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38-Inch LCD Panels 75

Posted by emmett from the ell-see-dee dept.
MasterDevelopers.com writes, "How about this for a laptop screen? Rainbow Displays is building the world's largest LCD displays coming in at 38 inches diagonal. It's a cool way that they do it, combining four 19" panels into one large one in a way so that you can't see the seam between the panels at all. Look out plasma displays; LCD may be making it in the big screen format."
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38-Inch LCD Panels More

38-Inch LCD Panels

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  • god (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Am i the only one who is sick of websites submitting slashdot stories as their domain name just to get a link on the slashdot home page? I don't care WHAT andover does, this is the kind of thing that's truly goin to destroy any sort of quality slashdot had, when the READERS are trying to commercialize the site as much as the advertisers.

  • Re:Nice, but still far from desktop (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah, take a look at their home page. All of the pictures show (or imply) a group of people in the foreground and a big screen several feet away in the background. None of the pictures show a geek with their face 18 inches away from a giant panel with 47 xterms on it, which is the use case of interest to me.

  • Firewire is even slower (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1200 Mbit/s = 150 MB/s

    That's if start and stop bits aren't included in the 1200 Mbit/s, otherwise it's even slower.

  • Sounds not that interesting.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I can get even bigger screens with my lcd projector: about 12x12 meters max. (1000+ inches diagonal). Nice to play quake or unreal on, but I prefer an 21 inch monitor because otherwise it's too immense and sometimes it's easy to take a quick look on your keyboard, takes to long to refocus otherwise.
  • Nope. 2048x1530 is quite doable with today's graphics cards. According to my X server output, my voodoo3 can handle a dot clock of 300MHz; 2048x1530@60Hz would be about 200MHz. That leaves about 100MHz of bandwidth for other graphics tasks such as blitting, etc. Further, DVDs *do* require processing to display! The video overlay has to be mixed in with the desktop image, and this process steals bandwidth from the available pool-- especially if a color key is used.

    --synaptik
    If you want to flame me, do so here [slashdot.org].
  • These guys started in the MatSci department here at Cornell. In fact, they were originally based in a building on the Engineering quad until moving to Binghamton.
  • LCD pixels often have longer off-times than CRT pixels (A known problem), but the one advantage to this longer off-time is that you can have a slower refresh w/o flicker, because the pixel stays on. I'm not sure, but even without this natural "persistence" LCD pixels may remain turned on full-time until told otherwise.

    As far as a SCSI interface - SCSI may be fast for storage, but it gets absolutely torched by even PCI. SCSI to your monitor would be a Bad Idea. The current monitor-to-videocard interfaces will scale quite well.
  • They have a display made from four displays 1/4 the size, but would it be more or less expensive to combine 9 1/9 size or 16 1/16 size displays?

    My guess is that they need one edge at the top-or-bottom and one at the left-or-right to connect the panel. This makes 4 the max.

    My guess is that they have something like half a pixel or a whole pixel of empty space between the two screens. The adjacent pixels need to be a bit brighter to compensate. You need to be at a sufficient distance not to notice.

    Roger.
  • Is a 36 inch, 200 ppi display. Of course, we wouldn't have any chance of taking advantage of that resolution at that size.

    [...]
    I think that we should be concentrating on increasing the bandwidth that we can send to
    the monitor. Why not run a fiber-optic cable from your computer to your monitor? Put that
    SCSI interface to work providing you with the bandwidth you need, to your monitor, not
    your CD-ROM!

    I just did the math. You need to pump about 5G per second to your 36 inch 200 ppi screen to get a 70Hz refresh rate. You wanted to use your spare 80Mb per second SCSI controller for that? You need 65 of them to achieve enough bandwidth. Ah, you have your CDROM drive connected to your 160Mbps lvd SCSI chain. Ah. that changes things. You need only 32 of them to drive a display like that.

    No, SCSI and video hardware don't really compare in the transfer rates.
  • Ick...imagine running 400x300 on a standard 19" monitor (most are 18" viewable diag)...this is the resolution we're talking about.

    Yes, but you are presumably sitting further from the 38" monitor than the 19 inch. My 19" takes up all except my peripheral vision. If you compare this with other ultra-large ( > 21' ) display monitors, you'llfind it's in the same league resolution-wise

  • Perhaps because until recently it would have resulted in a product more expensive than a new car

    hey.. cars are cheap in the US ;)

  • Why are people so desperate to get smallish computers? There's plenty of room for a 20" screen in a briefcase - assuming it is flat of course. And a real keyboard instead of those joke things in today's portables. A keyboard is supposed to be signigicantly wider than a sheet of paper, about as wide as the baseline of the 20" screen. There's no problem using such a thing as a laptop either, just keep it reasonably flat and lightweight.
  • I might be wrong, but doesn't those screen still have the problem with a limited view angle? Then it wouldn't be possible to watch the whole wall-screen at one time.
  • This page [rainbowdisplays.com] describes their screens as; "an SVGA panel over 38" in diagonal". Why is it only SVGA? Who would want an 38-48" SVGA (800X600) panel? You can get plasma screens with far higher resolution, not to mention LCD projectors.
  • (just imagine the video ram you'd need for something like that!)

    That's 8,640,000 pixels. You'd need 24.72 MB for 24 bit color (plus texture storage if it's a 3D card). This will probably be cheap by the time a screen like they one you describe can be had for under $10K. There are already cards with 64 MB.

    --
  • Having said that, I just noticed that the first image, which depicts a graphic being edited what appears to be a windows graphic editing program, has buttons, controls, etc. which are more believable for a regular XGA screen.

    Having read the previous stories about all the troubles people have with very large resolutions due to buttons and control etc. not resizing, the images seem very suspicious to me.
  • Why rescan the whole screen; you really only need to update pixels whose color has changed. But you're right -- as resolutions increase, bandwidth to the display is going to become a bottleneck, so we'll have to start using some send-the-diff scheme. Perhaps mpeg compressed video signal all the way to the display? This also relates to previous discussions on encrypted signals too.

    Johan
  • The best part is that it scales beyond 2x2

    You sure? I assumed that the reason why they were able to make it seamless was that if you use a 2x2 grid, each panel still has two hidden edges, giving you somewhere to attach the input signal. If you use a 3x3 scheme, the middle panel has no obscured edge, so it has to be fed "from behind", which I'm assuming is harder to do.

    All this based on assumptions.
  • Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but 42" plasma screens, or whatever size they have now, have a resolution of maybe 1600X1200. However, if you fuse 4 19 inch LCD panels together (each with an assumed 1024X768 resolution) you have a total resolution of 2048X1536, which is quite a bit denser then the plasma screen. Plus you don't have the inevitable failure of plasma screens, which can only operate for so long before the screen "dies" and it becomes a $10k wall hanging. I think they've improved the life on more recent models, but its still a problem. Now if only they can produce this display for the same $10k. Or preferably, a lot less.

    Spyky
  • I thought the main problem was that LCD's needs lots of circuits around the display panel. (wires for each pixel.)
  • Reading about attempts to expand LCD technology beyond its current boundaries is interesting, but the fact is that future large-screen display applications will be met by newer display technologies such as organic light-emitting polymers [electronicproducts.com].
  • Current pricing is about $800-1200 for 15" screens. $3500-4500 for 18" screens. So combining four 15" screens would get a 30" screen at about the cost of current 18" screens. Plus the cost of the integration work and components. Have not found prices for the many 10-13" screens that are on most laptops but would guess at prices in the $200-400 range. Assuming that they want to charge $1000-2000 for the integration pieces initially it makes more sense to stick with larger screens. Another factor is how much the integration costs scale up with larger numbers of screens. Probably it should be that much more costly to integrate without a seem as the large screens that are in stores that do have many screens and visible seems. After they get the cost of integration down then they move onto integrating smaller screens.
  • > As far as a SCSI interface - SCSI may be fast
    > for storage, but it gets absolutely torched by
    > even PCI.

    To my knowledge, the 32 bit PCI bus (running at 33MHz) has a throughput of around 132MB/sec. The latest Ultra SCSI-3 specification, at 160MB/sec, can't be fully taken advantage of in this case. Of course, 64 bit PCI is a different story, as is AGP1x, where in both cases the bandwidth is doubled by the bus width getting you 264MB/sec. (AGP 2x and 4x each double the bandwidth further by increasing the clock speed.)

    Either way, unless you're updating the entire screen at this resolution, you don't need this type of bandwidth on the bus just to display video. You need only pass the information necessary to modify the display, and let the video card's acceleration engine (either 2D or 3D) handle the rest. AGP even gets you the benny of offloading the image data from the PCI bus with sideband addressing, giving the rest of the system room to breathe next to that hungry video card.

    Since the video card's engine is doing the actual manipulation of the DAC, that's the part that needs to be this fast. With today's 250MHz and (easily) faster RAMDACs, this isn't quite the problem it might seem at first. Unless you are trying to do full motion video at that resolution (good luck getting that bandwidth!) you'll probably do fine with AGP2x or better. Now, if the VGA connector starts running into problems transferring that amount of data, you could have a real problem on your hands... But until that time, I'd say current high end videocards could handle this class of display.
  • MPEG compression is computation-heavy and lossy, not exactly what you'd want to run your word processor or photo editing software through. We'd need something a bit more lightweight to push the huge volume of data in real time. Perhaps RLE encoding would do the trick, it doesn't get much lighter than that and would likely work wonders on the (*usually) uncompressed data streams sent to the video card. Using this on top of a pure delta protocol would probably get something like what you're looking for with minimal encoding cost.

    There's no reason that this couldn't work for FMV data though, barring costs and complexity it could be the logical extension of hardware-assisted MPEG cards. Sounds very yummy... It'd have to be programmable/upgradeable though, to keep up with new technologies. Who wants to have to purchase a new 36-inch display because a better video compression algorithm came out?

    *Texture compression notwithstanding.
  • you could do an entire wall that way
    Ooh, and that combined with the 3D technology in the article from yesterday... :)
    Would that work? Anybody?
    -Ravagin
    "Ladies and gentlemen, this is NPR! And that means....it's time for a drum solo!"
  • Wait, you misunderstood me.

    2048x1530 is the highest your graphics card can handle. Even at that high a resolution, it'll appear blocky on a 38" screen. We currently don't have a practical solution that will do something higher than that. (Yes, there are better cards, but they are prohibitively expensive).

    Furthermore, the refresh rate is dependent on more than the graphics card. It also depends on the monitor, among other things.
  • That's actually extremely cool; but because of that "little" resolution problem, you'd be stuck with basically a wall that cost an arm, a leg and a kidney (laugh, eBay time!) and yet never be able to do anything with it.

    Good point about the entire wall thing, the scalability. But is that really something that will ever become practical?

    Anyone out there recall the parlor walls in Fahrenheit 451? We don't want to be like that. I think I'll forgo the full-wall TVs and computers, for the time being, as I'm not a department store.

    "I may disagree vehemently with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
  • I personally prefer liquid/crystal varieties. the display is much clearer

    May be clearer, however, there is a paralax problem if the user cranks up the gain.

    -d "could not resist"

  • I'll believe it when I see it... Besides I have never seen a good seamless display every attempt at this has pretty much been a failure if I'm correct. However, there is potential here. The other issue is bandwidth of course. Unless you have a serious data path from your digital video card to your monitor this sort of technology is just not going to work.


    Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
    NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
    www.npsis.com [npsis.com]
  • My Voodoo3 3000 can do upwards of that resolution, and still maintains 70-80 hz


    You should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.
  • The best part is that it scales beyond 2x2

    Yes, but judging by the technology profile, they need to match the brightness of the panels. This would push the price up even higher. Still, considering the small demand for 57 inch flat screens I suppose this isn't too much of a problem.
  • Well, they have done this in the past, albiet not with panels this large. See this link [samsungelectronics.com] for an example of an even larger tiling arrangement that uses smaller panels. The major difficulty that really drives up costs is building the underlying interconnects to deliver signal to each pixel, which is a problem that scales with the number of screens involved in the array (as well as the resolution of each one, but I'd assume they're just feeding data into the back of existing panels).
  • In response to the cost-effectiveness, you have to consider the manufacturing differences (as fas as cost) for physically joining the LCD panels. Would it be cheaper to join 4 large panels into 1 or 16 small panels into one (of the same overall diagonal size)? I would assume the former; less joining, less cost.
    I guess I should go and read the article, but did it mention how the singal is distributed to the panels? Are all the panels acting as individual screens, expecting to receive only a potion of the overall video signal (displaying only what it receives) or does it actually receive the same signal as all the others and display only what it is supposed to (based on it's position in the overall display)?
    off to read the article...
  • yeah, but ten to one, it has a low resolution
  • I personally prefer liquid/crystal varieties. the display is much clearer ;)

  • LOL

    But it's not seamless. Those little preforations really detract from the Dancing Bears picture :)

  • I presented it to an experienced engineer from a graphics ASIC company--with no advance preparation or information. And I timed him. It took him almost a *!minute!* to figure it out! Of course he did--these guys see every crazy thing that people try (under NDA's of course) and have very finely tuned eyeballs. It's theoretically possible that he was just being nice to me, but the (inexperienced) sales rep didn't see it until the engineer pointed it out. Boris Yost Mgr, Electrical Engineering Rainbow Displays
  • OK, you have your LCD display that is the size of Rhode Island and you want to control it? Get 4 computers! Load each one up with a GeForce 256, and you can play 4 games of Half-Life at the same time. If you're smart, you will be able to write some fancy code that only renders a quarter of the screen (and a GeForce goes up to 1024 at >=60fps) and you have your 2048 resolution screen. And it's made with current technology!
  • Some quick math:

    2x2 display, 36" diag
    800x600 fmv resolution

    Chopping each dimension in half (to give stats for individual displays) gives us:

    4 displays, each 18" diag
    400x300 res per display

    Ick...imagine running 400x300 on a standard 19" monitor (most are 18" viewable diag)...this is the resolution we're talking about.

    When they can link 4 1600x1200 capable screens of the same (18" diag) size together seamlessly, and provide total resolution of 3600x2400 - then we'll talk ;)

    (just imagine the video ram you'd need for something like that!)

  • The link to the person who submitted the article Masterdevelopers.com [masterdevelopers.com] just happens to have a nice little interview [masterdevelopers.com] with our one and only hemos [slashdot.org] it's a nice little, fluff piece :) read it if you like


    Sgt Pepper
    Lame Sig Shamelessly Ripped from
    Fortune:

    Grandpa Charnock's Law:
    You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.

    [I thought it was when your kids learned to drive. Ed.]
  • No question that Firewire/IEEE 1394 was built from the ground up for these kinds of applications:

    http://www.pavo.com/ieee1394/faq/1394faq.htm#how Fast

    Presently the fastest implementation is S400, which runs 393.216Mbits/s (megabaud). Future standard extensions may run up to 1200Mbits/s! And like SCSI, these are only effective over very short distances.

    Just like USB will soon completely replace serial connections, Firewire will probably eventually replace all parallel, SCSI, and video connections, not to mention its potential for things like home networks combining data, telephone, and video interfaces. It's already becoming a standard for full-motion video interfaces.
    ----
  • Why such a high resolution?

    It sounds nice, sure, but do we really need it? I mean, most monitors now are supposed to be around 72 DPI and the pixels on them are fine. And while the size of a screen increases, so does the practical viewing distance so you can get away with even larger pixels.

    This doesn't mean I don't want one, but we can do it cheaper than that.

    Greg
  • Apple's Studio Cinema Displays cost $4,000 each, and are only available with the purchase of an expensive G4 tower.
  • to be fair, the slashdot guys didn't put those in, the guy who posted the story did. but mayb slashdot should have some way to fix that
    It's called the demoroniser [fourmilab.ch]. It's been around for quite a while, so I'm a little suprised to see that the Slashdot folks don't use it to clean up messy input....
  • I might be wrong, but doesn't those screen still have the problem with a limited view angle?

    According to Philips's Password [philips.com] magazine, they have overcome some of this problem with "simple compensation foils". They also have a Colour 3D-LCD Evaluation Kit [philips.com].

    If only they would combine the two.
  • You know, that would be a good poll, "How many terminal windows do you keep open at a time?" (0; 1; 2; 4; 8; Until I run of processes; What, you mean like DOS?)

    It is about 4 for me, because I like to keep them all in the same workspace. This naturally means that the more screen I have, the more terminals I have. Mmmmmm, CLI....
  • EE Times pointed out how the technology could take 2 inch by 2 inch screens and glue them together.

    Given the excess capacity in the small market, and how cheap a 2x2 is, we can get big displays from small.

    21 inch displays for under a grand in 3 years was what caught my eye.

  • The problem with really big displays is that the computer can't send enough signals to the screen to get a decent refresh at a high resolution. It'd probably be possible to get 2048x1530 or something ludicrously high like that, but you'd have to accept visible rescanning rates. In other words, completely useless for typical applications.

    Since LCD displays are digital, it shouldn't be hard for the display to include memory and buffer the image on the screen. It might do that anyway.

  • Firstly i would say that I am very pleased to see Philips involved in this, since I have a great deal of respect for this firm (for those who don't know we owe the the audio casette and the CD)
    In the web page, though, it was stated that the diplay supports full motion video @800x600 which makes it quite useless for the desktop (at least for now). After all, of you had a 36'' monitor, it would be a shame to use it at a resolution smaller than 2000. And I guess that LCD doesn't go that far for the moment.
    Then again, the first purpose would be large panels for public sites and I think what they provide is enough.
    And as a mean question : on the site says that the announcement was made on Nov 9 1999. Don't you think this is a bit old even for a boring Sunday ?
  • I'd be more impressed if their site had a close-up picture of the joint between two panels. This idea has been tried before, but hasn't been very successful.

    I don't see driving the thing as a serious problem. Worst case, you drive it using a multiple-monitor setup, with multiple graphics cards. And for many applications, you don't need fast update anyway. Flicker isn't an issue; this is an LCD, not a CRT.

  • The image could be scaled in order to make the Window$ controls recognizable, the same way a single-piece LCD with 1024x768 pixels displays at 800x600. Of course, since this is a 38-inch screen, the effective resolution (not the actual hardware resolution) would be rather less than 72 ppi.

  • You know slashdot is going downhill... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 20, 2000 @07:18AM (#1258546)
    When Bill?s so-called ?$mart quotes? start appearing on the main page.

    "How about this for a laptop screen? Rainbow Displays is building the world?s largest LCD displays coming in at 38 inches diagonal. It?s a cool way that they do it, combining four 19? panels into one large one in a way so that you can?t see the seam between the panels at all. Look out plasma displays; LCD may be making it in the big screen format."

  • Where can we see it at? (Score:3)

    by Marvin_OScribbley ( 50553 ) on Sunday February 20, 2000 @06:45AM (#1258547) Homepage Journal
    Once you see a Rainbow display, you will be amazed at the image quality in a large flat panel display. We invite you to see it for yourself! You will then agree that Rainbow has created a display with excellent image quality, and most importantly: NO VISIBLE SEAMS!

    If it was really that seamless then why aren't there any pictures on the website. The graphic that depicts the four displays becoming one seamless display doesn't convince me.

    Ok, so there are a few screenshots at http://www.rainbowdisplays.com/news/ images.htm [rainbowdisplays.com], but they really should have some closeups so you can see how seamless it really is. Such a small image of such a large real estate doesn't convey much.

  • Re:Good way to do it! (Score:3)

    by iMoron ( 69463 ) on Sunday February 20, 2000 @08:22AM (#1258548)
    I might be wrong, but doesn't those screen still have the problem with a limited view angle?

    A few years ago, almost all LCD screens were like this. Unless you were almost directly in front of the screen, you couldn't see anything (or the colors were inverted). But advances have been made in LCD technology and most of today's LCDs look great from almost any angle.

  • Good way to do it! (Score:3)

    by RickyRay ( 73033 ) on Sunday February 20, 2000 @06:33AM (#1258549)
    I've wondered for years why nobody has done LCD's that way. Perhaps because until recently it would have resulted in a product more expensive than a new car ;-)

    The best part is that it scales beyond 2x2; you could do an entire wall that way (assuming you have the budget for it). The problem then is that it's even beyond HDTV resolution or 35 mm, so you would have trouble finding what to show on it.

  • Re:Now, all we need... (Score:3)

    by CrazyD ( 125427 ) on Sunday February 20, 2000 @09:25AM (#1258550)
    Interesting
    But the SCSI bandwith is nowhere near enough to drive a monitor. Case in point:

    A monitor running at 1600x1200x24bpp requires about five and a half megs of video memory to display. The fastest SCSI specification has 160MB/s bandwith. Since display needs to be sent to the monitor in full every time the monitor refreshes, we divide the two to get the refresh rate. So, in the best case, we get a refresh rate of 29Hz.

    By the way, even AGP 1X has something like 532MB/s bandwith. There is certainly a reason why we have video cards instead of SCSI monitors.

    More interesting to me is the software constraints of running at super-high resolutions (36inch 200ppi). Very few operating systems offer the ability scale icons or font size on your desktop. This obviously needs to be changed before any super high-res displays can be adopted. The hardware will surely catch up in time to support these displays, it always does.

  • How about LSD Panels instead? (Score:3)

    by Fat Lenny ( 150637 ) on Sunday February 20, 2000 @09:14AM (#1258551) Homepage
    You want flat, you want pretty, you want interactivity, you want it all to be big and bright? Use LSD, not LCD.

    LSD is paper thin, and projects beautiful imagery of a fantasy world across your whole field of vision. Forget about thick "panels", kludgey technology like this 38" screen, or cumbersome technology like heavy headsets -- all you need is LSD, and I think it might be cheaper.

    --

  • Re:Cost effectiveness (Score:3)

    by Martin Blank ( 154261 ) on Sunday February 20, 2000 @09:53AM (#1258552) Homepage Journal
    There are a couple of possibilities on this one. One of the major problems that keeps LCDs so expensive is errors in the manufacturing process. Every manufacturer allows a certain number of pixels per specified size to be bad to keep the rejection rate down, but the process still leaves a lot of bad screens, and so a lot of work and materials are wasted.

    The question that needs to be answered to determine if costs go up or down is the accuracy of the joining process. If it is very accurate, can be done by machine, and has a low failure rate, the costs could well go down significantly, as each rejection would be of a smaller part, meaning less work and fewer materials wasted. If it is a painstaking process, the materials question remains about the same, but the work costs can go up, meaning no reduction or possibly an increase in size.

    One interesting possibility with this technology is a sort of "Lego" function, where you could snap in more and more of them (this would require some very tight manufacturing tolerances) to create larger screens on your own. This would allow not only individual consumers to build to the size they need (gamers go for larger traditional screens, graphic artists and webmasters go for wider screens, etc.), but companies could create screens that fit into their decor. Another upside with this is that if you have a panel that starts to have an unnacceptably high number of bad pixels, you swap it out for a new one.

    :: sigh :: Technology never does move fast enough for me.

  • Fold-out Laptop screen? (Score:4)

    by AT ( 21754 ) on Sunday February 20, 2000 @10:38AM (#1258553)
    I wonder if screens with this technology could be folded at the seams?

    If so, IBM should take the idea of their Thinkpad folding keyboard and apply it to displays. I'd like to see a laptop screen that folds out to > 17" inches.

    The only other way I can see to make laptop screens bigger is to increase the length and width past the "notebook" size, which makes the laptop less portable.

  • Cost effectiveness (Score:4)

    by ForceOfWill ( 79529 ) on Sunday February 20, 2000 @07:22AM (#1258554) Homepage
    The real questions with this display combination thing are "What's the best balance between number of displays and their size?" and "Do they sell a product like that?"

    They have a display made from four displays 1/4 the size, but would it be more or less expensive to combine 9 1/9 size or 16 1/16 size displays? I'm thinking that if the joining process is cheap enough, you could have displays made up of 1" squares, thus reducing the cost of each display (fewer pixels to go wrong), and the entire display, to a point, that point being where the cost of joining (and calibrating) the little displays meets the savings of having smaller units.

  • How it's done (Score:4)

    by Money__ ( 87045 ) on Sunday February 20, 2000 @06:36AM (#1258555)
    More details on how it's done can be found here: http://www.rainbowdisplays.com/tech/i ndex.htm [rainbowdisplays.com]


    _________________________

  • Now, all we need... (Score:4)

    by Pufferfish ( 100833 ) on Sunday February 20, 2000 @07:58AM (#1258556)
    Is a 36 inch, 200 ppi display. Of course, we wouldn't have any chance of taking advantage of that resolution at that size.

    The problem with really big displays is that the computer can't send enough signals to the screen to get a decent refresh at a high resolution. It'd probably be possible to get 2048x1530 or something ludicrously high like that, but you'd have to accept visible rescanning rates. In other words, completely useless for typical applications.

    I think that we should be concentrating on increasing the bandwidth that we can send to the monitor. Why not run a fiber-optic cable from your computer to your monitor? Put that SCSI interface to work providing you with the bandwidth you need, to your monitor, not your CD-ROM!

    Besides that, we could use a different system for screens...field-emission might work. Something that could get the information from your cable to the screen faster. IIRC, field-emission can be based on Carbon-60, a superconductor. That'd probably translate into at least a small increase in speed.

    But there's one more problem. If you have a 36" 200 PPI screen, it doesn't matter if it can handle super high resolution. You need the hardware to handle it. Depending on what you're doing, it might take huge amounts of processing power to display pictures on that screen. Of course, some things (like DVD movies, which don't need processing to display) would be easy to display and would therefore look great and be big (although other's have pointed out that this resolution is even higher than HDTV, maybe burn your movie onto FMD..?).

    But who can say what tomorrow will bring? (ha, that look like a signature, but it isn't!) I've no idea what MIT will announce tomorrow, maybe someone in a secret collaboration between Sony, IBM, and DaimlerChrysler that will produce 12' 200 PPI screens that automatically drive around on a truck chassis next to you so you can always check slashdot.

    But I doubt it.

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