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Dell, HP, Lenovo Announce New Display Protocol
An anonymous reader writes "If HDMI, DVI and UDI weren't enough for you, several major PC manufacturers have announced a joint alliance to come up with another display adapter, creatively named Displayport. The new method is backwards compatible with DVI, but offers double the bandwidth."
Another toy, Will help destroy, The elder race of man. Thank you Geddy. So, now the average consumer is even more confused when they go to the store?
More importantly than being backward compatible with DVI is well it accept a DVI-VGA adapter. You're not taking my kick ass 17" IBM tubes from my workbench any time soon. LCD is just not dependable for working at various resolutions.
It looks more like they are planning some craptacular (via a scam chip buried someplace in the machine) way to make it impossible to view their (someone "their's") expensive "intellectual property" unless it is in the approved format of the week. Crack one level, you still have to view it, only to meet the new craptacular connection and monitor, tough noogies again. Call it defense of profits in depth, hard wired. Hit 'em in the hardware, hit 'em in the software, double nail them with laws, eventually they have 99% of the people buffaloed into economic submission..
Of course, that is a real wild guess....I am just a skeptic by nature when it comes to this sort of thing - "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me 7,963 times, shame on me" deal.. "New and Improved" - from big industry sources, most always translates as "a new conjob they have come up with and an improved way to keep sucking dollars out of your wallet"
DVI was braindead from the start. The protocol limited connections to 1600x1200 (1920x1200 if you pushed it). Their solution to higher resolutions is dual link which suffered from a chicken and egg problem. With no monitors supporting it no video cards bothered to add support. With no video cards to drive them, nobody bothered creating monitors that would take advantage of dual link. Most video cards still don't bother to support it.
LCD technology scales up much more cost effectively than CRT did so with the advent of LCD, the economics of big screen displays were about to get much better. At the time LCDs started becoming popular, I was working on a 21" CRT at 1600x1200. Unfortunately, because of the limitations of single link DVI, while 24, 26 and 28" monitors may have been cost effective to create, interfacing them with a computer was impractical. Instead you see the abomination of people sitting in front of 2 smaller monitors. Apple finally broke the chicken and egg problem with their 30" Apple Cinema display. They built dual link into their entire product line in preparation for it's launch. Dell now sells a 30" LCD for PCs as well and finally the latest generation of ultra-high end video cards now mostly support dual link. With this hurdle overcome, DVI is finally set to become a good digital display standard.
From what I understand this new standard will be incapable of driving monitors at resolutions above what these 30" displays can do now. That's nice but DVI is there and prepared to surpass that. Why create a new standard that limits display size to a resolution that was reached a year before the standard is even released, especially when dual link support is finally taking hold and the original limitations of DVI are starting to melt away. While I would like to see DVI replaced with something smaller and more capable, this new standard seems even more short sighted as the original DVI standard to me (since they don't even provide a path to higher resolutions).
Make it support up to 42" displays (20gb/s) and you've got a standard that makes sense. Otherwise.. lets just stick with DVI.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
No I wouldn't, becuase I won't by any of that content.
To use your car anaolgy, it would be like car manufactures being forced to make cars that couldn't speed. And yes that would cause one hell of an uproar. So I, like everyone else will bitch about HDCP crap.
DRM has a NEGATIVE value to the consumer, the only way to get consumers to buy it is to force them. It really pisses me off. We could be in the middle of a true revolution in digital content, but the "Content Providers" are such greedy bastards they need to "protect their revenue", all while failing to realize that if they just went along with what everyone wanted, they could actually, eventually make MORE money (see the VCR for an historical example they themselves experienced, but are unable, do to their stupidity to apply to this situation).
And true there really is a digital content revolution going on right now, but its wayyy behind where it could (or should) be.
Unfortunately it's not going to be _your_ option. The fact that it's optional for companies to deploy does us no good.