ViewSonic 9.2 Megapixel display

[jsw]

ViewSonic (link is to a review) recently announced a 9.2 megapixel display.

Good God. And it's only 22.2 inches. The crispness must be utterly unbelievable.

And, yes, only for the PC. And, yes, $8K plus $2K card. And, yes, relatively slow. So, no, not practical for almost anyone.

But over twice the resolution of a 30" Apple crammed into 22.2". Man.

Edit:

Just realized IBM and others have had similar monitors out for a while. But, still, I'm impressed by this technology.

 

[MoparShaha]

Wow, I didn't even know such displays existed. That's incredible. And I thought my 1600x1200 was pretty high-res .

I can understand the need to view a hi-resolution photograph, but isn't there a point where the eye can't detect the increase in resolution? A normal monitor with 72-100 ppi is probably around that limit. Can't these guys just zoom out? Well, I suppose I'm wrong, because obviously there's a market, and people are paying.

 

[Mr. Anderson]

That's just not right

pitch : 0.125mm
refresh : 25 Hz

no game playing, but for image manipulation, it would be great. Although the desktop icons would be microscopic at that pitch - and many things would be hard to read unless you supersize the font.

D

 

[Makosuke]

I'm not quite sure I understand how a monitor with that high of a pixel density would be more useful than, say, a "video-wall" type installation of several lower-density screens (which do certainly exist).

It's not that you can't see 204 dpi resolution (that's how high the beast is), but you're going to have to get very close to the screen to discern details at that level, whereas a larger (physically) monitor(s) with something closer to the 100 dpi density of Apple's new displays would let you sit farther back and squint less to see detail. Same reason people zoom in on images when they work in Photoshop so the pixels are big, right?

Combine that with the fact that, since Windows (or other current OSes) don't have good support for flexible interface sizing (which OSX really should by now), it'd be annoying to try and click those little x boxes or drag the resize corner of a window--they're already pretty small. Maybe they come with some hack to bloat the UI.

It'd sure look crisp, though, wouldn't it?

 

[jsw]

I think the advantage is that you can put over 9M pixels on a desktop, as opposed to a wall. Easier for NSA/CIA/etc. to cram in more analysts. ;-)

Plus, wall units would be as or more expensive, require more room and electricity, and force you to step back to see the whole image anyway, whereas this puts it right in front of your face.

However, I'm guessing the market is very, very small right now. That is, of course, until the porn industry finds a way to use it....

 

[mkrishnan]

I think there are some good limited market uses for this though. For instance, one can definitely tell the difference on printed paper between 300 DPI and 600 DPI printer, right, or between older lasers that used fixed bitmap size vs. the ones that use adaptive sizing to get smoother fonts. For something like publishing, its important to get as good an idea of what the printed product will look like as possible. There, high-res is much better than having the same number of pixels spread over a large space. So it could have applications for electronic gallows, etc.

Of course, eventually, this sort of thing will also have the obvious implications for things like video games...200 DPI is a whole new level in terms of possibilities for photo-realistic graphics....