High-end large scale PC LCD futures unfold

THE BENEFITS of multiple LCD panel fabs churning out ever-large panels are trickling down to both TV and PC monitor users. With prices falling, it is a good time to have a really large LCD monitor for your high-resolution graphics, whether at home or at the office - if the boss obliges, that is. If not the gargantuan 30-inch Apple or Dell display, than at least the more 'ordinary', 23 to 24-inch WUXGA (1920x1200) class of monitors.

24-inchers for HDTV
Such screens are a good match right now since they nicely accomodate full-size 1080i / 1080p HDTV display (1920x1080) at precise pixel for pixel fit, yet still with some extra space free for menus and buttons of your favourite H.264 or WMV-HD media player. Watching such HD video on this kind of monitor, with matched pixels and no interpolation, is a feast for the eyes wary & tired of the DVDs and VCDs of the present. Also, two pages of text / DTP / PDF / HTML web page data can be edited side-by-side at the same time at a high resolution. The 96 dpi pixel raster density of the 24-inch models (or 100 dpi on the 23-inch ones) is also a nice match for the default Windows 96 dpi font resolution.

If you have HDCP content protection as well, then you're ready too for Windoze Vista rip-off season, where you may have to pay through your nose for the new "well-protected" BD or HD-DVD content to enjoy on that LCD. And if your monitor, like most current models, doesn't have HDCP? Well, then await the "solution" by some smart coders, either under current Windows XP, or under Linux, of course. Just like any such "protection", HDCP will be broken, and its presence will at the end of the day affect and inconvenience law-abiding legal user flock far more than those bent on and capable of hacking it to pieces.

On top of that, these high-end units will have all the other bells and whistles you may want: multiple DVI and VGA inputs, tilt and swivel and portrait modes, as well as elegant design with thin edges. Some models, like long-time 24-inch reference in this class, Dell 2405FPW, claim incredible (for a LCD) 1000:1 contrast ratio and 500 cd/m2 brightness - while I didn't go the Tom's Hardware way and actually measure it up, this monitor, which I am using right now, does have one of the best pictures I've ever seen on any LCD, and that is while keeping the brightness at minimum and contrast in the mid range. Other similar models in this classfrom Samsung, Viewsonic, LG and so on are pretty close in the claimed picture quality parameters.

Right now, they are not up to speed compared to their smaller 19-inch cousins: 16 ms declared response time is the current standard here - enough to watch the HD movies or for 3-D design, but not for the fastest paced 3-D games. Also, the colour gamut leaves more to be desired, as with most LCDs - maybe the move to 10-bit per colour definition or different backlighting techniques would help. Another problem that increases proportionally with the LCD screen size is ensuring that the backlighting is uniformly bright across the whole display, avoiding the problems of slightly varying intensity that sometimes plague large monitors. The white intensity should be consistent everywhere.

Finally, the performance: most of these monitors are rated at around 16 ms (or 12 ms gray-to-gray) response time - sufficient for playback in HD video for both 1080i-60 and 1080p-30 fps - but not for 1080p-60 fps HD video. When playing fast-paced 3-D games though, not only in many case the screen can only make use of 1600x1200 regular-format size, but the games, while playable, will definitely have visible slight drag in rapid-moving sequences.

And, talking about the price, Dell was the first to break the US$ 1,000 barrier on the (discounted) price of its monitor - in Taipei, you can also find the 23-inch Acer model in shops for around US$ 800 now. So, yes, they are affordable if you want them. I don't expect this price to fall much further, maybe US$ 700 (the current 20-inch LCD price) is a reasonable minimum for a 23-inch or 24-inch WUXGA display. What vendors and users should focus on is better performance. A 12 ms standard or 8 ms gray-to-gray response time, if really working, would give you sufficient speed for even a 1080p60 display. And more features: how about two switchable DVI inputs from two high-performance PCs?

The 30+ inch class: Beyond HD
The WUXGA 1920x1200 at 60 Hz refresh is the maximum that the current single-channel DVI can provide - Display Port and other proposed next-generation video links may solve that problem in the future, but for now, if you want more, you need to go by dual-link (or dual dual-link like in the case of IBM T221!) DVI. The current cream-of the crop, (still too) expensive Apple and Dell 30-inch units provide 2560x1600 resolution at nearly 3x the price of the 24-inch display, yet still keeping the 96 dpi pixel raster density.

There are a few problems here. Firstly, they can't display full-screen 1080i or 1080p HDTV without blurry interpolation - yes, they can do 720p very nicely and sharply with 2x2 double pixels for each 720p pixel, but well, you're not buying this kind of super display to watch 720p video, which many much smaller (and much cheaper - we're talking one-fifth of the 30-incher's US$ 3K+ price tag) screens can take care of very well anyway?

Secondly, the assumption is that such screens are going to either professionals with specific jobs and clear return on investment expected (including the high expectations from the product), or high-end hobbyists with money to burn (and sometimes even higher expectations from their gear due to the often-inherent perfectionist madness). If you're one of these, editing your 10-megapixel photos or multiple HDTV video streams or what nots, those huge 96 dpi pixels stare prominently at you - the preference would be something a bit more dense to fit those big images better.

Now, remember the IBM T221 model, which we reviewed here over two years ago? The Quad W-UXGA resolution, or stunning 3840x2400, for a 22-inch display, or an ultrasharp 204 dpi? When you keep in mind it is real pixels, and not dot dithering like on most colour laser or ink-jet printers, for your photos or renderings this would be a printout quality equivalent of a true 1,200 dpi colour laser printer! In its heyday at that time, you could get the high-end T221DG5 model for as low as US$ 5,000 subsidised price if you were an IBM partner in specific industries.

Yes, the 204 dpi was kinda TOO DENSE for regular work, as you really had hard time seeing the pixels on this screen - I used the monitor for several months, and had to set my Windows fonts to 144 dpi to be able to see the icon displays and menus without magnifying glass, And yes, it did need two dual-link DVI ports in parallel from a single card just to get a 48 Hz refresh, and yes, IBM all but abandoned these excellent displays in the post-coital bliss with Lenovo - but this is the monitor that shows where we should go.

At that resolution, you can not only have a great 9.2 megapixel photo editing screen, but also natively reproduce all smaller resolutions including all HDTV formats at or near full-screen, without pixel interpolation - so whichever signal you put in, it will be sharp: the 1080i / 1080p will be displayed with 2x2 screen pixel matrix for each video pixel, the 720p will do fine with 3x3 screen pixels for each video dot, and so on even to the 480p, which will use 5x5 screen pixels for each video dot. Not to mention all the computer resolutions from 1920x1200 down, displayed sharply without interpolation

Now, imagine that 3840x2400 resolution on a 30-inch display the size of Apple CinemaHD, giving you an impressive (yet not magnifying glass-requiring) 150 dpi pixel density? To me, this format, and not the 2560x1600, is the major next step after the standard WUXGA. Why? Well, now you don't need to look for very high end professional OpenGL card to get two dual-link DVI ports on a single card anymore: ATI Radeon X1800 or better will do just fine, as long as the graphics driver allows a virtual dual-monitor configuration with proper genlock / framelock between the outputs to prevent frame tearing when, say, watching a 4K-resolution IMAX video, or handling a real-time 3-D city walkthrough, across the whole screen. That was all already done on Nvidia, ATI and 3DLabs OpenGL cards years ago, since Quadro FX1000 days. Also, 150 dpi pixel density may be more manageable from the manufacturing yield point of view - after all, such pixel density is common in notebook screens too.

At this resolution, you won't be watching HD or DVD video without switching into a lower resolution mode, so there is no requirement for absolutely fast refresh - 48 Hz or 50 Hz refresh, in sync with cinema or European TV refresh is doable with two dual-link DVIs - you can always have 60 and 75 Hz at lower resolutions when playing videos or games. Talking about games, it would be interesting to compare 3840x2400 without antialiasing vs 1920x1200 with antialiasing. Personally, if 50 Hz is enough for the game refresh, I'd rather go with pure 3840x2400; the X1900XTX might even be able to throw some antialiasing for a good measure at decent performance here, but that would stretch the 512 MB video memory to the maximum due to the huge resulting frame buffer size.

So, nothing new to invent there, it's up to the first vendor to get out and do it - combine the 30-inch size with Quad WUXGA resolution, and current twin dual-link DVI cards, and you have the ideal Super-LCD display! µ