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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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...

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!

[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.

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.

So it's like a CRT...

[mushadv]

but backwards?

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.

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: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:not very curvy

[berashith]

Is that you Sir Mix-a-lot?

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!"

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: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.