mode often meant fullscreen across both displays. Hopefully some of those issues have been resolved.

Re:Multimonitors and X

[bhtooefr]

That was what I was thinking - old multimonitor. I won't be running KDE - it'll be Fluxbox. The only questions I have are:

Can I get the toolbar running on the main monitor, but the slit (and Kopete) running on the second monitor?

Will the old multimon work with 16 colors on the second monitor (I'd figure it'll be more graceful than Xinerama, though...)?

Re:Multimonitors and X

[Bishop]

Fluxbox should be fine. When you start Kopete and the Slit you will probably have to specify the second monitor with "-display :0.1". I believe multimonitor works with different resolutions and colour depths.

Re:Multimonitors and X

[bhtooefr]

The slit is part of Fluxbox. You start a dockapp, it finds something compatible with the WindowMaker dock (the Fluxbox slit in my case), and docks. So, the question is, does Fluxbox have a slit for each monitor? If so, -display :0.1 should work, but if not, it'd either just be in 0.0's slit, or loose in 0.1. Has anyone tried this?

Re:Multimonitors and X

[bhtooefr]

*kicks self for not Googling earlier*

This goes into ~/.fluxbox/init, and it's exactly what I needed (a slitted app shows on ALL slits - the config file that I stole this from and optimized had it autohidden on 0.0):

session.screen1.slit.onTop: True
session.screen1.slit.autoHide: False
session.screen1.slit.placement: BottomRight
session.screen1.slit.direction: Vertical

This monitor has been out for more then a year. =P

[JackAxe]

And it's finally a news blurb on Slashdot now. Oh well.

*Blah*

This is a rebadged IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW...This monitor is made by Chi Mie Optoelectronics of Taiwan in partnership with IBM. Chi Mei bought IBM's lcd plant there and continued production ( it is a lower price :)).

It is a good product because the 200dpi is important to readability of stroke/pictogram based languages on a screen. Even for western readers 200 dpi allows book like type and less eye strain when reading.

This would rock with Scribus and/or Sodi Podi or any print like application.

Old news? Again.

[Duncan3]

Wasn't IBM selling these over a year ago? Oh yes they were...

And didn't /. cover it then too? Over 200 DPI don't ya know :)

$6000?

[Chuck Bucket]

...is that all? I know, it's for "professionals", but I'd counter with what professionals? I don't know any that work somewhere that'd spring for that. Perhaps it'd be best for some college kid playing Doom3.

CB

Viewsonic let us demo one of these at work...

[Anonymous Coward]

... and it is an incredible piece of hardware. The problem is that the software support for it wasnt too wonderful, at least in Windows.

The box we tried it with ran Windows XP and I found it really difficult to get the font and control sizes to scale reasonably in most applications. You can imagine what happens to small images on web pages when the resolution is this hight - they basically appear to be .1x.1 inches across.

On the other hand, with Clear Type turned on, Word and PDF documents looked incredible - absolutely no jagged edges visible at all.

So my conclusion was that in order to take advantage of the resolution of this monitor you really need to get away from raster graphics to vector graphics. But most user interfaces for current software applications are pixel defined rather than vector defined.

So in the end I found this monitor to be too ahead of its time to be useful - unless you use it in niche ways.

Re:Viewsonic let us demo one of these at work...

[dfghjk]

I'd imagine software support for anything other than Windows is nonexistent.

Re:Viewsonic let us demo one of these at work...

[be-fan]

You'd be surprised. I have a pretty high-res dispay (133 ppi) and KDE does a better job of scaling than Windows does. The main reason is that the Qt widget set is font-sensitive, so when you increase the fonts to the appropriate size, everything else follows. KDE also has several large icon sizes available, so icons aren't a problem either. In Windows, the widget set is not font-sensitive, so you have to hope your application's author took scaling into account. And there is a hard-coded icon size, so you're stuck there as well.

Re:Viewsonic let us demo one of these at work...

[dfghjk]

Yes, but is any card capable of driving these displays supported in X? I'd be very excited if there is but I doubt it seriously. Anyone know?

Here's what I want...

[bgarcia]

At 204 pixels per inch this display has pretty much matched the quality you'd expect from a standard photographic print viewed at normal distances.

Ok LCD monitor manufacturers, here's what I want:

A 10 inch monitor with this pixel density.

I don't care so much about have a big monitor. What I really want are lots of pixels. A 10" monitor with 200ppi would give me a 1600x1200 display! I would be very happy to have this in a nice, compact laptop! Or even as a desktop display!

Re:Here's what I want...

[Anonymous Coward]

They're getting closer to that point. I have a Toshiba M200 Tablet PC and it's a 12" screen with 1400x1050 resolution.

Toshiba has also started manufacturing the LCDs at this resolution for other companies to put in their products. Hopefully they will reach 1600x1200 in a 12" display soon, not sure that they'd ever scale it down to 10" though...

Re:Here's what I want...

[Anonymous Freak]

Sony has a 5" display at 800x600 in their U50/U70 micro-notebook. And their slightly older U101 packs 1024x768 into a 7.1" display. (The U series used to have a 6.something" display at 1024x768, which was 200+ ppi.)

I agree. I think 200ppi is the next logical step. Then you just need to tell the OS to double all standard UI elements, and everything becomes readable, and crystal clear. (Windows already has this ability, which would be of great use in the story's ViewSonic/IBM monitor. The ViewSonic appears to be an OEM version of IBM's T220 display. Even the casing looks the same.)

Re:Here's what I want...

[K1-V116]

Laptop display? Forget that....give this to me embedded in the drawing surface of a Wacom tablet.....

*drool*

Re:Here's what I want...

[dododge]

I don't care so much about have a big monitor. What I really want are lots of pixels. A 10" monitor with 200ppi would give me a 1600x1200 display!

Dell claims to have a variety of laptops with 15.4" 1920x1200 (WUXGA) displays. That's about 125ppi.

For some reason they don't offer equivalent densities and resolutions on standalone LCD panels -- only when it's part of a laptop. You can't get 1600x1200 in a standalone from Dell without going to at least 20". Granted that 20" is a very nice display, but I'm already running 1920x1440 on 19" CRTs so in some ways it'd end up being a step down.

Highly Adjustable DPI

[DonGar]

I wonder just how many other problems you run into trying to do everyday things on such a high-DPI monitor.

Our whole concept of how UI's are built are mostly built around absolute sizes measured in pixels. There have been some semi-recent moves towards smarter systems (layout managers, etc), but mostly those system are never complete and comprehensive because what we have now works well enough.

Will monitors like these be prevented from moving into mainstream because they make the text to small to read?

Re:Highly Adjustable DPI

[Moofie]

Apple's Quartz rendering engine I believe renders a lot of UI elements as vector objects, so I'd imagine it scales pretty darn well.

But, of course, it's from Apple, so it must suck. Just like the display they released on Monday. You know, the one with almost as high of a resolution and half the price.

Re:Highly Adjustable DPI

[darien]

On Windows at least you can change the system DPI in the advanced display properties. I'm sure some badly-written UIs won't respect that (and will have e.g. tiny clickable buttons), but I've been playing around with it and a surprising number of applications work perfectly well.

Re:monitor running linux

[Animats]

Why not? Monitors already run quite a bit of software, for configuration, on screen menus, and "digital rights management".

I'm surprised that the monitor vendors haven't tried to position the monitor as the center of the system. Plug keyboard, mouse, joystick, and USB gadgets into the monitor, and have one cable going back to a featureless "compute box". Monitor makers control the visual "look" of the computer. The computer can be integrated into the monitor stand.

Answers

[appleLaserWriter]

(1) Look at the Samsung 213T. 19", 1600x1200, 500:1 contrast ratio, $1190. Alternately, grab an old Apple 22" DVI Cinema Display. 1600x1024, wide aspect, usually $1000. Still an excellent display after five years. Better than many 3 year old CRTs.

(2) bandwidth is expensive, webservers are slow, and there is no practical way to prevent content theft. Also, high-res stock photography is significantly more expensive than the low-res stuff.

Re:Answers

[be-fan]

Um, the 213T is 21.3", which is a lowly ~100 dpi.

IBM T-220 vs IBM T-221 vs ViewSonic VP2290b

[mah!]

If anyone is interested in more first-hand experience with these, please see my previous post about "Bertha" displays attached to another story:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=112692&cid=956 2882

old news

[canavan]

I think this has already been reported on /. around November 2003, about the time sgi introduced this thing. They also sell the proper graphics hardware to attach 10 of those to a single box. No need to use a wimpy PCI based Parhelia.

Hey, I've got one of these!

[jimhill]

My bosses here at the Bomb Factory bought me one of them for data visualization efforts. Sadly, it's hanging off a Windows XP box and at the highest resolution dialogue boxes are utterly unreadable. Once you know what the boxes are trying to tell you, though, you can go high-res and it doth kick much ass.

I can't wait until the price comes down enough to consider one for home.

Re:Hey, I've got one of these!

[JustNiz]

>> at the highest resolution dialogue boxes are
>> utterly unreadable ..So why don't you just set the system text font size to be bigger?

Re:Hey, I've got one of these!

[jimhill]

I have maxed it out. That's the mind-blowing thing about these screens. We have a package called MagnaView or some such name that does a pretty good job magnifying things like the text under icons but a lot of applications' dialogue boxes seem to be hard-coded and there's nothing we can do about those.

Nice price...

[Maljin Jolt]

With that price, they could bundle in a free computer to encourage customers to buy.

Insert Random P0rn Comment Here

[notcreative]

I've never seen one so big!

how about DMPGA (deca-mega-pixel graphics array)

[Preposterous Coward]

only a slight exaggeration... no worse than the hard disk guys ;-)

I don't care

[Barlo_Mung_42]

I still want one. I'm a geek so I'm sure I could find something cool (geeky) to do with it.

a monitor for unix...

[unics]

Finally a monitor that I can use on my UNIX box. Those silly toy lcds that can only do 1024x768 function better as a paper weight.

On a more serious note:

ViewSonic has an excellent reputation for making quality displays. I still have a ViewSonic P810 21" that has exceptional picture quality since I have R/G/B/H & V Sync BNC inputs from my video card.

Actually for the mathamatically challenged

[Tetsugaku-San]

4,641.25 GBP United Kingdom Pounds = 8,445.91 USD United States Dollars

Worrying about spotting dead pixels

[fnj]

Dude, if you can't spot it, is it really dead (effectively)? Think about it, really.

Display at Disney

[jamesshuang]

They had one of these screens on display at Disneyworld last year I went visiting, although it was an IBM model. Found at Epcot, the innovations booth. Incredible screen, the pictures look like they were painted on the screen, not the normal LCD look...

Seconded.

[Grendel Drago]

Agreed. Getting decent-quality images on Wikipedia is frequently a pain. If there's ever a print version of a subset of the articles, it will most likely resemble crap when it comes to the images.

Oh well. Sooner they have SVG support for diagrams, the better...

--grendel drago

Nice display, but...

[procrusteous]

Let's see, that's about 204 dpi screen resolution. Although much better than most displays, it doesn't match the 300 dpi resolution of my old HP2 laser printer.

Re:Nice display, but...

[dfghjk]

Perhaps you should use that for your monitor then. I bet it'd work great for video.

Scalable desktop.

[Grendel Drago]

Good article on this is SVG and its Path into the Linux Desktop. Some games in GNOME 2.6 already run in SVG; all (supposedly) will by GNOME 2.8.

Check out the Gorilla icons for GNOME as well. There's a video demonstrating the hotness. (The video's not that great-quality, but it's an adequate demonstration.) (More information about SVG themes available at Spheres and Crystals SVG theme.)

Coming as well: themed colors; SVG graphics can refer to a color from a system or user stylesheet instead of having them hardcoded. Lots of possibilities. Vector graphics rock.

--grendel drago

Damn DVI

[_damnit_]

I have a nice 24.1 inch Sun LCD that has ~100dpi. That is good enough for me for now. Of course I'd like the 300dpi for smaller screens. Things like ebooks will be possible at that point. For larger monitors I don't need 300dpi unless I plan on planting myself inches from the screen.
My biggest complaint about these large res monitors is the crappy DVI interface we've been saddled with. DVI maxes out at 1920X1080. With some tricks ATI drives my monitor at 1920x1200. Nvidia took that out of their drivers for a while (I haven't looked to see if they got it fixed in the last 6 months). Now that is with the double DVI-D cable. If you want more than that, you have to resort to the two cable BS that you see on the posted site. I find that extremely sad. Wy the hell can't we get a better digital standard for monitors than this? Not to mention they push this down our throats with HDTV connections too to prevent copying. What a load of crap.

Re:Damn DVI

[Anonymous Coward]

DVI dual-link goes up to about 350 MPix/sec bandwidth, according to the people who developed it. At 75Hz with normal blanking intervals, that still works out to 2048x1536, according to them, and significantly higher with an LCD at 60 Hz and 5% blanking. Apple gets 2560x1600, which seems to be a bit higher than 1920x1080. With 60 Hz 5% blanking, you can just do 1920x1080 on a single-link connector, although with higher refresh rates and normal blanking intervals, you have to go dual-link.

anti-aliased?

[Nurgled]

I don't think it's called "anti-aliasing" when there are no jaggies in the first place! :)

Re:anti-aliased?

[Omnifarious]

*laugh* The human eye is generally very sensitive to contrast differences, even on very small scales. So, the artifically sharp contrast differences from anti-aliased fonts would still be noticeable until each pixel of the display lit up an area much smaller than a single nerve cell in your eye.

We have a few of these... except...

[GC]

they're called IBM T221's, and we've had them for about 2 years now.

These are probably re-badged, re-assembled models of exactly the same technology.

Incredibly though, I think the IBM T221's are cheaper...

HELP

[Anonymous Coward]

I am using a 14" monitor at 800x600@16bpp@72Hz on an obsolete Power Mac G3.

I want a new monitor and computer, but I have $500 to my name. Help!

Hey, no dissing on Ben & Jerry's.

[Behrooz]

Ben & Jerry's is one of the most socially and environmentally responsible corporations in operation in America today, regardless of their trendy packaging and premium product.

Accusing B&J's of selling out is both inaccurate and unjust, and lumping them in with car companies is just clueless.

Re:Hey, no dissing on Ben & Jerry's.

[Dogtanian]

Ben & Jerry's is one of the most socially and environmentally responsible corporations

Hmm. Didn't Ben and Jerry's stop using free range eggs after a while?

Whatever...

[The Master Control P]

I just want to know where on earth you got porno pictures at 9 megapixels.

in a word, resolution

[RMH101]

you can read a broadsheet newspaper from 18 inches away - because it's very high res. a 21" monitor at 1024x768 is a bit too in-your-face - but at 1600x1280 is much better. My NEC 21" would be nicer still at even higher resolutions, but it doesn't support it. I don't get this - I can buy a laptop with a 15" 1900xwhatever display, but I can't easily buy a desktop 17" with the same resolution.
Life will be even nicer if your OS handles high res properly - windows isn't too great at this unless your eyes are good!

Iiyama Prolite E511S 1600x1200 USD$500

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a 20inch LCD TFT panel.

Re:Iiyama Prolite E511S 1600x1200 USD$500

[ToadMan8]

USD 500? From the back of a truck? http://www.dealtime.com/xFS?FN=&KW=Iiyama+Prolite+ E511S&FD=0&x=0&y=0 says it's way more. If you read this e-mail me and tell me where to get it for 500!!