Albatron goes touch screen

ALBATRON JUST PUT out a multitouch monitor for the masses, that means cheap and mostly childproof. What was a prototype at the last Computex is now a real product.

The idea is simple, instead of expensive and somewhat, pardon the pun, touchy resistive coatings or embedded wires, you put IR lights and sensors along the edges of the monitor. IR is dirt cheap and doesn't blur or darken the screen image, so it is a win/win. On top of that, you can make the screen out of more durable materials because you don't need to worry about changing the sensitivity.

Albatron's touchy-feely monitor

The new model is 21.5 inches diagonal, and has a sensing rate of 120 points per second. It has DVI and D-Sub ports for graphics, an audio pass through, and USB for the touch functionality. We played with a prototype last June, and it looked pretty good, and tracked accurately enough that we didn't have problems while fooling around on the Computex show floor.

Because the monitor coatings tend to go up in price with the square of the screen area while IR is linear in cost, this part should be pretty cheap. No hard specs or price were released, but Albatron did say it will be out by the end of March. µ