The Ultimate Flat Panel Monitor Solution

Reeses wrote in to send us linkage to a monitor that makes my SGI Screen look a little less sparkly. Mass Engineered Design Inc has screens that can be configured with 16 flat panels in on desktop. The Horizontal Triple has an aggregate resolution of 3072 x 768 and costs a mere (cough) $6500. They say solutions are available for various UNIXs but that don't specify. And then again, with all the multi-head stuff coming in XF86, it might not matter as much.

Comments

Flatpanels are a double edged sword

[jandrese]

(Note: may experiance is with the Silicon Graphics 1600SW flatpanel, YMMV)

Flatpanels aren't for everybody, at least not yet. There are many advantages, however there are also several disadvatages to flatpanels. I'm going to list them so you can make an informed decision by yourself.
Advantages

• Super crisp display -- Pictures displayes on the Flatpanel look REAL, whereas they look like pictures displayed on a CRT on my monitor.
• Small size -- Just look how much of your desk is consumed by a regular monitor
• Lower emissions -- Less worry about being slowly irradiated by your own personal xray cannon
• Less heat output -- Less energy consumption for lower monthy electricy bills (at least in the summer)
• Immune to magnetic fields -- No more worrying about your speakers distorting your monitor, and vice versa
• 100% digital interface -- No more digital->analog conversion mean no more lossiness.

But there are some disadvatages

• Expensive -- Although this will change if they become popular, flatpanels are still pretty expensive
• Narrow viewing angle -- You can only view about 60 degrees to any angle, and less if its from the top
• You can't change the resolutions, this includes things like fullscreen VESA modes, so a vast majority of games simply won't work with a flatpanel.
• Younger technology -- Flatpanels (other than Laptop displays) are a relativly new technology and are going to have more problems than your tried and true CRT, especially w.r.t. manufacturing defects.

I hope this is enough information for you to get started on an informed decision.

Re:Flatpanels are a double edged sword

[jandrese]

Don't get me wrong, I love the 1600SW, but depending on what you do, it may not be right for you.

Warning: once you try the 1600SW for a while, you will never want to go back to regular CRTs.

Re:Flatpanels are a double edged sword

[jandrese]

Try a more modern flatpanel. There is a world of difference between looking at photos on a CRT and looking at photos on a flatpanel. On the flatpanel they look like you can just reach in a grab them, while on CRTs, they tend to look, well...projected. As an added bonus, SGI ships a color-balancing utility with all of its flatpanels (the "ColorLock").

Of course all of the opinions expressed above are my own.

Re:Flatpanels are a double edged sword

[Analog]

Hmmm. Maybe I'm misreading you here (apologies if so), but I think you're comparing apples and oranges.

Hate to burst your bubble, but any TFT display is *analog* -- that's right... how do you think they get those bazillions of sparlky tantalizing colours? you're driving the electronics with analog RGB signals and in most cases, standard sync pulses.

You're right that in most cases the LCD monitors are using the same RGB signal as the CRT monitors (and convert them back to digital at the monitor), but as noted above the SGI monitors don't do that. Those bazillions of sparkly colors are generated with 24/32 bit numbers (as in all PC video these days) but unlike in the normal case, they're not converted to an analog RGB signal. They're sent directly to the monitor which uses them to control the transistor switches that make up the display.

Now, I suppose you could mean that there are no digital signals, only analog representations of digital signals, but that is mostly a semantic game played by first year engineering students, and has no real practical significance outside the design labs.

Analog does *not* mean lossy or lousy or unclear. Analog makes the world go 'round, my friend. Digital makes it easy to convey the info, but ultimately you're dealing with analog.

Again, right in theory, (somewhat) wrong in practice. As noted in your rant, digital these days uses speeds that make it necessary to treat the signal paths as transmission lines, but this only matters to the people making the hardware. As far as practical significance, consider this. I am sending an analog signal down a line. Any rounding of edges, any attenuation of signal levels, any noise picked up, degrades my signal. And you cannot avoid these things in the real world. Period. What I receive may be very close to what I sent, but it is not exactly the same. I have lost some information.

Now let's say I send a digital representation of that analog signal. Unless the noise, attenuation, etc. is bad enough for me to not be able to distinguish between a high and a low, I receive an exact copy of the signal sent. No loss of information has occured. Now, usually there's a tradeoff, because there is always loss involved in the a->d and/or d->a conversion, but in the case of PC video, it's generated digitally to begin with so that problem doesn't exist. So with the displays themselves being equal, a digital signal will beat an analog signal in quality every time.

Re:Flat Panel Fuzziness

[jandrese]

Silicon Graphics does. Check out The Silicon Graphics webpage for the 1600SW. I've got one sitting right next to my CRT and people just marvel at the clarity of the screen. I should point out that the 1600SW has a 110dpi resolution, which largely accounts for its incredible crispness.

Disclaimer: I work for Silicon Graphics.

Flatpanels driving CRTs down

[heroine]

Theoretically the more suckers who buy into flat panel displays the lower CRTs are going to cost. For the first time ever, we're seeing CRTs dropping below $150. Now that my ValueColor is dying, we need to get more people buying flat panels. Drive those CRT prices down.

Mac did this pretty much from the get-go

[alumshubby]

Granted, it was with CRTs, but early on it became obvious to many Mac users that, in a windowed environment, your productivity could improve if you could increase the usable desktop area.

I bet a bunch of "normal"-sized LCDs refresh much faster than One Horking Big LCD would. Once you get the LCD panels aligned to counteract the fact that they're separate monitors, scrolling from one to another is no big thing -- you hardly notice the frame edges between.

Re:Flat Panel Mania

[Hasdi Hashim]

Flat Panel has discrete number of pixels. Let say you have 1280x1024 pixels on your flat panel. To simulate 1024x768, only a portion is used. To simulate 640x480, each 1x1 pix maps to 2x2 pix, so to use up 1280x960 pixels on your panel. You can't map it to 1.5x1.5 pix because the placing of pixels are fixed on the grid.

In the case of CRT, the size and number of pixels can be changes by adjusting the focus and size of the electron beam. A lower resolution requires a 'fatter' electron beam. A higher resolution requires a 'thinner' electron beam. The beam is swept from one corner of the monitor to the other.

In short, this about discrete vs continous. Get it?

Hasdi

Resolution is useful, because...

[Chris Worth]

Couple of weeks ago in NY I saw a presentation by David Small (http://www.davidsmall.com) who built an 8000x6000 display as part of his PhD.

His point? As with bandwidth, a bigger screen allows you to do not just more stuff, but qualitatively different stuff. Like look at the thumbnail structure of Shakespeare's plays and pick out structural details (length of last lines? Size of scenes?) large and small.

This screen is a step towards that increasing of visual bandwidth that took my breath away. Can't wait for the day I can create web pages the way I write ads - pasting big sheets to a wall and writing in foot-tall letters everyone, just everyone, can comment on.