Happy Taipei wide format lunar new year

INNOVATION IN MONITORS and their resolutions has been asleep, if not comatose, during the past year, according to the few monitor vendors I spoke with on a recent trip to Taipei.

Yes, you can see the LED backlit LCD monitors with 30-bit colours, super contrast, 120Hz refresh and all kinds of funny 'features' these days. 30-bit, billion colour displays can be especially stunning, especially when you can discern the fine gradations. But we haven't had a new mainstream resolution improvement for a few years now, and in fact the nice Golden Ratio 1920x1200, that is, 16:10 proportions, just perfect to see two A4 pages next to each other, started to give way to the 1920x1080 HDTV 16:9 proportions, which is far less convenient due to lost picture height such that you often need to scroll up and down to see the information being displayed.

Save me from all those arguments about HD movie watching. How much of your computer time is spent watching movies compared to using productivity applications and, say, even gaming? Either of these uses benefits more from the older standard resolution ratios versus the HDTV display proportions. Yes, the sole reason for these awfully wide 16:9 display ratios on PC LCD monitors, desktop and notebook alike, is that it allows LCD panel makers to save a bit of dosh by using the same cutting templates for both monitor and TV production. It has nothing to do with, and is in fact contrary to, the users' needs and benefits. Ask any vendor, like Lenovo, Asus, Gigabyte or HP, and they'll all tell you this.

Talking about monitor resolution, there has been nothing new since the 2560x1600 30-inch displays appeared from Apple and Dell three years ago. In fact, the prices of those big displays haven't come down, either, all this while. To the chagrin of high-end graphics card vendors, it is only the extra pixels drawn - not the gimmicks like so called 3D display or 120Hz refresh - that really will force users to upgrade in droves. A 3840x2400 9.2 megapixel display, like the good old IBM T221 that I had the honour to use some seven years ago, will require just over twice the graphics pixel processing power of a 2560x1600 4 megapixel monitor. When counting all the extra effects and such, this will be a welcome reason to justify a pair of ATI HD5970's in QuadFire or three Nvidia GF100 Fermi cards in TriSLI, once they're actually out of course.

Not to mention that 3840x2400 can handle all lower resolutions, like 1920x1200, 1600x1200, 1280x800 and so on in integer multiply pixel display without interpolation at full screen resolution, or close to it.

Knowing that 4K resolution video cameras are becoming more than just a rarity, it might actually make sense to make a compromise between the 16:10 and 16:9 formats and create a 4096x2400 9.8 megapixel format in between those two ratios that accommodates even the 4096x2304 resolution of the largest 4K camera recording format, including the slightly smaller 4096x2160 and 4096x2048 resolutions, with a little spare space for control buttons on screen as well. So, you would still be able to edit natively the 3840x2160 Quad HDTV signal in it, with extra room for Windows 7 widgets, extra menu bars and other useless alerts. It would not be bad to have, say, a 4096x2400 32-inch 150dpi display of this sort.

Now, the new Displayport 1.2 enables all this from a single video link. Compare that to two Dual DVI links in parallel on the last version of the IBM T221, and you'll get the picture about how much this simplicity can help. The Taiwan graphics card vendors I spoke with are eager to see Displayport 1.2 take off, partly because it will enable easier justification of those ultra high-res monitors I just talked about, and also because it can drive up to four 1920x1200 displays from one connector, or EyeFinity on every card, pretty much.

Add to this 30-bits per pixel for those extra colours, and even the amount of graphics memory might actually start to matter in its old 'frame buffer' sense. A triple-buffered 30-bit plus alpha 9.2 megapixel display would need some 140MB of graphics memory just for the pixels.

Some of the monitor vendors, and I didn't mention Viewsonic or CTX, are exploring these options. Right now, it's up to the Taiwan panel makers like Chimei, which displayed the larger format QuadHD before, to try to go beyond the Korean and Japanese panel vendors and not be tied to the 16:9 ratio lock-in, while going for more profit margin at higher display resolutions.

In summary, with 120Hz refresh, pseudo 3D displays, the comeback of ultrahigh resolutions, and - last but not least - the fight for the 16:10 display format to stay alive and forge ahead, there'll be lots of interesting stuff to watch - pun intended - on the new monitors. Oh yes, did I forget the price fight? Despite the LCD panel price fluctuations, the vendors can't stop complaining about 'no money there' in old Taipei, despite my talking about the need to move up to higher end markets like those super duper displays. But then, such is the IT industry. µ