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ViewSonic VP2290b Super High-Res Monitor

Posted by timothy on from the creative-rationalization dept.

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.

22 of 408 comments (clear)

  1. Toys for the rich by ackthpt · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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!

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    1. Re:Toys for the rich by ackthpt · · Score: 2, Interesting
      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.

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    2. Re:Toys for the rich by Mysticalfruit · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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...

      --
      Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
    3. Re:Toys for the rich by Carnildo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      "They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
    4. Re:Toys for the rich by chefmonkey · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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.

    5. Re:Toys for the rich by severoon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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

      --
      but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
    6. Re:Toys for the rich by dasmegabyte · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Hey freaks: now you're ju
  2. Re:Tell me by ackthpt · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  3. High quality 3D displays by GillBates0 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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).

    --
    An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
    1. Re:High quality 3D displays by Rolker · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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!

  4. medical imaging by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  5. Comparison to Apple by mblase · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. It's all in one's Mentality by quadra23 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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.

  7. Re:Definitely cool ... but not too practical by daviddennis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

  8. Monitors exceeding software limitations by MobyDisk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

  9. A resolution gripe by ToadMan8 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
  10. Viewsonic let us demo one of these at work... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... 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.

  11. Here's what I want... by bgarcia · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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!

    --
    I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
  12. IBM T-220 vs IBM T-221 vs ViewSonic VP2290b by mah! · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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

  13. Re:for that price by blixel · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  14. Re:Hey, I've got one of these! by jimhill · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
  15. We have a few of these... except... by GC · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...