OT: Large LCD monitors for PC

On a sunny day (Tue, 14 Dec 2010 09:37:43 -0800) it happened Joerg wrote in :

My Samsung, now > 3 years old, is beginning to show vertical bands. First I thought it was burn in, but there is nothing with pure vertical bands to burn it in, and running an 'unburn' program does not help. It looks like some manufacturing pattern, getting worse from left to right. It is JUST below irritating on movies now, no problem on normal work.

Mine (Intel) doesn't gap either but there is still a gap because of the black bezels around your screens. I bet if you took a large Dremel to cut that off they'll quit working ...

The sims look rather digital to me, except for the 2nd trace from top. I am involved in an analog chip as well right now, very similar looking sims (for all the mux switches in there). Except that some of ours go to

I try to keep mine fairly clean. Have to. It's easier to make sure that files from various clients will never get mixed up, and my wife would have a hissy fit if I'd carry a mess on the desk spaces. She is the one cleaning the offices (I don't do a good enough cleaning job, sez SWMBO ...)

Really paranoid people would hang a piece of cloth over it :-)

I see a Java srcipt book there on your shelf ...

As fine as 0.25mm? Not on big screens, but plenty of laptops are well in excess of that... all the way down to around 0.15mm. LCDs on phones get even tighter, such as the iPhone 4's display at an astonishing .078mm!

Of course this reflects the idea that your eye only has so much resolution anyway, and hence with a bigger display the idea is that you'll be physically further away from it and super-high dot pitches don't buy you much... (Steve Jobs would have you believe that, held at 10-12 inches from your eyes, the iPhone 4's display is roughly the same resolution as what your eyeballs can differentiate, but it's a somewhat contentious issue with others claiming he's off by a factor of up to 2 or 3...)

I have some Samsung 2343's that are 2048x1152 over 23" ... which gets you

---Joel

It's an LED (screen) driver. The schematic on the left has no relationship to the sims... just for effect :-)

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you :-)

I just needed to learn enough to make an un-bot-able mailer. ...Jim Thompson

My great-grandpa was able to read the newspaper without glasse when he was over 100 years old. I am not that lucky, around 40 I needed 1.25x glasses for the computer and 2.5x or stronger for SMT (depending on whether there's 0402 stuff on there or not).

But, I thoroughly impressed a group of aerospace engineers when they had a last minute spec change and I soldered a 0603 resistor on top of another, using a Weller with the standard "pipe fitter's tip". Ok, with glasses. "You mean, you just doubled the current that way?" ... "Yup". Wiping off sweat beads and happy that I had >100% reserves in my circuit. I just knew it, saw it coming ...

I guess he's over 50? Then that may be the reason :-)

Once a client engineer asked about that mirror in my lab. "Just so I can see if someone walks up towards the window with an AK47 in hand" ... "Oh!"

(in reality is was to be able to see noise effects on ultrasound machines with me poking around in the back where the boards are, but now gone)

I believe you could have just downloaded one.

Try to gently squeeze around the corners, see if it changes. Could be just a contacting issue.

That is a function of your video card, not your PC....

I'll second Keith here -- I've had Sceptres in the past, and they're OK, but definitely cheap. I never had any reliability problems, but the color gamut, viewing angles, controls, and so on weren't as good as spendier choices.

Basically... Sceptre won't "wow" you, but for CAD review, it'll likely be just fine. ...and since you're buying from Costco, at least a return is easy!

I'm of the opinion that if you plug in a 1920x1080 monitor, your video card will likely be more than happy to play at that native resolution (even though it's not displaying it now), but if not... cheapy video cards are all of $25 these days (e.g.,

If you're really OK with 1920x1080 on such a big screen, here's a nice 32" Panasonic for $400:

...that's for "display devices without EDID" -- EDID is the little I2C PROM in pretty much every monitor build in the last decade that tells the video card what resolutions it supports. I.e., those are the supported resolutions if you plug in some really, really old CRT.

(EDID was released in 1994.)

---Joel

It's over four feet from edge to edge, so yeah, it's kinda big. And that doesn't include the fourth monitor on the shelf above them, or the laptop's monitor (five LCDs total). I'm building a bigger desk :-)

To give you an idea of how wide the main desktop is, here's a snapshot of a window that spanned all three main monitors (across, not up/down):

My son has decided that two monitors works best if one (side) is portrait and the other (center) is landscape.

Wow! How did you manage to butt the glass together so no seams show?

Hmm, ok, the monitor is from the late 90's. But how would I find out what resolutions the graphics stuff can do?

Ok, yes, but in my case it is on the motherboard. An Intel G33 chip set.

Most any chipset today can support any resolution so long as it doesn't run out of memory bandwidth or a maximum row/column counter size... so if your graphics card says it can do 1920x1200, it can almost assuredly do 1920x1080. Your G33 says it supports up to 2048x1536, BTW:

In theory the way to see the various resolutions is what others have mentioned -- right-click the desktop, go to properties, the advanced tab, un-check "hide modes that this monitor cannot display." I think you tried this, though, and it still doesn't display 1920x1080 though, right? I don't know why, but for whatever reason unchecking that box doesn't always seem to work... it doesn't on my PC here, even though I know I've had 1920x1080 displays hooked up to it and working correctly (...but the currently-connected display is 1920x1200...).

---Joel

True, but I'd rather buy the better quality one. One of my Viewsonic CRT monitors went bzzzzt on account of an arcing flyback transformer but other than that held it up a decade or so. The Dell with Trinitron I am using now is rock solid, super image quality. If it was just a little larger ...

But this is a TV, not a computer monitor, right? 1080 lines would start to become a bit blocky on 32" at short distance.

Thanks, Joel, then it should support the mode. If not I'll just have to buy a PCI graphics card.

On my PC there isn't even a check box like that. Happens a lot with Dell, that some features are not available or made unavailable. They don't see it but it can hurt their sales a little. Sometimes I am involved in the rescue of some legacy production tester. Very crucial that older features still work there, to avoid having to write a rather massive amount of new procedures and a big ECO.