Alienware's Curved Monitor

ViperArrow writes "Alienware has showcased a curved display prototype supporting a resolution of 2880x900, aimed mainly toward gamers, with a refresh rate of .02ms. This 3-foot-wide DLP with LED illumination will be available by the second half of 2008. The monitor is still showing some flaws, but Alienware assures us that these will be gone by release. No price has been revealed as of yet."

Comments

Here's a picture...

[DaFallus]

since the linked article doesn't have one... here

Re:Here's a picture...

[Anonymous Coward]

The pics are at the bottom, the video is the main media up front tho

Re:Here's a picture...

[Joe Snipe]

since the linked article doesn't have one...

No, they didn't have one. They had nine. And a video.

Re:Here's a picture...

[crymeph0]

GP's probably running NoScript in FireFox. I had to temporarily allow scripts from gawker.com to see the pictures and video.

Re:Here's a picture...

[DaFallus]

My bad, I use NoScript and I didn't realize you had to allow scripts to run from 5 different sites to get the pictures/video to load...

Re:Here's a picture...

[DaFallus]

Apologies for replying to my own post, but I just wanted to point out that I was wrong and that the original article does have pictures and a video. I browse with Firefox and NoScript so I did not see the images until I temporarily allowed scripts from gawker.

Re:Here's a picture...

[Doc Ruby]

Dammit, that looks just as unrealistic as everything else I see pictured on this flat monitor I use. YouTube videos of HD-TV demos can't fool me either...

Re:Here's a picture...

[dissy]

since the linked article doesn't have one... No, they didn't have one. They had nine. And a video. I can confirm, they have no images or video.
It's possible they have some crap javascript or java, but definatly no images or video.

Re:Here's a picture...

[das_magpie]

Pictures look good to me?

4 Monitors in one?

[Wakk013]

Looks like 4 monitors running 720x900 snapped together. Does not look curved during game play. Doesn't look like this product is really ready as yet.

Nice idea though. Good eye candy, but that's about it right now.

Re:4 Monitors in one?

[Brad1138]

Looks like 4 monitors running 720x900 snapped together

1440x900 is a common LCD display resolution. I'd say it's 2 monitors in one.

Re:4 Monitors in one?

[Bender Unit 22]

Indeed.
"Alienware has showcased a curved display prototype"

prototype
(pr't-tp') pronunciation

n.

      1. An original type, form, or instance serving as a basis or standard for later stages.
      2. An original, full-scale, and usually working model of a new product or new version of an existing product.
      3. An early, typical example.
      4. Biology. A form or species that serves as an original type or example.

[French, from Greek prtotupon, from neuter of prtotupos, original : prto-, proto- + tupos, model.]
prototypal pro'totyp'al (-t'pl) or pro'totyp'ic (-tp'k) or pro'totyp'ical (--kl) adj.

Re:4 Monitors in one?

[Apathy451]

I know this is /., but RTFA: "The Soylent Green: You can see the seams between this monitor's four segments, but the Alienware humanoids tell us that flaw will be gone by the time this craft lands on Earth."

Re:4 Monitors in one?

[Brad1138]

Thanks! I did RTFA, Brilliant observation btw. How did you get "Looks like 4 monitors running 720x900 snapped together" from "You can see the seams between this monitor's four segments"? Did you need your calculator for 2880/4=720? Who has ever seen a 720x900 monitor? It is exactly twice as wide as a very common wide screen monitor resolution, which to me looks like 2 monitors in one.

Re:4 Monitors in one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who has ever seen a 720x900 monitor?
You've never seen a 5:4 monitor rotated 90 degrees?

It is exactly twice as wide as a very common wide screen monitor resolution, which to me looks like 2 monitors in one.
Brilliant deduction. How do you get 4 segments out of 2 flat monitors? Break them in half?

Thanks! I did RTFA...

I suggest you RTFA again and this time pay close attention to the pictures; specifically the picture showing the back of the unit.

It is exactly twice as wide as a very common wide screen monitor resolution, which to me looks like 2 monitors in one.

Again your brilliance is unmatched! It's almost as if they wanted the monitor to be twice as wide as a common resolution...

Re:4 Monitors in one?

[Fieryphoenix]

TFS says it is not an LCD at all. As stated in the video, it's a rear-projection DLP. It has four elements, the joins of which are not currently seamless. Common LCD sizes have no relevance in this case, but at least you're thinking.

hmm

[wwmedia]

did everyone notice in the video the way the monitor seems to be broken into 4 with the colors being dimmer?

anyways image how pRon would look on that!

Re:hmm

[Anne_Nonymous]

p Ron Hubbard?

Re:hmm

[peragrin]

I am wondering though how visible the seams are when viewing it in Real Life. sometimes Video camera's pick up subtle differences that can't normally be seen. Also Proper color correction should fix that.

I do hope those kinds of issues are sorted out before shipping.

Re:hmm

[Loibisch]

anyways image how pRon would look on that That's a long shot away...

Re:hmm

[Smidge204]

I noticed the seams too. It's actually a tad unreasonable to actually make one huge curved LCD panel... manufacturing alone would be a challange.

It may be an effect of the video camera, though, that makes it look so noticible. You know how LCD panels look offcolor and dim when viewed from an angle... so if you are sitting the proper distance from the unit, all the panels would be facing directly at you and it might look very nice.

What gets me is the "0.02ms refresh" thing. 0.00002 second refresh rate? 50,000Hz refresh? Really? I'd believe a 2.0ms (100Hz) refresh rate, but 50kHz - if that's even possible - is wildly impractical. Anything more than the game's rendering FPS is technically a waste.
=Smidge=

Re:hmm

[Pharmboy]

Yes, unlike his successful author L. Ron, p Ron wasted his time by duping people into a cult that worships money and the mothership.

Re:hmm

[Smidge204]

Aha. The article says 0.02ms response time not refresh rate. Very different measurement there. The incorrect summary fogged my mind when reading the article... 0.02ms response time is slightly more believable.... not my much though. It's about 100x faster than current consumer-grade units (2-3ms).

=Smidge=

Re:hmm

[UbuntuDupe]

Just don't try to play any rhythm games on it (or any hidef tv) from a 480i input game...

Re:hmm

[AvitarX]

It's a DLP projector.

I know they refresh much better than LCDs though 200 times may be a bit stretching it.

If that is mirror flutter rate than it is a solid 5ms max (with some things being quicker, such as black to white being .02ms).

IAFOS

Re:hmm

[192939495969798999]

Agreed, looking at the playback it's quite clearly 4 monitors stitched together, very cheesy and disappointing. It is not at all a "seamless" curved display , and looks surprisingly dumb compared with say, the zenview 6-way monitor which has defined seams. At least the picture remains sharp besides the seams, instead of having that weird fade line.

http://www.bornrich.org/entry/zenview-announces-elite-six-screen-monitor/

Re:hmm

[prelelat]

In the article alienware acknowledged that this was a problem and that it would be resolved before it was released in late 2008. This is just an early prototype. If it wasn't fixed I agree there would be no benefit over something like a zenview 6-way. I might still prefer something like that anyways, looks cooler and you can breakup work when you want to, to different screens. Even if you could with the alienware model it would probably be a little more confusing.

Re:hmm

[dmdavis]

If you RTFM, you'll see that it is described as "four nearly seamless and sharp screens", and "You can see the seams between this monitor's four segments, but the Alienware humanoids tell us that flaw will be gone by the time this craft lands on Earth." So yeah, I think that was noticed.

Re:hmm

[TheGavster]

This isn't actually an LCD panel; it's an array of DLP rear-projection screens. DLP devices can hit over 1kHz refresh rates, so I don't think that 50kHz response is out of the question. What vexes me is that it's only 900 lines tall; when is something 1080 or above going to be standard in the widescreen display market? Standard ratio monitors have been 1024 to 1200 lines for years.

Re:hmm

[ajs318]

480i? Who would want such a picture? That's worse than ordinary low-definition TV, which has 625 lines interlaced.

Re:hmm

[Amouth]

actualy DLP chips have amazingly high responce time.. and being that the industry tends to measure responce time from gray to gray instead of white to black... i can very well see .02ms response time for the DLP chip.. but at that rate it is the color wheel that will be the limiting factor as the mirror can't reflect light that isnt' there yet.. if you think about how DLP works..

you have a grid of little onchip mirrors.. that tilt back and forth.. you have a color wheel that spins at high rpm and a blub shining throuhg it.. for a specific color to be shown the mirrors in sync with the wheel tilt to allow a certin amount of the light from the wheel through. if you have a color wheel going at say 10k rpm 3 colors in the wheel (more modern ones are using 6 and 12 color wheels to help prevent rainbow effect) each mirror has a color option 500 times a second wich means 2ms to switch from solid to solid with only a 3 color wheel.. but if you had say a green then it would be blue and yellow both and no for red. which means 2ms/3 mirror movements so .66ms responce time on the mirror.. now if you double the color wheel options you must increase the responce time.. by the same factor.. 6 color wheel = .33ms responce time 12 color wheel = .166ms response time..

while i will agree that .02 responce time is insane (providing use of a 64 color wheel) i am willing to bet that it is more like 0.2 ms responce time.. as 2ms would be a very plain cheep projector..

but DLP is by far better than LCD at responce time..

Re:hmm

[yoyhed]

What? Ordinary low-definition TV is 640x480i.

Re:hmm

[UbuntuDupe]

No, 480i is standard def, and that's what most PS2 games (and all of the DDR series) output as.

Re:hmm

[ajs318]

There are 625 lines, which are not subdivided into pixels, in the two fields which make up a standard analogue TV picture.

Re:hmm

[TheRaven64]

480 is the number of lines in an NTSC picture. You probably live in an area with a slightly less primitive colour TV encoding. PAL encodes 625 lines, although only 576 are visible. Since PAL picture have 20% more vertical resolution, standard definition TV in the USA and other places which use NTSC looks terrible to someone used to PAL (the colour reproduction is very poor too, leading to claims that it stands for Never The Same Colour). It's probably one of the reasons why HD is doing better in the USA than Europe; the quality difference is much more apparent.

Re:hmm

[mrchaotica]

What gets me is the "0.02ms refresh" thing.

Maybe the person who said that used to work for Verizon?

Re:hmm

[modecx]

The alternative to the color wheel may be that they are using separate RGB LEDs for illumination, and the LEDs can surely pulse much, much more quickly than a six color wheel can spin.

I'd like to try this bad boy out in a less illuminated room. It's hardly fair to demo a rear projector in such an over illuminated place like a trade show floor.

Re:hmm

[marcansoft]

Of which about 480 are actually visible, and the rest are blanking and retracing.

Re:hmm

[livewire98801]

TFA says that it's LED, as does the summary.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't P Ron come AFTER L Ron?

Re:hmm

[Sockatume]

RGB SCART's popularity probably has an effect too. YPbPr component video's been viewed as rather a high-end feature in my experience (coming on either progressive scan or HD TVs), but every TV in Europe since the middle of the 1990s pretty much has an RGB socket on it, from the 14" portable upwards. The video quality of any component video system in comparison to composite is pretty staggering.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

THE WORD IS RESPONSE. Jeebus. Use a goddamn dictionary sometime... I'm sure you've read the word multiple times before. Did it not sink in ?

Re:hmm

[teddygraham]

It is possible there is no color wheel in the unit. It may use the LED backlights to provide different colors. The article does not specify, however.

Re:hmm

[wrong]

Nope. PAL (the GP's TV standard of choice) shows 576 out of 625 lines. NTSC shows 480 out of 525 lines.

Re:hmm

[Amouth]

my whole point was to show WHY logicly DLP's have a much faster response time than LCD screens.. i understand that they are using LED DLP projection.. but people undertand a color wheel and speeds .. so by showing how DLP works in a normal projector i was atempting to show that they are faster.. not why this monitor is faster.. only showing that what was said isn't comletely unreasonable

Re:hmm

[bughunter]

LED-illuminated. Meaning that the light switched by the MEMS mirrors and filtered by the color wheel originates from PN junction somewhere (i.e., instead of a lamp).

Re:hmm

[maildeaddrop]

Actually, using LEDs there won't be any color wheel (and no rainbow effect either). So the response time will be limited either by the mirror tilt frequency limits (usually in the 50 KHz range) or by the LED pulse rate. I'm assuming that the LEDs are high-brightness single color LEDs, and will therefore be pulsed (instead of continuously on) for thermal management purposes.

MDD
(a Texas Instruments employee)

Re:hmm

[Amouth]

more than likly that is the case.. it would make more sence to have the LED's provide the colors to eleminate the color wheel.

the whole purpose of my post was to show why the qouted response time isn't unfeaseable based on DLP's work in projectors.

Re:hmm

[phillips321]

yeah i thought the same, i for one would much rather a monitor that could cope with 1080 res and be less wide.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

LED DLP projectors don't use a color wheel. Instead, the light source flashes very quickly.

Re:hmm

[marcansoft]

That is correct; I missed that detail when I read his post and assumed that he was talking about NTSC. Indeed, NTSC is 480 out of 525, PAL is 576 out of 625.

Re:hmm

[Minwee]

I think that pretty much anyone who read the article would have noticed that.

You can see the seams between this monitor's four segments, but the Alienware humanoids tell us that flaw will be gone by the time this craft lands on Earth.

Re:hmm

[BBF_BBF]

Too bad LED lighting based DLP's don't use colour wheels anymore... BTW this product uses LED lighting. They use banks of different coloured LED's that flash on and off at the specified intervals, so the response time is no longer limited by colour wheel spinning speeds.

Re:hmm

[darthflo]

Looking at the form factor of the display wouldn't that be more of a wide shot?

Re:hmm

[Trixter]

NTSC has many flaws, but the higher refresh rate is an advantage to a country that seems to live and die by its professional sports Since all pro sports games are transmitted/recorded at the full 60Hz framerate (ie. there is a new piece of temporal information every 1/60th of a second), they are more fluid than PAL.

That's a very minor issue, though; the bigger issue is how movies are transferred to PAL -- standard transfer is to speed them up 6% to translate 24fps to 25fps. Up until very recently, that altered the pitch of the sound! Thankfully newer transfer methods are able to speed up the audio without altering the pitch.

Re:hmm

[Amouth]

all my post was trying to do was explain why it is feasable for this thing to have such a low response time.. in the main thread there was 30+ people saying that it must have been a misqoute - i was just using an example of how DLP works - i under stand that LED DLP doesn't use a color wheel - and didn't really think everyone would point out that this thing is LED DLP

all i was trying to do was point out that it is perfectly possiable for them to qoute a .02ms response time

and if you are right about the 50kHz then .02ms is right on the money

Re:hmm

[KeeblerD]

If it's anything like the Samsung's LED DLP, then they got rid of the color wheel. Yay for LEDs!

Re:hmm

[Bryan Ischo]

I lived in the USA all of my life and was very used to NTSC. I moved to New Zealand a year ago where we have PAL. To be honest, I didn't notice the extra resolution or color fidelity of PAL. What I did notice was the flicker that PAL exhibits in bright scenes. However I have since become accustomed to that and don't really notice.

I don't think that NTSC is much worse than PAL in image quality, at least from the perspective of someone who just wants to watch TV and isn't interested in showing off superior image quality detection skills. I'll bet that more than 90% of people wouldn't even notice any difference at all between PAL and NTSC. I know my wife didn't.

As to the movie transfer thing - what do they do for NTSC, which is 30 fps and which would require movies to be sped up *even more* to match the frame rate. Obviously they don't do that - so whatever they do for NTSC, why didn't they do the same thing for PAL instead of speeding movies up for PAL?

I have noticed that some TV shows from the USA are sped up for PAL, and have corresponding high pitched voices. It's funny to see shows that you know what the actors really sound like, and listen to them now sounding like little kids.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

IT'S RESPONSE, YOU CRETIN!!! Not 'responce'. Asshole.

responSe! responSe!!!

An SSSSSSSSSS!

Asshole!

Please learn to spell before polluting the internet with your dumb-as-shit bad spelling, it's REALLY irritating.

Re:hmm

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

They say the display is LED backlit, so there's probably no color wheel. Bright R/G/B LEDs are commonly available and can switch plenty fast.

Re:hmm

[Amouth]

first of all you are the 9th person to point out this out.. if you also noticed in response to several of them i noted..

all i was trying to do was to give an example of WHY the qouted .02ms response time isn't unreasonable - there where 30+ people saying it had to be a miss qoute ..

the example is to show why you can't complare DLP to LCD in response time..

Re:hmm

[enoz]

Slashdot make incorrect summary? Unpossible!

50kHz refresh rate? Imagine the monstrosity of a graphics card that would have to drive that.

Re:hmm

[RedWizzard]

As to the movie transfer thing - what do they do for NTSC, which is 30 fps and which would require movies to be sped up *even more* to match the frame rate. Obviously they don't do that - so whatever they do for NTSC, why didn't they do the same thing for PAL instead of speeding movies up for PAL?
Converting film to video is called telecine. What they do for converting 24fps film to NTSC specifically is called 3:2 pulldown. Film is 24 frames per second and NTSC is 30 frames per second. To convert from film to NTSC you take 4 frames from the film and make 5 frames (10 fields) of video out of them. With PAL the two frame rates (24 and 25 fps) are relatively prime which makes this sort of scheme less attractive. You can do it by taking 12 frames of film and converting those to 25 fields of video (12.5 frames), but that can cause noticeable jerkiness. A 4% speed increase is generally less noticeable, at least if you perform pitch correction on the soundtrack.

Re:hmm

[Jesus_666]

That sounds pretty awesome. Imagine a regular projector without the expensive, fragile bulb. No more leaving the thing in standby for five minutes so the fan can cool the lamp down to a safe temperature before you can completely power it down. No more waiting for the lamp to heat up before you get a picture... No more paying four hundred bucks for a replacement bulb.

Of course the LED array will probably be just as expensive as a traditional bulb, but I fathom it should be much more resilient to aging/overheating/shattering etc. And there's the question whether a regular LED-illuminated projector is actually feasible - after all, a projector should be a bit brighter than this monitor.

Still, quite interesting.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

These already exist. Samsung makes 61" TVs using this technology.

Re:hmm

[bobbozzo]

And the LED 'bulbs' are very expensive, as are the TVs. The LEDs supposedly last 10,000 - 20,000 hours but are (currently) about $800 to replace.

Re:hmm

[bobbozzo]

.66ms responce time on the mirror.. now if you double the color wheel options you must increase the responce time.. by the same factor.. 6 color wheel = .33ms responce time 12 color wheel = .166ms response time..

FWIW, your numbers seem to be going the wrong direction.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

>480 is the number of lines in an NTSC picture.

Close, but wrong. 525 lines is the NTSC standard. 480 is the reccomended amount of lines used in a digital reproduction, since, (just like PAL), some of the lines are considered overscan or are used (missing) during the vertical refresh (which was a problem, but isn't anymore). But 525 is the actual limit.

>PAL encodes 625 lines, although only 576 are visible.

Correct, give or take, due to the same reasons stated above.

>Since PAL picture have 20% more vertical resolution, standard definition TV in the USA and other places which use NTSC looks terrible to someone used to PAL (the colour reproduction is very poor too, leading to claims that it stands for Never The Same Colour).

Somewhat correct, if you are using a TV built before solid state electronics existed (if you are, I must say you are talented at sourcing the correct tubes). Anyways...

525/625 = 84%, or 16% less vertical definition. Colour reproduction was indeed very poor with early sets, and was caused by the way the colour carrier was introduced into the original black and white NTSC design so it was able to support both black and white and colour. Unlike black and white PAL sets, black and white NTSC sets were significantly simpler to build, as they blindly followed the original specification and did not require a repurchase of new sets (such as the UK required for 405 line true monochrome BBC service).

Now, continuing with the old 1960's is how it is now argument, having seen old PAL sets, I always had a terrible headache when I was in the UK. It was due to the 50 Hz interlaced refresh rate being 83.3% (rounded) of NTSC's 60 Hz, or 16.3% (rounded) lower than NTSC (NTSC has slightly more bandwidth, and therefore more lines a second than PAL. Seriously, I'll explain later). Yes, new PAL TVs either double the frame rate to 100 Hz, or are not CRTs and therefore are relatively unaffected by this. Lovely.

Furthermore, I always wondered why the sound of music sounded (almost) a semi-tone off... As PAL runs at 25 Hz, it was not possible, at the time, to re-time a movie to fit PAL's specs, since there is no simple fraction between 24 to 50 Hz. Therefore, movies were traditionally played (approx.) 4% faster on TV in PAL countries, resulting in a pitch-up of the audio. The other option at the time would be to introduce jitter as some frames are either doubled or dropped entirely (much worse). However, NTSC's 60 Hz does have an even integral to 24 Hz: 3/2. Therefore NTSC audio was perfect for movies, although some believed they could see jitter (but no frames were ever lost in the process, and the claim to jitter is somewhat difficult to support).

But lastly, in support of NTSC, the better utilized bandwidth of NTSC allowed laserdiscs to include dolby digital audio for NTSC movies; much to the dismay of those watching TV in PAL-land.

And please God don't make me explain why NTSC is now actually 1.001% slower than 30 fps. IIRC, it has to do with the introduction of colour TV...

And no, I didn't just visit Wikipedia to rattle that off. I know it from heart, I've investigated it enough for PAL lovers, along with having a heart for old analog TV. And, today, you are right. Sort of. PAL is better for modern formats and modern media editing techniques, and just about everything else. But us cheap bastards that have 10+ year old TVs, like me, love not getting headaches from watching TV. And the colour is just fine, I've never touched the tint control once since they made decent and dirt cheap AFCs standard about 30 years ago.

Now, you're saying "I looked it up and PAL uses more bandwidth and therefore has more definition". Just because it uses it poorly (this description is, of course, just an opinion, not everyone appreciates doing more with less at the expense of doing everything less well as better, but in these days of reduce, reuse, recycle, it seems appropriate) does not mean it is better. Imagine each line as

Re:hmm

[yoyhed]

Exactly! I was commenting on how the OP said 480i would be so terrible for looking worse than SDTV - well, if you're only seeing 480 lines anyway out of 525 lines technically there, why get pedantic, GP?

Or maybe I should move across the Atlantic so that my SD viewing experience can be slightly better and I can see 576 out of 625 lines at a lower framerate! Or hell, import all PAL equipment and media from now on!

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because it is broken into 4 different screens seamed into one... they said it will be fix by the release time in the next half of 08...

Re:hmm

[julesh]

PAL (the GP's TV standard of choice) shows 576 out of 625 lines.

That depends very much on your TV. There are 518 lines in the standard "safe area" that's supposedly displayed by all TVs, although I've seen some that lose some of those as well. Few CRTs show more than 520. LCDs tend to do a little better, although even those tend to lose a few lines off the top and bottom of the display, and some can be much worse (my local gym has an LCD TV tuned to Sky News, and it loses the bottom half of their ticker line across the bottom of the screen... very annoying).

Re:hmm

[maildeaddrop]

I see what you mean about the number of people "correcting" you on the color wheel. BT-DT.

And yeah, the 0.02ms number is almost certainly coming from the mirror tilt frequency limit on the chip. And the guy is likely flat out wrong, as I'd be surprised if the LEDs are being pulsed at 50KHz. They are almost certainly being pulsed somewhat slower, maybe a few hundred to a thousand (or so) hertz. So the actual response time is much harder to describe. While the LEDs are on, the response time is is however fast you can change the duty cycle on the mirror. If your mirror tilt frequency is 50KHz, then that would be 0.02ms. But when the LEDs are off, the response time is, uh, infinite.

And btw, this problem describing the response time isn't specific to LED illuminated DLPs. IIRC, the common lamp illuminated DLPs (like in TVs) are high-intensity discharge (HID) lamps, which have blink, too. And there's the color wheel, too.

About the only place where the DLP response time would be *consistently* 0.02ms is in a cinema setting. In a cinema installation, a large incandescent bulb is used (continuous white light), a color splitting/combining prism is used, and three DLPs are used. So no blinking light source, and no color wheel.

MDD

Re:hmm

[maildeaddrop]

Uh, I think I'd disagree as to who's the asshole here. I'll take logical thought and decipherable misspelling over vitriol and foul language every time...
MDD

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

.. you have a color wheel that spins at high rpm and a blub shining throuhg it..

Hmm... the guy mentions that it's lit by LCDs. Would you necessarily need a color wheel then? I would assume that the LCD "color wheel" would be simpler, or it could just be turned on and off at just the right times achieving faster response times.

Re:hmm

[cthulhu11]

The lower frame/field rate of PAL was distinctly noticeable and annoying to me when I visited Britain.

Re:hmm

[GWBasic]

you have a grid of little onchip mirrors.. that tilt back and forth.. you have a color wheel that spins at high rpm and a blub shining throuhg it.. for a specific color to be shown the mirrors in sync with the wheel tilt to allow a certin amount of the light from the wheel through. if you have a color wheel going at say 10k rpm 3 colors in the wheel (more modern ones are using 6 and 12 color wheels to help prevent rainbow effect) each mirror has a color option 500 times a second wich means 2ms to switch from solid to solid with only a 3 color wheel.. but if you had say a green then it would be blue and yellow both and no for red. which means 2ms/3 mirror movements so .66ms responce time on the mirror.. now if you double the color wheel options you must increase the responce time.. by the same factor.. 6 color wheel = .33ms responce time 12 color wheel = .166ms response time..

The rainbow effect drives me nuts. I think it would be even worse with video games!

Re:hmm

[Amouth]

the rainbow effect that i see seems to be static on the image - some see it move.. most don't see it at all..

hope fuly with this monitor and other ones that use LED instead of a color wheel as i stated for an example will reduce the rainbow effect.. but who knows as i personaly havn't had a chance to use them

x900????

[Shivetya]

More for presentation than gaming, so why does Alienware have this product?

Re:x900????

[steveo777]

More for presentation than gaming, so why does Alienware have this product?

Because they hope that people will buy it, and that they will make money.

Re:x900????

[noc007]

I have to disagree. I run two 19" monitors with 1440x900, the same combined resolution as Alienware's, and find it quite adequate height wise for gaming. My only complaint is the "seam" in the middle for the bezels and doesn't work to well for FPS games. This curved monitor would eliminate that. I'm not to keen that it uses four DLP projectors to get the job done though. It would be nice to have a curved film OLED display like this. The movie Red Planet comes to mind.

initital thoughts

[Fierythrasher]

This might perhaps be good for gaming, but the fact that it is curved makes me shudder at the thought of people doing, say, photoshop work on a naturally curved surface. Sure, having a 3' flat monitor would be hard to see, having it curved is going to make drawing a straight line, or anything other than gaming, really difficult I would think.

Moreover, I'm wondering if this will result in a fish-eye lens (or reverse fish-eye lens) effect even in games.

As for price...you can bet it will be steep, but Apple thinks they can charge $3k for a 32" monitor, so I'd expect a similar cost for a 36" monitor.

Re:initital thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't a 36" monitor we're talking about, it's 36" wide. Assuming square pixels it's roughly 11" tall, leading to a "diagonal" size of sqrt(1296+121)=37.6" (and in monitor sales 1.6" is a big deal). Since Dell says that a dell-branded 30" is worth $1200, you can bet a 7.6" gain with the more expensive Alienware branding will want $5k by itself. Personally, though, I'd take their 30"... so..much...code!

Re:initital thoughts

[digitig]

having it curved is going to make drawing a straight line, or anything other than gaming, really difficult I would think. Well, I'd like one for side-by-side comparisons of documents. Two ordinary monitors side-by-side wouldn't be as good because -- er -- give me a moment to think...

Re:initital thoughts

[B1ackDragon]

having it curved is going to make drawing a straight line, or anything other than gaming, really difficult I would think.

Well, in that case artists should just switch to the Gimp. It's impossible to draw a straight line then anyway ;-)

Re:initital thoughts

[Solandri]

Moreover, I'm wondering if this will result in a fish-eye lens (or reverse fish-eye lens) effect even in games.

That would be a non-factor for 3D games. It's trivial to code your viewport for rectilinear vs. fisheye output. The game's authors just need to add a switch to let you choose which output you want.

From an angle-of-view standpoint, a curved screen is more efficient at filling your field of vision. A flat screen can never fill more than 180 degrees of your vision. As the viewing angle approaches 90 degrees from straight ahead, the amount of additional screen real estate needed to eek out an extra degree of FOV approaches infinity. With a curved screen, you just add another degree in the curvature. The only problem is making sure you sit in the center, at the focus point of the screen's curvature. If you sit there, you can even "fake" an illusory flat screen's output, thus eliminating the straight line problem (unless you move your head away from the focus).

Re:initital thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

Click on the canvas press shiftkey down, click on different spot on the canvas whilst holding the shift.
RTFM!

Re:initital thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple sells a 30" monitor for $1799, even cheaper if you're a student with ID (or know one.) Is that what you were referring to?

Re:initital thoughts

[novakyu]

Because my notebook has only one crappy video output! My integrated graphics cannot drive more than one external monitor, and God knows I don't want an external monitor the size of my laptop LCD.

And yes, I am absolutely sure that my crappy integrated graphics can drive 2880x900 just fine. Absolutely fine.

Re:initital thoughts

[tepples]

Two ordinary monitors side-by-side wouldn't be as good because ...you wouldn't be able to have three documents open without one straddling the gap between the screens.

Re:initital thoughts

[PitaBred]

It's got a vertical resolution of 900 pixels. That's barely enough to browse the web on nowdays, much less do actual image work. I think we're safe from all but the most amateur of PhotoShop "artists", which I ignore anyway. Apple's 32" monitor is MUCH better designed for image work, and this one is positioned directly for gamers, which it will be awesome for (assuming they fix the seam issue)

Re:initital thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a demo of how to program for an entire sphere:
http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=27000

If you don't want to download the program, here's a video link:
ftp://ftp.untergrund.net/users/kb/videos/Farbrausch%20-%20fr-054%20polar.avi

Re:initital thoughts

[dlelash]

"As for price...you can bet it will be steep, but Apple thinks they can charge $3k for a 32" monitor, so I'd expect a similar cost for a 36" monitor."

I don't think they think what you think they think:

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=B0137FD9&fnode=home/shop_mac/mac_accessories/displays&nplm=M9179LL/A

Re:initital thoughts

[dangitman]

Moreover, I'm wondering if this will result in a fish-eye lens (or reverse fish-eye lens) effect even in games.

Uhhh, why would a screen curved around one axis result in a fisheye projection? What it would result in is a cylindrical projection, which is completely different.

Re:initital thoughts

[julesh]

Sure, having a 3' flat monitor would be hard to see, having it curved is going to make drawing a straight line, or anything other than gaming, really difficult I would think.

Microsoft Research have done some work with a similar, but more extreme monitor in the past. IIRC, MS's was effectively 6 1024x768 displays stitched into a 90 degree arc, which provides for almost total immersion; you have to turn your head to be able to see both sides of the display. They tested subjects' performance on a variety of standard office tasks (word processing, working with spreadsheets and databases, file management), and showed a startling productivity gain.

Re:initital thoughts

[Lord Kestrel]

Actually, the vertical resolution is too low for most games too. Especially the ones where you'd actually be able to use that nice horizontal resolution, like Eve.

Re:initital thoughts

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Given that the curvature is only slight, and is convex, not concave like an old CRT, I thought there would have been less visual distortion. In fact, I thought that would have been the entire point of making such a wide-angle screen curved in the first place -- less visual distortion.

holy shit

[Anonymous Coward]

I want one!

That's a lot of pixels!

[91degrees]

Can any graphics card handle the sort of fill rate required from this yet?

Re:That's a lot of pixels!

[quarrel]

I have a 30" Dell, running at its native 2560 * 1600. Apple makes one, lots of others.

2560 * 1600 = 4,096,000

This Alienware monitor:

2880 * 900 = 2,592,000

So this new monitor is nothing special total pixel wise..

Looks cool though.

--Q

Re:That's a lot of pixels!

[cyber0ne]

It's maybe half the pixils of a 30-inch cinema display (be it Apple's or someone else's). DVI connections can handle plenty more than that, and there is no shortage of video cards that can do it. Cute toy, but hardly super-high-res.

Re:That's a lot of pixels!

[Brad1138]

Can any graphics card handle the sort of fill rate required from this yet?

Are there any games designed to run at 2880x900?

Re:That's a lot of pixels!

[Carbon016]

Well, um, sort of - depending on your definition of "run". World in Conflict and a few other DX10 titles support dual monitors, and seem to work well on my paired 1440x900 displays, so I can't imagine it being much different all in one - so technically it can support the fill rate, and they're designed to run at that res.

Of course that's using one monitor as a separate sort of display - a minimap or other useful feature. "normal" games would most likely have their UIs stretched beyond recognition if they attempted to add the extra width "normally". So it's not really a technical issue but an issue of "how can we make this work both 1. as a completely non-standard resolution and 2. as one display without cheating and making half the screen our inventory or something".

Re:That's a lot of pixels!

[Bigbutt]

And that's the $64,000 question. I have three screens at home running on two adapters (512M video ram). It'd be nice to be able to use all the extra real estate to see more of a battlefield (StarCraft or Command and Conquer for example).

The three screens work great for my programming projects though.

[John]

Re:That's a lot of pixels!

[berashith]

Oh NO!!!
Time to restart Duke Nukem for native 2880x900

Re:That's a lot of pixels!

[Have Blue]

Many modern games will let you specify arbitrary pixel dimensions and aspect ratio, either with the console or by hand-editing the config file. I imagine it'll make the HUD look a little weird.

Re:That's a lot of pixels!

[-noefordeg-]

Uh?

My Dell 30" LCD screens are 2560x1600 pixels (each), which is almost 1.5 million more pixels than this screen. Even my MacBook Pro can drive simple games in that resolution and using any new graphic card in two or three way SLI will let you run state of the art graphics in those resolutions.

Extreme example (3-way SLI): http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_3waysli.html

Re:That's a lot of pixels!

[I Like Pudding]

Can any graphics card handle the sort of fill rate required from this yet?

That's only 12% more pixels than a 1900x1200, which a single 8800 can drive without too much trouble.

Re:That's a lot of pixels!

[Kris_J]

I'm on a 3840x1024 triple-head system at the moment and Gigabyte's whacky SLI-on-one-card 6600GT SLI solution can manage WoW at around 30FPS if I don't turn on anti-aliasing. My other triplehead is 3072x768 and I have a 6200 running that, though it only manages 15-20 FPS in WoW with most of the options dialed down.

I can't imagine modern cards have any problems driving it. It is, however, a stupid resolution on which I will no doubt comment elsewhere.

Re:That's a lot of pixels!

[rastoboy29]

Oh yeah, not a problem at all.

That is, if you've got the money for this monitor, the latest and greatest Nvidia or ATI card is a given.  Most of the current generation of games are not really all that demanding on those cards.

Now my game...that's different :)

...tf?

[Anonymous Coward]

it has a 50kHz refresh rate? that can't be right

Re:...tf?

[It'sYerMam]

No, it has a 0.02ms "refresh rate" which doesn't even make sense because a "ms" is a unit of time not of rate. You'd think "nerds" would at least know their units.

Re:...tf?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it has a 0.02 ms "response time". You'd think nerds would know the difference between "refresh rate" and "response time".

Re:...tf?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot filtered out the slash. The refresh rate is 0.02/ms = 20 Hz.

on behalf of all of slashdot, i would like to say

[circletimessquare]

DROOL

Gah, DLP

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Does anyone else feel like they are going to be sick or at least get a huge headache when looking at DLP displays?

If I sit perfectly still it's OK. But even little movements cause my eyes hurt. Turning my head to talk to the person next to me is likely to cause me to puke into their lap.

I don't suffer from motion sickness or anything like that. It is just these displays, front or rear projection don't seem to form a stable picture to my eyes.

Re:Gah, DLP

[yodleboy]

2 comments. the first is it's funny how DLP bugs some people but not others. I have a 65" DLP here at home and I've never had an issue, but i've got friends that get a headache.

the second is that the visible lines on this monitor are one of the issues that will be resolved by the time it ships, so calm down people, or read the article...

Re:Gah, DLP

[SixFactor]

Your reaction to fast motion on DLP is really interesting - it's the first I've heard of it. We have a 61" DLP at thome, and have not noticed any illness during fast movies like any of the Bourne series of flicks.

Maybe you have what I jokingly call "Sniper Eyes," which my kids have, when they focus rapidly on my moving head during TF2 sniper war sessions on 2Fort (insert booming UT voice here: HEADSHOT!)

I did some googling, and it might not be the fact that it's a DLP screen. See here , where the writer claims even LCDs can cause them.

Re:Gah, DLP

[Neon Spiral Injector]

I can see the blur on some LCDs; it doesn't bother me it just looks like motion blur.

Of all the display technologies I've seen I prefer the "look" of plasma or good ol' CRT. They seem the most natural.

Re:Gah, DLP

[Ogive17]

I have a 56" DLP and have never experienced those symptoms... I also have a Nintendo Wii that causes me to get up and move around while focusing on the TV and still have never felt like it was making my eyes fatigued.

Re:Gah, DLP

[teddygraham]

Some people have these problems with DLPs because of the color wheel. It is a wheel with different color translucent segments that spins very fast and produces color for the dmd. Some backlit/rear proj/front proj DLP devices use three chips, one for R G and B, but they are usually very expensive. Additionally, if this device is backlit by LED light, it is possible to use the LED to produce the color and eliminate the color wheel also. Traditionally, the faster spinning color wheels produce less ill-effect for the users (Headaches, Rainbows or RBE.)

Re:Gah, DLP

[Neon Spiral Injector]

That probably explains it. From the corner of my eye it is almost like a flickering. I don't see the flicker straight on, but any head movement just makes me feel awful. I've seen DLP TVs on the showroom floor that say "multi-segment" or "3x color wheel". They still bother me. Although I do remember now one DLP projector which I had a hard time believing was DLP because I could watch it without feeling ill. It was a 3-chip from Runco.

Awesome, dude

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks wild, but it's really thick (because of the projection process). I doubt it will be cheap.

Flight Simmers

[PowerEdge]

I can see this product geared towards flight simmers. Figure out how to drive four of these displays (front, left, right, back) and I'll be happy. That and I won't have to worry about installing a furnace in my new house.

Re:Flight Simmers

[Loibisch]

That and I won't have to worry about installing a furnace in my new house. Yeah, because most likely to afford 4 of these babies you'd have to sell your house anyway... ...and your neighbour's... ...and your grandmother for some change for the video card to drive it...

Re:Flight Simmers

[PowerEdge]

yeah. or a down payment on a Cirrus.

Re:Flight Simmers

[MBGMorden]

Or a full payment on a used Cessna/Piper :).

Re:Flight Simmers

[PitaBred]

Most planes I've seen don't have rear windows. Why not just two of these? That'll cover what, 250 degrees or so? That should be more than enough for a very realistic flight sim.

Oh great! Four of these...

[sfled]

set up around me and I'd never leave the house.

Oh, wait, how much is the video card?

So it's like a CRT...

[mushadv]

but backwards?

Re:So it's like a CRT...

[niceone]

Yeah, it's like being inside a CRT - but without the electron gun burning a hole in the back of your head!

Re:on behalf of all of slashdot, i would like to s

[teslar]

Naw, I'm not drooling, so please don't speak for me. In fact, the resolution leaves me distinctly unimpressed, given the size of the beast. The only wow-factor is the curved form, but I'm not yet sure how much, if at all, that will improve gaming experience. Not sure it's useful for working at all, as others have pointed out. Also, if you need screen estate, it's probably cheaper to put 3 1920x1200 monitors or so next to each other.

Useful Only For Gaming?

[MrCrassic]

Will this monitor serve any productive purpose outside of enhancing gaming experience? I can personally see myself having a curved monitor as a hinderance for writing applications or anything that closely resembles writing on a flat surface (i.e. code, documents, spreadsheets, etc.).

Re:Useful Only For Gaming?

[Itchyeyes]

I could think of a few things, robotic surgery, piloting UAVs, flight simulators, etc... anything that involves immersing the user in another point of view. Obviously this is a niche device, but for what it is, it's pretty cool.

Re:Useful Only For Gaming?

[thatskinnyguy]

How could you let virtual reality porn slip your mind? Get with the program man.

Re:Useful Only For Gaming?

[CannedTurkey]

Time to start thinking outside the box, and inside the ball!

Re:Useful Only For Gaming?

[mrchaotica]

Hookers are cheaper.

Re:Useful Only For Gaming?

[thatskinnyguy]

Yeah but a hooker is only good for one thing. You could call this monitor the Swiss Army Hooker. I mean, it can show more than one hooker at a time and when your hands are idle and you're not in the mood, you can play games too. I mean, sure, this thing probably cost about 20 hookers but can you play WoW on a hooker?

Re:Useful Only For Gaming?

[MBGMorden]

sure, this thing probably cost about 20 hookers Interesting that Slashdot has now just flat out started measuring prices in the "hooker" unit of measurement. :)

Re:Useful Only For Gaming?

[ImpShial]

Interesting that Slashdot has now just flat out started measuring prices in the "hooker" unit of measurement

Man, I wish I had mod points. +5 Funny.

Re:Useful Only For Gaming?

[thatskinnyguy]

I put large weights in terms of n*(the curb weight of my car) so using the hooker form of currency isn't that far of a stretch.

Wiiiidddeeee Windows.

[ErroneousBee]

So will Gizmodo take a hint and develop a website that looks good in a short and wide window?

I get sick of having to scroll vertically stacked content into view when I'm on a wide-screen display.

Maybe someone could memo the BBC and Ars about this too.

Re:Wiiiidddeeee Windows.

[It'sYerMam]

I don't see how this is offtopic to be honest. The problem is that huge lines of text aren't practical to read - after some experimentally verifiable length, it's too far for your eye to follow down back to the start of the next line. That's why I didn't bother buying a widescreen monitor - mostly I'm reading or writing, with some gaming and TV watching. For reading, the vertical pixels are much more useful, since they let you see more on the screen at a time. Perhaps if we begun to see webbrowsers which displayed two consecutive pages side-by-side then we'd be on to something, but 1440 pixels divided into two page widths is a measly 720 pixels each, minus borders and scroll bars. Even a midrange 1600 pixel widescreen sets you back to the days of 800x600.

Re:Wiiiidddeeee Windows.

[ErroneousBee]

I don't see how this is offtopic to be honest.

Dumb mods. For their education, this thread is about usability issues caused by increasingly wide screens and the inability of old-media to break out of a narrow-columns mindset. TFA links to a website designed to be taller than it is wider, and that website is showing a monitor that is very much wider than it is tall. This is irony of a very mild sort.

The problem is that huge lines of text aren't practical to read - after some experimentally verifiable length, it's too far for your eye to follow down back to the start of the next line.

Somewhere about 15 words per line is optimum. It cuts both ways, as making lines too short increases eyeball 'flyback', which reduces reading speeds and hinders comprehension.

Things get even worse when you have to re-aquire you position in a document after scrolling text into view.

Go to the BBC, who show as little as 4 words per line. Note how they actually cause line breaks in the top and most popular stories columns.

Now go to Ars where they have 3 strips of banner across the top, meaning I have to scroll them off the screen to see an article posted 2 hours ago. Also see how the middle column causes flyback at about 5 words, making scanning the text harder. Many readers simply will not bother to look at content that is in too narrow a column.

Now worship at Jakob's Altar See how its far easier to read with the wider columns. The actual articles are shown absent of sidebars, at about 15 words/line.

That's why I didn't bother buying a widescreen monitor - mostly I'm reading or writing, with some gaming and TV watching. For reading, the vertical pixels are much more useful, since they let you see more on the screen at a time. Perhaps if we begun to see webbrowsers which displayed two consecutive pages side-by-side then we'd be on to something, but 1440 pixels divided into two page widths is a measly 720 pixels each, minus borders and scroll bars. Even a midrange 1600 pixel widescreen sets you back to the days of 800x600.

Im at 2080x1024, and some web pages and applications that were designed on an A4 pad suffer usability issues. In particular, PDF documents and Excel seem determined to show as little on the screen as possible. This is just going to get worse as screens get wider.

Re:Wiiiidddeeee Windows.

[Cederic]

Perhaps you and the two people you're replying to should learn how to use a web browser window that isn't fullscreen.

Failing that, turn your monitor 90 degrees. Ooh, look - 1200x1920 resolution, perfect for tall thin webpages.

I'm writing this on a 1920x1200 widescreen laptop. The web browser window dimensions are (at a guess) around 1400x1100. On the rest of my screen I have useful information displayed, that isn't interfering with (or interfered with by) my web browsing. At the same time the web browser and its contents are perfectly readable, and web pages fit nicely.

Widescreen monitors and tall thin web pages are not a problem, and are off-topic for this discussion.

Differing specs

[clegrand]

Eh.. Gizmodo sez .02ms refresh ... wow.. Macworld sez 2ms refresh ... sounds more reasonable

Okay, this one still resides in the land of dreams, but tell me the mere sight doesn't set your salivary glands into overdrive. Alienware's working on a curved monitor that actually helps simulate peripheral vision in gaming. The resolution on this truly remarkable feat of engineering is an astounding 2880x900 and it's run off a Dual Link DVI set up (with some serious graphics horsepower). As if that's not enough, it uses DLP technology, is backlit by LEDs, and has a 2ms response time. http://www.macworld.com/article/131451/2008/01/gboxces1.html

Re:Differing specs

[theonlyaether]

Hrm, Tom's Hardware agrees with Gizmodo though. http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2008/01/07/alienware_display/

Re:Differing specs

[Anonymous Coward]

DLP HDTV have a response time of about 16 microseconds. Macworld is wrong.

Re:on behalf of all of slashdot, i would like to s

[teeloo]

BARF

not very curvy

[Oktober Sunset]

it's not exactly wrap around, with that shallow curve, it wouldn't fill your field of vision much more than a flat monitor of the same size. They nee to make it even wider and even more curvy.

Re:not very curvy

[berashith]

Is that you Sir Mix-a-lot?

Re:"0.02 ms"

[TheRequiem13]

Yea, he must have meant 2ms, as 0.02 ms doesn't make any sense. I assume the presenter misspoke (I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, since it was just a single one-on-one session). Yet all the coverage of this monitor on various gadget sites has quoted the .02 number. People need to learn to question what they hear/read...

Gaming on RPTV

[__aaqvdr516]

I'm not sure how many other people have done it but I've attempted to game on my rear projection HDTV. It looks like poop. Their refresh rate is based on 60hz which is where they got their .02 refresh rate (1/60hz). I'll pass on this one.

Re:Gaming on RPTV

[Brad1138]

Their refresh rate is based on 60hz which is where they got their .02 refresh rate (1/60hz)

The article says .02ms not .02s. hz is cycle/second not per Millisecond.

Nice but......

[Anonymous Coward]

I want one taller so it's in the proper ratio for 1080P. Seeing films on a curved screen makes a big difference. Not sure that I'd get one for gaming but if they make a HiDef one I'm placing an order. I'm sure they'll work out the four screen issue, I'm a bit surprised by the poor blacks. Normally DLPs have nice rich blacks. Hopefully that'll get worked out by launch as well. The LEDs should last indefinitely which gets rid of the downside of DLP and makes it superior to LCD in life expectancy. I just hope the poor blacks aren't a side effect of the LEDs.

I just had...

[Tastecicles]

...a Joygasm. I want one of these. Make that two. Price is not an issue.

If you have to ask how much it costs...

[bondjamesbond]

...you can't afford it.

I, for one, welcome our curved overlords.

Fahrenheit 451

[gblackwo]

People could spend a chunk of their annual income to get a "parlour wall", a screen with moving pictures that would be come your new family. The really rich people could buy four of these and surround themselves entirely, and for an additional price, their name could even be added to the program to be inserted into the dialogue.

why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[razorh]

with all the high def mania out there, why is it that monitor resolutions keep going lower and lower? I still run mainly CRT's because I like 1600x1200 and I don't want to pay a bunch of $$ for an LCD that will support that (most traditional ratio LCD's are 1280x1024, widescreens are Something x somethingcloseto 1024). Now, 900?

A common arguement I hear is 'well, you loose some there but you make up for it on the sides'. HELLO? If I am browsing a web page, looking at a document, or basically doing just about anything, I want length/height on my display, I want to be able to stretch it out up and down.. not sideways.

Maybe for gaming this lower resolution is ok, but really, lets start seeing some higher res. monitors as 'standards'.

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[Alioth]

Turn the display on its side.

No seriously. We have monitors like that at work that have a stand that allow them to be turned on their sides to view or use "sheet like" programs like web browsers, word processors etc.

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[pizzach]

LCDs, because of how they are made have only one resolution that doesn't look like poop called the natural resolution of the display. So companies usually choose the resolution for the monitor size that works the best for the most people and make that the natural resolution. Another words, they choose the resolution that ensures the icons and texts don't get so small it's an eye sore. Because of the above, saying that you want a higher resolution LCD is basically synonymous with I want a larger LCD.

When interfaces become a bit more resolution independent or things start getting upscaled in the OS again we'll start seeing the higher resolution LCDs.

Anyone have anything they want to correct anything poopishly wrong?

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[dreamchaser]

I felt the same as you until I finally switched from a 1600x1200 CRT to a 1680x1059 22" LCD. It's more than high enough res, I enjoy the widescreen format, and it's so much easier on my eyes. YMMV.

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[gnuman99]

1200x1024 19" HP LCD which I bought almost 3 years ago. The text is *much* better than a 1600x1200 res. CRT. *Much* better.

CRT are just blurry by comparison. The higher the refresh rate, the fuzzier they are. And the lower the refresh rate, the sorer my eyes are. You can't compare resolution of any CRT to native resolution of any LCD. CRT pixels are fuzzy be design. LCD pixels are sharp by design. Enough said.

Also, you can turn most business class LCD sideways. Generally these are the 4:3 ratio ones, so you end up with 3:4 ratio. Widescreens would be awkward sideways, I think, though I haven't tried that.

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[KillerBob]

Likewise... I switched from a 21" CRT @ 1920x1440 3 years ago, when I bought a Gateway 2185W 21" widescreen LCD at 1680x1050. I love it. My new laptop has a 15.4" screen at the same resolution...

It's not that resolutions are going down. It's that the standard aspect ratio has changed. I can't remember the exact name of it, but there's a general rule out there which describes how a widescreen aspect ratio is more aesthetically pleasing than the old standard 4:3. Has something to do with how the eyes themselves see images... while you still have peripheral vision, your world perception is pretty much in the widescreen aspect ratio. Seeing something in 4:3 is jarring, because you have a *lot* more unoccupied space to either side than you do above and below.

That said... later this week I'm taking delivery of a 47" screen at 1920x1080 resolution.... Converting my old desktop to a Media Center since I've moved all my gaming and other things to the laptop. :)

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[Dog-Cow]

My widescreen has a native resolution of 1900x1220. It's great for working with documents because it's big enough to have two windows side by side. Really handy if I need a web reference or a couple PuTTY sessions open.

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[zippthorne]

Another words, they choose the resolution that ensures the icons and texts don't get so small it's an eye sore.

I think you mean, "In other words..."

But more importantly, I think it's important to note that you're basically saying that monitor resolutions are being chosen to compensate for a failure of OS gui designers: There is a still natural font-size in pixels for each of the OSs, and although they allow you to resize display fonts, things just don't quite work right except at the default size. (at least, on all Windowses I've tried, 3.1,95,98,ME,XP and all the linuxes I've tried, Mandrake 5ish-8ish, Red Hat something, and Ubuntu Hoary through Gutsy)

Further, icons are still stored as small raster files instead of either vector-graphics files or larger raster files. Gone are the days where icons have to be super-small to conserve disk space, and where it didn't matter anyway because 640x480 was considered a relatively high-resolution display.

I never liked .28 dot pitch. I'd prefer a much smaller dot pitch, but arbitrarily sized text and graphics, for a super-sharp display. Font blockiness is one of the reasons that people print web pages if there is a lot to read: the higher resolution fonts are quite a bit easier on the eyes.

Personally, I think my ideal display would be something like 5000x3750 pixels and 300-500 hz refresh rate, in a size suitable for the application I'm using it for. ~21" diagonal for a desktop, a bit larger for a media room. Hopefully, by the time display technology is in danger of reaching that rather lofty standard, OS technology will be able to properly support it.

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[NoPantsJim]

I've been using a 42" 1920x1080 display as a computer monitor for almost a year now. By far the best purchase I have ever made.

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[MDiehr]

I agree with this. At work I have two monitors, one in landscape and one in portrait. The portrait monitor is much, much better for web browsing and most document viewing, whereas the other one is more useful for viewing images or videos.

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[Kris_J]

Yeah, there's nothing good about the resolution for this screen. I mean, seriously, who would build an obviously expensive, niche screen these days that doesn't have at least 1080 lines?

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[Apotsy]

a 21" CRT @ 1920x1440 3 years ago It's very doubtful that the aperture grille (or shadow mask, depending on the monitor type) was small enough to actually show that many pixels. Hell, even the beam's spot size might have been too big to prevent pixel overlap. With LCD and other monitor types that offer physically discrete pixels, you are guaranteed to actually get the advertised resolution. And many of these monitor types have the side effect of allowing sub-pixel antialiasing on some graphics, increasing the effective resolution beyond the number of discrete pixels.

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[toddestan]

On the other hand, I really wish that some company would buck the trend and make some high DPI screens, as they simply do not exist at this time. I would really like to buy a 1400x1050 14.1" screen, or a 1600x1200 16" screen, or a 2048x1536 19" screen (or similar). Things really look much nicer when you can't see the individual pixels all the time, and the subpixel rendering of fonts start to look really nice. And judging by how I see other people use their LCDs, there would also be some good money in making a 1024x768 native 20" screen too.

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[master_p]

I've been longing to buy such a monitor for the sole purpose of properly playing Ms PacMan in MAME...

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[juhaz]

Likewise... I switched from a 21" CRT @ 1920x1440 3 years ago, when I bought a Gateway 2185W 21" widescreen LCD at 1680x1050. I love it.
It's not that resolutions are going down. It's that the standard aspect ratio has changed. Except they are going down, obviously. Your "widescreen" display has less pixels in width, too, in case you did not notice. If it was just aspect ratio, the height would've staid the same, and width would have increased, instead, both went down, and the total resolution is just 64% of the old one.

That said... later this week I'm taking delivery of a 47" screen at 1920x1080 resolution.... Which, needless to say has by far the lowest physical resolution (in DPI) of all the displays you've mentioned so far (the laptop is highest, and only one of the non-CRT lot that is sane), reversing the trend how?

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

My computer has a 24" 1920x1200 LCD screen. 1280x1024 sounds about right for a low-end or specialised screen, but bigger screens have been around for a while now, without costing an arm and a leg, too.

Also, you can always buy a wide-screen and mount it on it's side, then simply tell your OS to rotate the video feed to it (standard feature in OS X 10.5) like I did for my 2nd screen (1024x1280, with built-in pivot) -- very handy. Your sub-pixel font rendering might not work, but since you have a larger amount of pixels to view it in, you can increase the font-size to something more comfortable and still have plenty of vertical room.

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[KillerBob]

The monitor in question was a 0.21dp Compaq P1100. Feel free to Google the specs. It did 1920x1440 @ 75Hz.

Re:why do screen resolutions keep going down?

[Apotsy]

According to this (PDF, scroll down to the P1100 section), the pitch was 0.24mm, which probably isn't enough. Don't really feel like doing the math, but it's doubtful at first glance that that is enough. Yes, it may have had the ability to modulate the beam at 1920x1440 @ 75Hz, but that does not mean that it was actually drawing that many pixels properly masked with no overlap. Like I said, the mask and beam spot size have to be small enough for the pixels to fit, and I've never encountered a 21" CRT that could actually do it for 1920x1440.

Why is it being touted for gamers/video?

[mykepredko]

Just looking at the screen, my first thought was that the format would be great for code/system development with seamless transition across multiple open applications.

It would also be great for different industries (I'm thinking the financial markets) where more than two screens are the norm. The curved structure might allow for a smaller workstation.

In any case, it's a kewl concept and it will be interesting to see where it goes.

myke

900?

[MMC Monster]

Nine hundred pixels high seems a bit low. You probably can't do anything with this monitor except play games or watch cinamascope movies.

Wait a Minute

[trongey]

I thought I was supposed to be excited about a perfectly flat screen in a super thin frame. Now I'm supposed to go back to being all googly about a curved screen with big bulge in the back again? This is too hard, I give up.

Re:Wait a Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

I googled both of them and I'm still excited.

Re:Wait a Minute

[WaZiX]

That's because you have SafeSearch turned off...

Re:Wait a Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no, no. It's curved *the other way*, see? That's the difference.

Re:Wait a Minute

[whyde]

Perhaps you don't understand. It's curving the other way. Used to be convex, then flat, now concave. Makes perfect sense to me in the natural progression of things.

Re:Wait a Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh....

Re:Wait a Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Double whoosh!

Re:Wait a Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfft, what's hard about this logic?

Convex monitors = old and busted
Flat monitors = current hotness

To get concave, you just follow the trend of pushing the middle in, and pulling out the sides, hence:
Concave monitors = new hotness

Makes perfect sense. This trend will only end when the sides are touching, and you have a monitor globe.

Re:Wait a Minute

[Anonymous Coward]

WIN

Rubbish

[Spad]

My two 17" LCDs do 2560x1024 - they may not be seemless, but that doesn't really bother me. 2880*900 is pretty poor, especially when you consider the size of the thing.

Re:Rubbish

[vimh42]

Not sure if I'm ready to call it rubbish. I'd have to sit down in front of the thing. Looking at the pictures, I'm not sure I'd like the curved screen.

Oznium?

[thatskinnyguy]

I heard a little blurb in there about it being powered by oznium LEDs. This monitor is powered by the same brand of LEDs I used to rice a car a while back! One thing I will say: those little suckers are bright!

Re:Oznium?

[homer_ca]

Osram. It's a brand.

Re:Oznium?

[thatskinnyguy]

Guess I parsed it wrong. At any rate, Oznium also sells LEDs.

Wrong approach?

[Doctor Faustus]

At some point, it's going to stop making sense to make the monitors bigger and bigger. If you're going to do something exotic and expensive like this, why not glasses?

Re:Wrong approach?

[mrchaotica]

If you're going to do something exotic and expensive like this, why not glasses?

Because then the pixels have to be tiny. It's almost certainly much easier to make a 100DPI screen than it would be to make a 1,000 DPI screen!

Incidentally, most HMDs (especially reasonably-priced ones) tend to be VGA resolution. Making one with this many pixels would be super-expensive.

Would take some getting used to

[Richard.g.k]

Having to look back and forth on it would take quite a bit of getting used to wouldnt it?

Curved?

[ajs318]

Surely all computer displays used to be curved, not so very long ago?

Can't do this with just any LCD

[uuxququex]

If you try this on most laptops, you will quickly see that it won't work very well. The polarisation filter in a typical wide-screen laptop makes the viewing angle from the sides very good. This is needed so both your eyes see the same hue and luminance. The angle can be quite steep (left-eye to right-side of the display, for instance). You don't need this as much for up and down, because your eyes see the same no matter what. Yes, your display is slightly brighter on top (or bottom, doesn't matter) but both eyes see the same. Now, if you rotate your display 90 degrees, your eyes will see different brightness. This makes for some very uncomfortable viewing. You can try it easily.

Re:Can't do this with just any LCD

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

You'll also be screwing with the sub-pixel rendering, and all those documents and web pages won't look so good any more.

Re:Can't do this with just any LCD

[AaronLawrence]

Laptops are (obviously) not meant for this. Real monitors are better. I have a Dell 24" and use it all the time in portrait mode with no problem.

LED don't cause poor blacks...

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor blacks are caused by the man holding them down!

Nice field of vision, poor 3D.

[Half-pint HAL]

Yes, a curved monitor does present great field-of-vision opportunities, but it's breaking one of the unwritten rules of 3D graphics: software perspective curving isn't necessary because the gamer's physical world does the job for you.

What do I mean? Modern 3D engines generally make a flat projection of a plane, with the drawn size of an object being related to the z difference between the player and the object. However, basic geometry says we should take the true distance, equated with the x, y and z differences. If you look at a window, you will see it as oblong, but if you compare the visual length of the top and bottom edges, they're likely to be different.

Calculating that perspective distortion is computationally expensive, but we're OK, because the difference in physical distance between the eye and the various points of the monitor starts to make up for this (but not completely).

In the days of Quake and Duke Nukem 3D, most of us still had curvy CRTs. These curves exaggerated the natural curve and enhanced the 3D. These days, our flat LCDs have reeduced that and things start to seem a bit flatter.

HAL.

Wonder how many...

[Anonymous Coward]

other times this has happened to you and your first thought was similar: not your fault, someone else messed up? Well, don't worry, there's now several hundred thousand people who know about your problem and will help correct any future browsing mishaps...

"No price has been revealed as of yet."

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, that's easy; "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it"

Head Tracking

[Keyboarder]

Imagine pairing this with a http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/TrackIR or http://www.free-track.net/similar system. With a larger FOV you could turn down the sensitivity (which makes it so you don't have to turn your head away from the monitor to see "behind" you) on the tracking system and provide a more lifelike and immersive experience. You still wouldn't have 1:1, but you could tone it down to maybe 1:2.5 or less.

Do They Work Better than Stereo?

[Doc Ruby]

Has anyone playtested these curved monitors to see whether they work that much better than flat screens? For games? How about for movies - is the "experience feeling" any easier to forget you're looking at a simulation, a picture on a monitor?

And are these curved monitors going to trap us in "sweet spots" that are more "hifi" than flat screens, but require a single viewer to occupy a very specific viewing position at their focus, like stereo speakers do? If you're not in the sweet spot, does it look any better at all than a big, hirez flat screen? Any worse?

What's the big deal?

[MT628496]

If I take two 1680x1050 displays and put them next to each other, I have more screen real estate for a lot less money. Not to mention that I can run two programs fullscreen more easily, or dedicate an entire screen to a shell constantly etc etc.

Re:What's the big deal?

[PitaBred]

You've still got a huge division between the two. Call me when you have that figured out.

This display is made for gamers people who want to run one programs fullscreen, not for someone who wants to run two programs fullscreen. I certainly hope you aren't so stupid you couldn't figure that out.

Re:What's the big deal?

[MT628496]

I certainly hope you aren't so stupid you couldn't figure that out.

Smart enough to recognize an ad hominem argument. Anyone, my point, which you chose to ignore, was that I'd rather have more pixels than one giant expensive piece of eyecandy.

Comparison

[Avatar8]

2x dual DVI graphics cards that can drive (nVidia 8800 w/ 320Mb) this @ ~$250 each = $500
4x 19" 2-5ms LCD monitors for equivalent screen space @ $220 each = $880

I already have the cards and two monitors, so I'd only need to spend $440 to reach an equivalent. Those starting from scratch would need to spend $1400+ to do this.

Not sure a seamless (as they promise) display that wide is really worth however much more than $880 it will cost. Knowing Alienware's high prices, I'm sure it will likely be 3-5x that.

Nice proof of concept or toy for those that have everything, but I don't see it being that popular amongst regular consumers. Besides how many games/applications are going to support four wide? Granted the way I play WoW now with one screen to play and one screen for browser/VoIP/reference, I could definitely do a widescreen format in the middle and "support" screens on both sides. Limited application.

Useless

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

This monitor is useless for "true, hardcore gamers". Why? In recent years, game makers have decided that wide screen will be a subset of a "normal" screen, not the other way around. In other words, you see the same width, but with the top and bottom (that you'd see on a normal screen) chopped off, then magnified to stretch it proportionally to the wide screen width.

I forget which game announced that last year, but I wanted to slap someone.

Try it. Some games have "wide screen" settings. Switch it on and off. You see no more width with the widescreen setting, and lose some on the top and bottom. Eve Online is one such monstrosity.

Crap for gaming.

[Nim82]

Crap for gaming. With a screen that size/shape you can't see the extremities without physically turning your head quite a bit. In FPS games you really need to have your whole FOV in view to be competitive. If you move further back (to get the whole screen in your field of vision) you defeat the point of the screen being curved and may as well be looking at a conventional panel. In terms of enhancing gaming it's right up there with fancy LED's on Heatsinks.

Shit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I need to redo all my 2000x1 pixel background images. But if you're browsing a website full screen on that thing, you don't get to bitch about column sizes...

PAL vs. NTSC

[tepples]

What? Ordinary low-definition TV is 640x480i. ajs318 is from the UK. There, SDTV has 576 interlaced picture lines and 49 vertical blanking lines, for a total of 625. There are 25 frames per second, divided into two fields at 50 Hz. You're probably from the United States (NTSC), Japan (NTSC), or Brazil (PAL/M), where SDTV has 480 interlaced picture lines and 45 vertical blanking lines, for a total of 525. There are 30 or 24 frames per second, divided into two fields at 60 Hz or an alternating sequence of two and three fields at 60 Hz respectively.

Re:on behalf of all of slashdot, i would like to s

[ArsonSmith]

With this screen and this wiimote hack I'd never have to go into the big blue room again.

Will games even support this monitor?

[Cornflake917]

AFAIK, it seems like there still quite a few games that don't even properly support normal widescreen aspect ratios. Furthermore, I would imagine the FOV will have to be pretty damn high (Close to 180), and I think most games see that setting as a cheat/hack. It will probably take while, if at all, for developers to actually feel its worth the time and money to beta test on these monitors. For multiplayer games, developers will have to be faced with a tough decision of giving people with this monitor a huge advantage, or screwing these people by trying to make things fair.

While the thought of a having a near full range of view for gaming is pretty cool, I'm not sure if gamers are going to get what they expect.

Hey, I like the idea!

[lavacano201014]

This is the sort of thing I'd use for games. If I had enough deskroom. Or maybe I'd put it on the media center and have fullscreen visualizations.

old news?

[NRISecretAgent]

Didn't we just COME from curved monitors? old news slashdot... Actually this monitor looks pretty awesome. The only problem is that that's an insanely skewed res. How will that ever make things look normal?

You are mistaken

[Anonymous Coward]

You couldn't be more wrong. To make a flat image look 3D you have to ensure that a dot in the image appears to be located at the same location, that is is projected on the same location on your retina, as the corresponding dot in the threedimensional scene. A true perspective projection, as generated by when you render something on a flat display, be it LCD or otherwise, does just that and thus creates the most realistic image. Any "improvement" a curved CRT may have caused in your opinion, is really nothing more than your imagination, probably combined with an unhealthy dose of selfdeception.

Re:You are mistaken

[Half-pint HAL]

Nowhere does that article state that a flat-plane perspective is a perfect representation of 3D. A flat-plane perspective can be a true representation if and only if 1) the projection is sized such that the observer's angle of vision matches the angle of vision of the projection, and 2) the user views the picture on-axis: in the centre and perpendicular to the projection plane.

Unfortunately, a computer screen typically occupies half the visual angle that the game represents. A flat-plane projection then has the illusion of representing a narrower view than it does. This makes turning potentially disorientating as you turn 360 in what the eye believes is only 180.

Neither will the player always be looking perpedicularly at the centre of the screen. In a static flat-plane projection, the nearest point to the eye becomes the centre of the picture. If you look at architectural photography, you'll see that a lot people use perspective distortion to force viewpoint. In a photograph approximating flat-plane perspective, or one that has been digitally perspective-corrected, the observer moves his viewpoint as he moves his eyes -- effectively walking around the picture. In a photograph with clear perspective distortion, the viewer is forced to "stand" in one place, and when he looks at a different part of the scene, he is simply moving his eyes. The effect is generally held to be more evocative and immersive. Now, in a moving environment, movement can reset the centre of vision, but only with simple movement. If you're moving forward, strafing and using mouselook simultaneously, the movement gives no clear centre.

The brain and eye have incredible potential for adaptability (check out "prism glasses" for more info) so most avid gamers will have trained these problems out of their systems by now, but the occasional gamer or non-gamer is likely to get floored by them.

Even if you still don't agree with me on that, the statement "You couldn't be more wrong" is clearly false. Even if your other assertion was correct, both our models suggest that this curved monitor will not provide an accurate rendering of a 3D environment using flat-plane projection, so I could have been more wrong. If I'd said that the curved monitor was any use in 3D gaming, I would have been more wrong.

HAL.

2,880 x 900 DLP?

[Kurayamino-X]

Yeah, it' awesome and all, unless you want to actually game on it, or watch 1080 video. Call me when there's a 3920x1200 curved OLED display.

Limited analog bandwidth is like pixels

[tepples]

There are 625 lines, which are not subdivided into pixels They can be if you are using composite video. In both PAL and NTSC systems, the video signal is divided up so that low frequencies encode luma and high frequencies encode chroma. For example, in PAL, chroma occupies a 1.25 MHz band centered around 4.433618 MHz. TVs separate them with a brick wall filter just below 4.433618 - (1.25 / 2) = roughly 3.81 MHz. Per the Nyquist theorem, a signal sampled at over twice the highest frequency can be perfectly reconstructed from the samples. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to assign an effective pixel count to composite video. In the case of PAL, the active area of the frame is 52 microseconds wide, so 52 us * 3.81 MHz * 2 = 396 pixels.

Re:Limited analog bandwidth is like pixels

[Markspark]

you didn't miss the MHz , ie 10^6 Hz in your calculations, 396pixels is not a very big total resolution..

Re:Limited analog bandwidth is like pixels

[tepples]

you didn't miss the MHz , ie 10^6 Hz in your calculations Nor did I miss the microseconds, ie 10^(-6) second.

396pixels is not a very big total resolution You're right that 396x288 for a field or 396x576 for a frame isn't very big. That's one thing digital SDTV was intended to correct, to bring it up to the 704x576 typical of DVD.

Hey Peter, can I borrow your lawnmo-WHOOAAA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, can somebody bring me a towel?

Might take getting used to...

[jadin]

I'm not so sure it'd be good for gaming. Several years ago we had a lan party where someone had wall projector for a monitor. We all tried to play counter-strike and most of us were pretty horrible on it. We found it far easier to play on a normal monitor and let everyone else just watch for fun on the projector. The problem was there was too much screen to scan quickly with your eyes. We'd even miss enemies we'd normally see on the smaller screen.

If you had two of these with dual monitor support, could you have a full 180degree view?

Can't find the images for the scripts

[HTH NE1]

Come on, if your site needs to be able to run scripts from:

1. 2mdn.net
2. digg.com
3. doubleclick.net
4. gawker.com
5. gizmodo.com
6. googlesyndication.com
7. gridskipper.com
8. quantserve.com
9. sitemeter.com

just to convey a one-paragraph story with pictures, there's something seriously wrong with your site design, your privacy practices, and the lack of respect you have for the security of your readers. Sorry, Gizmodo, but your content is not compelling enough for me to drop my shields for all your friends. We are not one big happy fleet.

Re:Can't find the images for the scripts

[Kingrames]

And if you've seen the picture, the first thing that pops in your head SHOULD be "Shields up! Red Alert! Battle Stations!"

Re:Can't find the images for the scripts

[Jaysyn]

Odd, I just had to allow Gizmodo.

Re:Can't find the images for the scripts

[Instine]

14 millions readers per week apear to disagree with you. IMO this is exactly why noscripts is as silly as Norton or almost any other addon security tool. Its like breaking your toy so the bully doesn't play with it. Its your browser's job to make your browsing safe. And yours of course.

Re:Can't find the images for the scripts

[HTH NE1]

IMO this is exactly why noscripts is as silly as Norton or almost any other addon security tool. Its like breaking your toy so the bully doesn't play with it. Its your browser's job to make your browsing safe. And yours of course. No, it is the site's responsibility to use the NOSCRIPT tag to provide alternative content when the script does not run for whatever reason.

So many sites so in love with Web 2.0 forgetting basic HTML principles like graceful degradation. Or at very least, <noscript><p>You need to enable scripts from gawker.com to view the images accompanying this story.</p></noscript> for the totally lazy but not quite totally inept.

Seems only DoubleClick even bothers to use the NOSCRIPT tag, just to ensure that they get their ad impression even if their script doesn't run.

Re:Can't find the images for the scripts

[Anonymous Coward]

indeed. ya get one tmp allow from me. if that doesn't display
what needs to be displayed, i consider your shit broken, and move on.

i am also unlikely to return, and simply search for the linked content elsewhere.

Re:Can't find the images for the scripts

[ozphx]

Come on, if you feel the need to make that many star trek references to complain about a perfectly fine website then it says a lot for you being stuck back in the stone ages with your hippy friends. I bet you complained about the H1 tag when it came out too. "Polluting my eyes by enforcing its unnecessary largeness... like a giant pair of... klingon testicles... or something".

Sorry, but your post is no longer compelling now that Slashdot is no longer just a bunch of geeks and furrys :)

Re:Can't find the images for the scripts

[HTH NE1]

if you feel the need to make that many star trek references "That many"? How many did you find?

Re:Can't find the images for the scripts

[WK2]

NoScript is a tool. Using it has advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages: the internet is less annoying. And faster. And you are safer from Javascript exploits (which are quite common in Firefox)
Disadvantages: some poorly written pages don't work, or work poorly.

I feel that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, so I use NoScript. Sites that require Javascript and don't say so are probably lame and annoying anyway.

At what point do you start barfing?

[raddan]

This is the reason I can't watch the TVs at the gym while on the treadmill. Instant motion-sickness. I'm resigned to the fact that I won't be an astronaut, but apparently I won't be a gamer for much longer either...

Why is this news?

[Keeper Of Keys]

I had a curved monitor back in the 90s. It actually worked, too. :-P

Wallhacker eh?

[tepples]

I have three screens at home running on two adapters (512M video ram). It'd be nice to be able to use all the extra real estate to cheat at StarCraft or Command and Conquer for example. The number of square meters of the battlefield that each player can see is one of the game rules. If you increase an overhead RTS like StarCraft from 640x480 to 1280x960, you don't quadruple how much battlefield you can see; instead, you just increase how much detail is shown in each texture. This detail can be real (hi-res texture packs) or fake (smart line art resizer).

Re:Wallhacker eh?

[Kyokushi]

You do get to see more battlefield in Red Alert 2 on higher resolution. Also a longer sidebar, which means less scrolling to get more units. Maxing out at 1024x768 isnt a really big deal though at this time.....

Re:Wallhacker eh?

[Bigbutt]

Hey, thanks for modifying the quote to add your own little cynical observation.

I wasn't interested in cheating. Just seeing more real estate. How is being able to see the entire screen (not uncloak or "wallhack", just have it visible) cheating? It's the same screen I'd see by scrolling around, just not all at once.

I guess you play a lot on-line. I don't have the time to spend honing my skills to the level to even offer a decent game to the guys who spend all their time on line. Back when these were hot, I'd log in and within 10 or 15 minutes I'd be dead so I pretty much just play against the AI.

So honestly, I would just like these sorts of games to be able to display on all available monitors. I think it'd be cool to be able to see a lot more of the battlefield.

[John]

Re:Wallhacker eh?

[Bigbutt]

Yep. I've done that. I haven't tried it with C&C3 just yet though. I'll have to bring it up and see how it goes. I'm playing Red Alert right now (the original one :) ).

[John]

Re:Wallhacker eh?

[snooo53]

That would be nice to see the extra battlefield in RTS games. Would be even better with a multitouch display setup to select and move characters around on the large map. Just thinking out loud some ideas:

1. Easiest but most nauseating would be to macro up your PC so you can just hit a key to quickly scroll in one or more directions. (e.g., for a move down operation, do a 'unselect units and then arrow down 4 times' key combo)

2. An interesting but very hard to implement idea would be to have some sort system that redraws the minimap on another monitor, only expands it to take up the entire screen area. Bonus points if you could make it so that mouse clicks and movements on the expanded map would be translated to precise movements within the minimap.

Re:Wallhacker eh?

[WK2]

Starcraft is an RTS. If you could see three times as much of the battlefield as your opponents, that would give you a distinct, and unfair, advantage. If you were playing a turn based game, such as Battle of Wesnoth, or chess, it wouldn't really matter much.

Re:Wallhacker eh?

[Bigbutt]

No argument there. I think an unfair advantage over the computer AI would help me win at least one of the matches. I can get through the canned games without any problem but the StarCraft AI kicks my butt every time in the head to head games :)

[John]

Clues from the photos

[heroine]

The photos don't show much detail, but apparently it's 4 standard monitors rotated sideways & stacked.

Possible explanation

[HalfOfOne]

It's been years since I worked in the Interface Design field, so take this with a big hunk of NaCl.

What you may be experiencing is what a study I was involved with (not directly, but we audited their experiments and provided advice) that had issues with during flight sim testing with motion control servos. When they got really close to reality in terms of integrating visual, audio, and motion cues, but had very slight sync issues, the pilots (some Navy, some civilian) would get very sick. It'd only happen if the system were *almost* perfectly tuned. If they got too far off in terms of sync, we theorized that the sensory system would throw it out as obviously garbage. But if you got close, the brain would try to follow it as if it were actually happening, but the "error conditions" or things that wouldn't map to the right biological cues would get people violently ill. What was neat was that the same results could be found in 6 or 7 year-old kids, their "sensory gullability" wasn't any more forgiving of mistimed cues. That led me to believe that it was either hard-coded by the time they got to that age, or biologically hard-wired from birth. I graduated and moved on to a field where I didn't have to constantly beg for grant money, so I never got to see what they discovered, but it was an interesting experiment.

Perhaps your audio and video system is very close to synched up, but you've got a slight audio delay in one or all of your speakers. Try using the same cable types and lengths, and make sure your front and rear speakers are adequately matched up in terms of response times.

Re:Possible explanation

[Neon Spiral Injector]

This isn't on my system (I have a plasma and an LCD). It is with any DLP I've been around. Sound or no. I can tell a DLP display as soon as I glance at it (especially from the corner of my eye). There is just something I find perceptually wrong with the way these displays look.

Why only 900 pixels vertical?

[hcdejong]

What's this fascination with letterbox displays? I can see the appeal for movies, but for text, you want as much as possible to fit on screen without having to scroll AND without ending up with ridiculously long lines. IMO 1200 pixels vertically is the minimum usable size these days, and even that feels cramped. Especially with a display this size: if you can afford 2800 pixels across, why skimp so much on the other dimension?

Re:Why only 900 pixels vertical?

[Rick Genter]

It's much easier to extend the horizontal resolution without increasing eyestrain than the vertical resolution, since you can easily swivel your head to view the extra real estate. You could build a spherical monitor, which I imagine would be even harder to manufacture well than a cylindrical monitor, but I think moving your head up and down to read would feel less natural than moving it left to right (unless you typically use a language that uses a vertical orientation).

Re:Why only 900 pixels vertical?

[hcdejong]

My current monitor is about 30 cm high. I could easily use one that's 40-50 cm high: I'd be able to see from top edge to bottom edge without having to move my head.

Re:"0.02 ms"

[Brother Dysk]

I reckon this is the same affliction that makes people refer to chipping in their ".02 cents".

Learn to speak

[Anonymous Coward]

The up-inflection drives me nuts? A presenter needs to speak with confidence? Every sentence sounds like he's begging for approval?

since it seems to be a contest..

[crossmr]

about who has the most real-estate, some of the machines we assemble for control stations have 8 monitors capable of 1600x1200 in them, stacked 4x2 for a resolution of 6400x2400
running on a couple of nvidia nvs 440s.

Hey, I paid extra for those top and bottom pixels!

[MDiehr]

That game was BioShock, and for the record, it's one of the only games to use the same horizontal FOV for normal and widescreen aspect ratios. Who was it that decided widescreen should show more, anyhow? Sometime in the future I bet you will be able to purchase "tallscreen" monitors to provide that extra height resolution to your games. Many modren games actually allow you to pick what kind of horizontal FOV you'd like to use. Quake 3 even supports up to 360 degrees providing the perfect fisheye omni-vision for the true hardcore gamer.

No big deal...

[bwcbwc]

I have this TV from the 1970's that has a tremendous curve on it. So what if it's convex instead of concave?

Re:on behalf of all of slashdot, i would like to s

[darthflo]

My dual 1600x1200 setup is working better than I'd imagine a huge-ass back projection setup with a lower resolution would. In the case of needing more space, I'll happily add a 2560x1600 center screen and pivot the 20" ones on it's sides, netting me some three times the screen real estate.

.02ms response rate

[M0b1u5]

I'm calling bullshit on that figure. That would mean an effective refresh rate of 50,000 Hz, I believe. No one has a monitor even remotely that fast, and no graphics card manufacturer provides a graphics card capable of more than about 60Hz at high resolutions.

In other words, there's no need to produce a monitor that fast, no equipment which could leverage that rate, and no human is capable of distinguishing the qualitative (not quantitative) difference beyond about 200Hz. (Quantitative differences are detectable up to about 100 Hz, qualitative through to about 200.)

Bad Journalism.

Re:.02ms response rate

[geekoid]

DLP

Racers

[kn0tw0rk]

I could see this would be just as good for racing games as it would allow to see your cars position better when the camera is set on top of the bonnet. Would be great for when overtaking and for when going into corners.

Re:Hey, I paid extra for those top and bottom pixe

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the BioShock patch fixed that.

It added an option to "lock" or "unlock" horizontal FOV.

DLP drawbacks

[enoz]

It is well known about the rainbow and flickering of single-chip DLP projectors, but I have seen systems that claim to be "3-chip" that still suffer the same effects.

To me it appears DLP is directed more to the consumer market, with industry still preferring CRT or LCD projectors.

Re:Only a brainless moron WOULDN'T run Windows

[Hucko]

For app compatibility, ease of operation, productivity in the workplace and maximum entertainment, there just isn't any other choice besides Windows.

??? I take it you don't get to use a computer much.

If you're an unkempt, cretinous, fat-chested, dirty-bearded, donut-eating, friendless, hostile, abrasive, abusive, horrifyingly ugly admin-type then you might have some justifiable use for Linux, but the rest of us don't.

Looks like I'm going to have to have a complete makeover. So is my wife. Know any plastic surgeons that specialise in ugly body modifications? I always come into the trend too late.

The shape of things to come?

[greggman]

I like the idea but 2880 by 900? 900 is not enough for editing code IMO.

My 2 24s at work are giving me 3200x1200.
My 2 19s and 1 24 at home are 4760x1024 (1200v in the middle)

I guess I'll wait for version 2

The width of the scanline in pixels

[tepples]

Now, you're saying "I looked it up and PAL uses more bandwidth and therefore has more definition". Just because it uses it poorly (this description is, of course, just an opinion, not everyone appreciates doing more with less at the expense of doing everything less well as better, but in these days of reduce, reuse, recycle, it seems appropriate) does not mean it is better. Imagine each line as one pixel. Why? I imagine each line as one row of pixels. For each color standard, there is a frequency that divides the luma band from the chroma band. For NTSC and for PAL/M (60 Hz Brazilian PAL), this is roughly 3.0 MHz; for PAL in Europe and Down Under, it is commonly 3.81 MHz. Take twice that (Nyquist sampling rate) and multiply by the nominal 52 microsecond picture width to get the equivalent 312 luma pixels per line for NTSC or 396 luma pixels per line for PAL. This is close to the square-pixel measure of 320x240 or 384x288 pixels per field that's commonly quoted for broadcast SDTV.

Now, work out the bandwidth. NTSC: 525*60=31.5 kHz (or lines per second!). PAL: 625*50=31.25 Khz. That's progressive. Interlaced is half that. And one of the interlace modes commonly used with NTSC is the 3:2 pulldown used with works shot in 24 Hz, such as motion pictures. The 3:2 pulldown mode uses only 80 percent of the signal, as half the frames have a repeated field. Now who uses bandwidth inefficiently?

One slight NTSC bonus: Tolerance of a poor signal. PAL isn't as tolerant, and usually doesn't have the ability to simply lose the colour carrier when the signal sucks.

Is this the fault of the standard or of the receiver?

Speaking of using poor signals, with a Sharp 32" TV, I've found that NTSC channels come in better than ATSC channels with the same rabbit ears antenna. With NTSC, I get a picture with noise and ghosts, but with ATSC, I get "Failed to receive signal" in white text on a blue background more often than not.

24--25 fps video, audio pitch change

[ErkDemon]

The bigger issue is how movies are transferred to PAL -- standard transfer is to speed them up 6% to translate 24fps to 25fps. Up until very recently, that altered the pitch of the sound!

Yeah, similar issues with transfers for UK rebroadcast. Some years back I used to have some music gear in the same room as my tv, and would sometimes tootle along with the music on the telly. But at some point they seemed to change the transfer method, and suddenly the tunings on TV programmes recorded in the US were way off. You'd have the same audio track on a UK-authored TV programme, and on a US-authored one, and the tuning would be off by about a semitone. If the difference had been a perfect semitone, things wouldn't have been so bad, but it wasn't. 'Twas really annoying.