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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[urbaneassault]

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

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

[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

[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.

Product link

[Karamchand]

ViewSonic's Product Info about the VP2290b.

Tell me

[harley_frog]

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

Re:Tell me

[garcia]

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

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

[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.

Seriously..

[Anonymous Coward]

who needs 9.2Mpixel resolution for porn?

Me!

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

[j-turkey]

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

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

[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.

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... :)

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

[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

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

[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

[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).

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

[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.

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!

dead pixel warranty?

[rexguo]

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

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! :-)

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.

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?

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: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.

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, ...

[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.

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.

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...

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).

Mirror

[Shachaf]

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

Page 1
Page 2
Page 3

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.

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: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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.)

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

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.

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.

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...