Alienware's Curved Monitor

ViperArrow writes "Alienware has showcased a curved display prototype supporting a resolution of 2880x900, aimed mainly toward gamers, with a refresh rate of .02ms. This 3-foot-wide DLP with LED illumination will be available by the second half of 2008. The monitor is still showing some flaws, but Alienware assures us that these will be gone by release. No price has been revealed as of yet."

Re:That's a lot of pixels!

[quarrel]

I have a 30" Dell, running at its native 2560 * 1600. Apple makes one, lots of others.

2560 * 1600 = 4,096,000

This Alienware monitor:

2880 * 900 = 2,592,000

So this new monitor is nothing special total pixel wise..

Looks cool though.

--Q

Differing specs

[clegrand]

Eh.. Gizmodo sez .02ms refresh ... wow.. Macworld sez 2ms refresh ... sounds more reasonable

Okay, this one still resides in the land of dreams, but tell me the mere sight doesn't set your salivary glands into overdrive. Alienware's working on a curved monitor that actually helps simulate peripheral vision in gaming. The resolution on this truly remarkable feat of engineering is an astounding 2880x900 and it's run off a Dual Link DVI set up (with some serious graphics horsepower). As if that's not enough, it uses DLP technology, is backlit by LEDs, and has a 2ms response time.

http://www.macworld.com/article/131451/2008/01/gboxces1.html [macworld.com]

Re:hmm

[Smidge204]

Aha. The article says 0.02ms response time not refresh rate. Very different measurement there. The incorrect summary fogged my mind when reading the article... 0.02ms response time is slightly more believable.... not my much though. It's about 100x faster than current consumer-grade units (2-3ms).

=Smidge=

Re:Gaming on RPTV

[Brad1138]

Their refresh rate is based on 60hz which is where they got their .02 refresh rate (1/60hz)

The article says .02ms not .02s. hz is cycle/second not per Millisecond.

Re:4 Monitors in one?

[Bender Unit 22]

Indeed.
"Alienware has showcased a curved display prototype"

prototype
(pr't-tp') pronunciation

n.

      1. An original type, form, or instance serving as a basis or standard for later stages.
      2. An original, full-scale, and usually working model of a new product or new version of an existing product.
      3. An early, typical example.
      4. Biology. A form or species that serves as an original type or example.

[French, from Greek prtotupon, from neuter of prtotupos, original : prto-, proto- + tupos, model.]
prototypal pro'totyp'al (-t'pl) or pro'totyp'ic (-tp'k) or pro'totyp'ical (--kl) adj.

Re:4 Monitors in one?

[Apathy451]

I know this is /., but RTFA: "The Soylent Green: You can see the seams between this monitor's four segments, but the Alienware humanoids tell us that flaw will be gone by the time this craft lands on Earth."

Re:Here's a picture...

[Joe Snipe]

since the linked article doesn't have one...

No, they didn't have one. They had nine. And a video.

Re:Here's a picture...

[crymeph0]

GP's probably running NoScript [noscript.net] in FireFox. I had to temporarily allow scripts from gawker.com to see the pictures and video.

Re:Here's a picture...

[DaFallus]

Apologies for replying to my own post, but I just wanted to point out that I was wrong and that the original article does have pictures and a video. I browse with Firefox and NoScript so I did not see the images until I temporarily allowed scripts from gawker.

Re:hmm

[Amouth]

actualy DLP chips have amazingly high responce time.. and being that the industry tends to measure responce time from gray to gray instead of white to black... i can very well see .02ms response time for the DLP chip.. but at that rate it is the color wheel that will be the limiting factor as the mirror can't reflect light that isnt' there yet.. if you think about how DLP works..

you have a grid of little onchip mirrors.. that tilt back and forth.. you have a color wheel that spins at high rpm and a blub shining throuhg it.. for a specific color to be shown the mirrors in sync with the wheel tilt to allow a certin amount of the light from the wheel through. if you have a color wheel going at say 10k rpm 3 colors in the wheel (more modern ones are using 6 and 12 color wheels to help prevent rainbow effect) each mirror has a color option 500 times a second wich means 2ms to switch from solid to solid with only a 3 color wheel.. but if you had say a green then it would be blue and yellow both and no for red. which means 2ms/3 mirror movements so .66ms responce time on the mirror.. now if you double the color wheel options you must increase the responce time.. by the same factor.. 6 color wheel = .33ms responce time 12 color wheel = .166ms response time..

while i will agree that .02 responce time is insane (providing use of a 64 color wheel) i am willing to bet that it is more like 0.2 ms responce time.. as 2ms would be a very plain cheep projector..

but DLP is by far better than LCD at responce time..

Re:hmm

[TheRaven64]

480 is the number of lines in an NTSC picture. You probably live in an area with a slightly less primitive colour TV encoding. PAL encodes 625 lines, although only 576 are visible. Since PAL picture have 20% more vertical resolution, standard definition TV in the USA and other places which use NTSC looks terrible to someone used to PAL (the colour reproduction is very poor too, leading to claims that it stands for Never The Same Colour). It's probably one of the reasons why HD is doing better in the USA than Europe; the quality difference is much more apparent.

Re:That's a lot of pixels!

[Have Blue]

Many modern games will let you specify arbitrary pixel dimensions and aspect ratio, either with the console or by hand-editing the config file. I imagine it'll make the HUD look a little weird.

Wallhacker eh?

[tepples]

I have three screens at home running on two adapters (512M video ram). It'd be nice to be able to use all the extra real estate to cheat at StarCraft or Command and Conquer for example.

The number of square meters of the battlefield that each player can see is one of the game rules. If you increase an overhead RTS like StarCraft from 640x480 to 1280x960, you don't quadruple how much battlefield you can see; instead, you just increase how much detail is shown in each texture. This detail can be real (hi-res texture packs) or fake (smart line art resizer [hiend3d.com]).

Re:4 Monitors in one?

[Fieryphoenix]

TFS says it is not an LCD at all. As stated in the video, it's a rear-projection DLP. It has four elements, the joins of which are not currently seamless. Common LCD sizes have no relevance in this case, but at least you're thinking.

Re:hmm

[wrong]

Nope. PAL (the GP's TV standard of choice) shows 576 out of 625 lines. NTSC shows 480 out of 525 lines.

Re:Can't find the images for the scripts

[HTH NE1]

IMO this is exactly why noscripts is as silly as Norton or almost any other addon security tool. Its like breaking your toy so the bully doesn't play with it. Its your browser's job to make your browsing safe. And yours of course.

No, it is the site's responsibility to use the NOSCRIPT tag to provide alternative content when the script does not run for whatever reason.

So many sites so in love with Web 2.0 forgetting basic HTML principles like graceful degradation. Or at very least, <noscript><p>You need to enable scripts from gawker.com to view the images accompanying this story.</p></noscript> for the totally lazy but not quite totally inept.

Seems only DoubleClick even bothers to use the NOSCRIPT tag, just to ensure that they get their ad impression even if their script doesn't run.

Re:hmm

[Trixter]

NTSC has many flaws, but the higher refresh rate is an advantage to a country that seems to live and die by its professional sports Since all pro sports games are transmitted/recorded at the full 60Hz framerate (ie. there is a new piece of temporal information every 1/60th of a second), they are more fluid than PAL.

That's a very minor issue, though; the bigger issue is how movies are transferred to PAL -- standard transfer is to speed them up 6% to translate 24fps to 25fps. Up until very recently, that altered the pitch of the sound! Thankfully newer transfer methods are able to speed up the audio without altering the pitch.

Re:Hey, I paid extra for those top and bottom pixe

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the BioShock patch fixed that.

It added an option to "lock" or "unlock" horizontal FOV.

Re:Can't find the images for the scripts

[WK2]

NoScript is a tool. Using it has advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages: the internet is less annoying. And faster. And you are safer from Javascript exploits (which are quite common in Firefox)
Disadvantages: some poorly written pages don't work, or work poorly.

I feel that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, so I use NoScript. Sites that require Javascript and don't say so are probably lame and annoying anyway.