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IBM Selling 20" 2048x1536 LCD
starman97 writes "IBM will show a new 20.8 inch LCD active matrix display
that boasts 2048x1536 pixels at Comdex this fall in Las Vegas
" One word: Yum. A slightly related question: what is the maximum size for a portable computer screen? I would say 20" is a bit out there, but there are 15 and 16 inch laptop screens. Larger LCDs with larger production volumes will mean someone is gonna test the waters sooner or later.
Oh great... now I gotta listen to all the techs next door talk about how much bigger THEIR screen is than everybody else's. It's like penis envy for geeks. Is it any suprise they're both measured down to the 1/10th of an inch? =)
--
Wouldn't that be yummy with a nice 1920x1080i signal? Me likes :-)
Woaaah, look at all those colors at such a high resolution.... wait wait.. LCD? OH, I thought it was LSD. My bad.
-PovRayMan
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
That is kind of small concidering that Apple sells a product called the Cinema Display that is a 22 inch LCD screen. If a "crappy" company like Apple can make a 22 inch LCD what is up with IBM?
still vulnerable to EMF spectrum scanners like CRT monitors?
Depends on what kind of portability you're looking for in your laptop. If you don't care how big it is, than 15-16" is fine... but if you want a light, thin laptop that you can stick in your briefcase, then you'll want something smaller.
For all the hype surrounding LCDs, they only look good at their native resolution (maybe at /2 also) Anything else and they look like utter crap with every 10th pixel or whatever stretched twice as wide. And I don't know about you, but switching video modes is not an uncommon event for a lot of us. The desktop gets the max res. The DVD player wants another video mode. Games seem to all want a different custom mode (I *need* MAME. 384x512 w scanlines or it ain't a proper emulation). For all but the most fixed task users, LCDs are a lot of money for a lousy display. I'll stick with the 21" Sont CRT thank you.
Anybody got any pictures of this beatuty, I'd loovee to see this. Oh, this gotta be sexy.
No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
It's good to see such a big screen. Too bad I'll be an executive before I can afford it....
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I have largeish fingers, so most laptop keyboards are a pain in the *ss to type on. When I need to type on them, I often resort to the end of a pen or pencil, especially on the "notebook" and "ultralite" styled laptops. I would like to see a laptop with a full size keyboard, and possibly a nice HUGE screen to go with it. If this screen brings about this, I will be completely extatic! For me, personally, weight isn't much of an issue with a portable computer. Durability and comfort typing is the need.
I will admit that I do not currently own a laptop, but that's not because I don't want one or like any current models. (Being a student often sucks.)
Laugh, it's good for you!
These are being manufactured for non-laptop use. A friend of mine works for the division of IBM that produces these and he thought (as I do) that anyone who would think these could be usable in a laptop forgot to wear their tin-foil hat.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
The bigger the better. Panoram Technology has a nifty LCD Display that sells for only $27,000. My questions are
A: When are LCD monitors going to become practical (aka cheap)
B: Just out of curiosity, are there any other display technologies in the works besides CRT and LCD? What about holographic displays?
I don't have pictures of this particular LCD from IBM that is 20 inches, but here is a photo of a easel stand based 22 inch LCD monitor with a 1600x1024 max resolution. Pretty cool!
anyone know an approximate price? Or is this gonna be a "screw college...i'm getting this" kind of thing?
-mark
If your computer says LINUX, run...computers can't talk! [unless you have text-speech software]
What are we going to do when 150+ dpi monitors start arriving? Most graphics will be illegible; widgets will be too small to click on. Is anyone working on a dpi-independent graphics system? (I wonder if these new monitors might cause the return of Display PostScript or NeWS...)
only there is no win.exe its win.com - thankyou
Why would anyone waste their money on this. I have a 15inch, Sony Trinitron and it has been the best monitor. Sharp picture, good size and with a good video card, pretty friggin' smooth at 1024x768x16-bit. Luxury IMHO would be a 21inch monitor with sharp picture. No one would need more than 1024x768, nor anything larger than 21inch (unless you're watching DVDs, but there are players and 37inch TVs that will do that job).
Standalone LCD screens seem to me a waste too. The only real noticable advantage is the lack of dust collection and slightly sharper image. THis is just another thing for men with big egos, too much money and too little sense.
And that's the way I see it (IMHO)...
Dijital
Diji
"I came, I saw, I WTF'd!"
Give it a try. Take that big photo album off the shelve, sit it down on your lap, and open it. No problem, as long as it's not much more then an inch thick. And then there would be room for a really good keyboard. Only problem I can see is getting a laptop case for it. ;-)
If I read the article right, this is the raw display, not the finished consumer product, so companies can put them into whatever frame they want. I don't know if there is any difference in the raw display for laptop screen's vs desktop monitors, but if not, an innovative company could build one into a laptop. Please make the screen detachable and mountable on an arm for when I'm computing at home.
By the way, the 22 inch Apple Cinema Display is only 1600x1024, which makes for quite a bit bigger pixels then the 20.8 inch IBM at 2048x1536.
$5000 to $7000 (nt)
Remember the IBM "butterfly-keyboard" laptops? One should be able to do something similar with an LCD screen. Getting the alignment right to the last pixel might be difficult, but shouldn't be impossible. Now THAT would be a machine worth buying. Butterfly keyboard, butterfly LCD...
I like my laptops small (think the old HP Omnibooks or the new Sony VIAO subnotebooks) and I don't demand that my laptop do the same kind of stuff my desktop does. As long as the keyboard and pointing device are reasonable, I'm happy.
You can fit a good keyboard into about 10", and t he pointing device doesn't have to take up any space at all if you use that eraserhead thingy everyone seems so fond of these days. (I know some people hate it, but I'm willing to make sacrifices for portability) Leave a little room for the bezel around the LCD and you get a 9"x6" display at some reasonable resolution (800x600 is good for me, in a pinch at least).
With the current trends in I/O ports and removable storage, I'd be willing to forego an internal floppy and CD-ROM, and have only modem, ethernet and USB ports. (maybe throw in IrDA, though I have yet to use it for anything. I'm sure some other folks have found it usefull)
On a 21" 1024x768 would be unbearable blockey.
I love LCD as much as the next geek, and there are applications that almost require LCD displays (such as labs where RF interference is a problem). But, as most laptop owners can tell you, every once in a while a pixel can go bad on you, and no matter how small the pixel is, it's noticble and annoying as hell. Now, when a traditional CRT bust an element, most of the time whatever it is (power supply, synch circuit, etc) can be replaced relatively easily. But burn a pixel out on an LCD screen, there's no real way of replacing it except for scrapping the whole damn display.
If I'm investing *that* much money on a display, it has to have a good enough warranty on it such that I can sleep soundly at night without worrying one or two annoying pixels that's always red.
-=- SiKnight
What is the point of getting any bigger? I agree with the idea of 15-17 being satisfactory. Don't they realize that the larger u get the worse the LCD is? If you were to go off on a tangent, u would kno that plasma screens for theaters are not used often because of 2 reasons. Sheer expense, and the lack of color. The bigger you get the more "black tone" there is. It is hard to heat all that crystal. The expense comes from the filterization and disposal. I mean, there are literally millions of pixels in them things!, and to make sure that not one is bad is hard. All the bad ones need to be properly disposed of. Now, im not saying that we should resort to 3 lens projectors as our laptop screen's. Although it would be phat to just have a 100 inch screen projected anywhere, HDTV quality with phat picture. But a limit needs to be drawn somewhere..., perhaps people will realize that its too expensive, and not that great yet at those sizes.
A couple other thoughts on his trouble booting:
;-)
One thing that can cause problems is excessive accumulation of dirt and grime. Besides having the potential to cause malfunctions, excessive dust and grime makes the system look unappealing to potential users. I would recommend the use of a thin covering material to shield it from unwanted substances, especially during use.
Are you overclocking? While overclocking can lead to more fun in your games, if you overclock too much you can wear the part down causing boot failures. You can only compute so much in a given time, trying to do more is just asking for trouble.
And I don't even want to know where the Matrox Dual-Head comes into this...
8^p
PS No, my choice of verb for what the Matrox is doing was not intended as a pun. Though it should've been
Common sense dictates you wait AT LEAST 24 months for this stuff to get mature and come down in price.
As for laptops and notebook computers, the current pragmatic issue is size, weight, and power consumption. Obviously, you do not want to lug around a heavy piece of fragile equipment, nor want a power sucking hog when one is truly mobile. And the best thing since slice bread are laptops with DVD drives and decoding. If you travel, there is nothing better than to pop in a movie when your flight has been delayed/cancelled, while your fellow travellers bitch and moan. One thing that I learned is that one should travel with at least one good PG or PG-13 movie as you don't know who you will sitting next to on your flight. I learned this while watching Aliens while sitting in an aisle seat. woops:-)
Now I will admit that I'm a mac-addict. I have a lombard powerbook (dual boot, macos and linuxppc). Some ppl that I work with just got a IBM 570 notebooks but realize that there is no composite S-Video output. Some with Dell laptops realize that their batteries don't last that long.
Larger LCDs with larger production volumes will mean someone is gonna test the waters sooner or later.
.25 dp 17" has been very nice, and I'd hate to go to something new, with much higher dot pitch (sorta like my friend's Packard Hel^H^H^HBell. .31 dp!)
Test the waters for what? Do you mean simply having 20" Laptop LCDs or using the tech to create 17" LCDs inexpensive, so they can compete with CRTs?
I think the next step is cheap, rather than simply bigger (but big is definitely not bad in this case!)
Also, what's the average dot pitch of an LCD? My
Personally, I like a larger screen, because I like high-resolution but have bad eyesight. Small monitors mean I have to either limit my screen size or squint at my monitor. But I would also hate to lug around some huge laptop wherever I go. That's the problem with large screens on laptops, the whole laptop has to get bigger, too. Sure, that gives you room for more stuff (drives, a normal keyboard, etc.), but if that were enough reason, we'd have larger laptops already.
/. has a large readership, I like to think (and I consider this a compliment) that /.ers do not represent the general populous, so even if we settled on a general solution, that wouldn't necessarily mean anything. I think the only way we'll ever really know what a reasonable size is will be to see what the market supports.
But I digress. The point at which I was actually driving is just that it's a matter of taste. As a developer, I stare at the screen all day, and size is important (insert crude joke here). I also don't feel the need to carry my workstation around with me, so laptops are more of a burden than a benefit. As far as portable computing goes, I'm satisfied with my Palm III. But I work with people whose jobs depend on using laptops, and I have little doubt their opinions differ from mine. Since there are so many different uses of portable machines, how can you ask for just one answer for how big they (or their screens) can be? You have as many answers as there are reasons for using a laptop. And even though
You are not me, therefore you are not important
I've used a Gateway LCD and I wanna ask LCD fans
Why????
There must be a market out there for people who use laptops all day and can't deal with the higher resolution and refresh rates of a CRT.
They do look quite futuristic and fetching though...
"Wow, look at that! You must be from the future."
"No, my gullible friend, I'm just rich."
Check out this EETimes article.
The displays are completely viewable at any angle and at any light level (even with big halogen lamps shining right on it).
>>Why LCD? Why not a 3 beam projector?
Because it's not really intended for use in laptop computers! From the article:
"IBM expects its OEM customers to incorporate the ITQX20 panel into products for medical, electronic publishing, drafting, image processing, media content creation, data visualization and financial applications, such as trading floors."
The 3-beam projectors I've seen don't give a precise enough display for these applications.
jmp
I've used a Gateway LCD and I wanna ask LCD fans
:(
Why????
There must be a market out there for people who use laptops all day and can't deal with the higher resolution and refresh rates of a CRT.
[caveat: I write firmware at a company that makes interface boards for LCD displays]
I used to think that the versatility and brightness of CRTs made them superior displays but have now completely reversed my opinion. I use a 16" SXGA panel as my main display right now and it is miles better than staring at a CRT all day. The important things for me are sharpness and flatness.
Current TFT displays have fewer dead pixels than they used to and with power from mains you can get decent brightness (I wish more laptops had brighter displays when jacked into the wall...) With the latest scaling hardware, non-native resolutions look much better than they used to as well. Now, when I go home to my Sony CRT I find it annoyingly fuzzy
Also, I live in Hong Kong and space and heat considerations can be important as well (I imagine this is true throughout Asia and possibly Europe as well).
There is still a problem with cost, but a good size panel costs about as much as a 17" monitor used to only a couple of years ago so wait for wider adoption to drop the price (as a matter of fact, I think part of the reason they are so expensive is the high demand right now... as more plants come on line they should become less dear).
C'mon you geeks, you got money, and everyone knows you got them big ol' brains, shake that thang and get you grrlfriends who'll alternately kick your ass on Quake, then make up for the insult with a little sweet love down by the fire!
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
wide-screen pr0n gimme gimme!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm happy to note the screen has a good resolution, and I'd love one as my desktop display to reclaim some of workspace back from my Iiyama "backbreaker" monitor.
I believe the next leap in LCD design should concentrate less in size and more on other factors such as:
* power consumption
* viewing angle
* resolution/dot pitch
For a laptop I think about 15" is the limit, but I'd be much happier if that supported (say)
3840*3072 [including happily handling low resolutions] within that 15" and had a full 180 viewing angle.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I've been carrying a laptop of one type or another for over 15 years. As a 6 foot, 275 pound, fairly active person, size and weight is of little matter to me. In fact, the larger size would allow for a larger keyboard, a full-size numeric keypad, and so on.
A 20" screen would mean a laptop somewhere around 16"x12" or so, about the size of two letter size pages. I would be more than happy to carry such a computer in order to have room for more sessions on the screen at the same time, or to have /. loaded next something I get paid for. 8^)
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
I'd like to see 2 or 3 pages of code while programming, and currently with 2 monitors & w2k, it's nice, but 2 20" LCD displays would just ROCK. I'd be able to have shitloads of work up there...webbrowser in one place, c++ in another etc.
Oh, and TV Tuner in one area as well. LCD is much smaller (I really hate the space CRTs take up), takes up half the power, and doesn't flicker.
I wish my *whole* desktop was a giant display, along with a 8'x4' 'electronic' white board on the wall.
:(
:).
Ah, just think of it, dozens of Linux kernal code snippits and modules right at the turn of the head, virtual terminals everywhere, get those piles of paper off of the floor, too. Hmmm.
Input w/ finger (death to the mouse!), voice and keyboard in a fast/smooth/seamless fashion, etc. Virtual goggles would probably be the most economical way to impliment, just don't make me feel like I'm floating in space/walking through molasses.
Technically feasable in a decade or two if Moore's Law and MIPS continue to advance. At least for professional use anyway. (Yes I know, all of the requisite ideas are here, but they are not all in a single package and ready for prime time.)
A far cry from getting our subatomic particles torn apart, moved, and reassembled in the correct quantum states by remote control.
--What happened to all those poor little naugas that gave their hides?
The only reasonable way to go portable with a big screen is to use eye-ware level LCDs. As reported on Slashdot a few months ago, Sony is making headway in this area. These things result in about 30 inch screens. And while they need further development, it seems to me to be the only reasonable course.
Secondarily we can then evolve on to stereo-scopic 3D. Some gamers and scientists are already doing this. There is no reason we all can't get a better GUI for the mundane stuff too.
There are other benefits too. Like no one looking over your shoulder at the airport reading you E-mail or passwords.
The Apple Cinema Display is pretty sweet, from what I hear, but its resolution is 1600x1024. 2Kx1280 is a breakthrough.
At the risk of sounding like a reminiscing old fart, the first time I ever saw 2048 x anything, was on a Textronix CRT, 8 bit monochrome, and you had to use the thing in a darkened room (faster scan rates mean dimmer displays, when you're talking CRT's.)
BTW, 2048 pixels, 8 bits deep, on a 19" display was pretty impressive. The only thing I've seen yet that topped it was 4K squared, also 8-bit monochrome, on a 20" tube with eight guns. Now, *that* image would make you swear that someone snuck a slide projector in the enclosure.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
>I would say 20" is a bit out there, but there >are 15 and 16 inch laptop screens. Larger LCDs >with larger production volumes will mean someone >is gonna test the waters sooner or later. There's nothing that special about making a 20/30/40" LCD - the technology of the display itself really doesn't need to change that much. What's impressive is to be able to be able to get high enough yields to make it economically viable. Area of the display goes up as x^2. If you assume a constant defect rate per unit area, yields go south pretty fast.
...is 15.1", 1400x1050. Not bad for a laptop!!! And the cool thing is, I have one now! Hooray!! :-)
The LCD does look a lot cripser and sharper. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
a 90 Hz 24x60@300dpi (65" diagonal) quarter-cylinder screen as a backdrop for my desk (that gives you a 38" radius, leaving you a comfortable 18"-deep or so quarter-annulus for "conventional" desk-top). We had quite an extensive discussion of this sort of thing back about a year ago on the "comp.arch" news-group, with the consensus that this was a nice sweet spot for the ergonomics -- that's the resolution and scan frequency at which further increases do not significantly imprive viewability, a size that is easily viewable from your chair, and a general design that would work quite well for lots of the participants in that discussion.
For grins: the whole discussion was started as a response to some idiot who claimed a Pentium had all the CPU horsepower anyone could make real use of (just driving the screen I described requires far more horsepower than any single CPU currently available :-)
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
It's my birthday next week ... Slashdot readers want to chip in? Wouldn't be much each ...
-- Arm yourself when the Frog God smiles.
When I was editing my dissertation, I actually hauled in my 486 laptop to use it's 640x480 display instead of the 19" monitor onmy K6. It made a *huge* difference inhow my eyes felt at the end of the day . . .
I have a 1994 era Sony that's just shy of 40 inches--my late father in law bought it to watch football.
It has a 700 line screen. Yes, 700. But the broadcast is only 525, of which 400-450 are usable. So it interpolates & extrapolatesto create the extra lines. Most things look ok, but diagonal lines and small text arehorrid.
And for some inexplicable reason,it hasno expansion slotto use it asa monitor or hdtv . . .
I was comparing this announcement side-by-side to the Apple Cinema Display earlier, and it seems the main difference is in pixel density (2048x1536 for the IBM vs. 1600x1024 for the Apple display, on, give or take an inch, the same surface area).
In my short history with laptops, I've had multiple bad pixels on measly 12.1" LCDs with maximum resolutions of 800x600. Based on some really primitive early-morning logic, it seems the pixels are just going to pop twice as fast on the IBM display.
Have the manufacturing processes changed at all in the past two years to allow them to cram 9 million transistors in this thing? (Besides the removal of the "spacer balls"?) (Heh)
..no doubt with 50/75Gb?? .5 hr, prob a irq clash) + I've got about 10 ex-dell FE575's lying around elsewhere that I neeeed to get linux running).
Is it very heavy?
Problem is I cannot stand those scratchpad mice.
I thought/hope dhinds pcmcia module does 3com FE575 (I hope so - I've got 2.2.2 on the 770 (I know, too busy to get updated at the mo) + all say IBM Etherjet is a nogo for linux (which I've got) but the Xircom REM56G-100 i've got lying in front of me would work, but NT hangs on it (could only spend under
Sorry. Going off topic.
What's important is (like someone said earlier) density/res - width is no big deal.
-- Mod me down. I am not a karma tart. ffs,gag
It's not exactly a light-weight laptop, but it's not bad. It's pretty large, though, and the screen slightly overlaps the base when closed.
:-)
With 128Megs RAM, a Celeron 466, and all the other goodies, I'm not complaining about the weight.
Yeah, those FE575 cards are pretty nice... I hope they're supported soon. I'm not a programmer, but if I was, I'd be writing code for those lil' suckers right now!
I edit photographs and learning how to color my comic book art and I cannot even fathom buying a LCD monitor.
Human skintones come out so damn digusting on a LCD but rendered beautifully on a CRT.
If I dealt with simple shapes and colors than I would pick a LCD. Times when I have to work on my laptop on a picture but I cannot wait to see this on my CRT.
Let them make LCD's... keeps my 19" and 21" CRT's low, low, low!
ChozSun [e-mail]
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
Can't remember who told me this, but apparently the EM field of a CRT hyper-accelerates dust particles in front of the monitor, so the burning sensation of eye strain is actually the sensation of a constant physical abrasion against your peepers.
Could be a load of old cobblers though..
Still, it's an interesting theory :)
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Your average businessman carries a briefcase, right? The one I just measured in this engineer's office next door is 18" x 13" x 4". You put the 20" display in the inside of the lid. The electronics, battery and AC adapter, together with enough padding material to protect it from both sides, shouldn't need to be more than an inch thick. The thing I dislike the most about using laptops is the way the keyboard is laid out right under the screen, but if you have a briefcase-sized package, you could fit a thin, full-sized wireless keyboard and mouse in the package (snap into brackets in the lid?). You'd still have plenty of room for the papers and stuff one usually carries in a briefcase. That's what I want, in dark brown leather; but if I had one, guessing what it would cost, I'd want to carry it around handcuffed to my wrist, like the courier in those old spy films.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
This reminds me of the preferred tech in William Gibson's 'Bridge' series (Virtual Light/Idoru/All Tomorrow's Parties). The only computers that people seem to use are these insanely high resolution, full-immersion goggles. The descriptions seem to indicate that both the CPU and wireless net access are built directly into the goggles. That would be a pretty fsckin' cool PC - although the brain tumors would be a drag.
I imagine inexpensive Sony supercomputers that are very much like the old ViewMasters we played with as kids. They would be solar-powered - and illuminated only when we look into bright light sources - but capable of showing breathtaking, 3-dimensional photo-realistic motion video live from the net...
Night
However the IBM flatscreens do kick most others out of the water.
Incidentally, apple don't make their screens: they rebadge them. IBM make theirs in Greenock, Scotland. (I think)
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
No kidding. Lots of Linux software is already hard to see on 1600x1280 screens. Not to mention web pages - why don't browsers have a Zoom feature?
Maybe if you post _real_ hard this next week, and get it above 50, we could be convinced to send you a few bucks each. :) -Judas
Just think, add some touch screen tech, and you could replace a whole room of analog sound equipment, have sliders, buttons, what not, hooked right up to you high end sound card enhanced computer.
.02
Better yet, write a Star Trek skins wrapper around Net Meeting , or any other meeting software, and have a ball.
Just my
My favorite two monitors have higher resolution
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Opera Has a zoom feature
All those standards bozo's are still trying to
:(
:(
hammer out VESA digital lcd 1024x768 standard while companies like IBM and SGI are WAYYY out front doing 2048 and 1600 sized displays. This
SUCKS. Now if a Voodoo or an nVidia supported
OpenLDI or whatever the hell IBM will use...
The Sgi LCD is the "BEST" display, bar NONE,
I have _ever_ used. Playing q3 on NT and
Linux on an SGI VW 540 was AMAZING! On
a PC with the sucky #9 rev 4, it was only
amazing looking. Too bad about the 3d
Skin looks correctly colored unlike most crap
lcds. I assume the IBM will have similar
insanely good qualities. Now if only
the standards bozos would get a REAL
damn standard for digital
da' fly
I believe SGI made a notebook a couple of years ago with a gigantic (17" or so) screen. It was in four parts, and opening the case caused the screen to fold out and come together.
Is this some bizarre dream, or does anyone else remember this?