Transform a Regular LCD Into a Touchscreen 146
eZtaR writes "NAVisis is introducing a new USB gadget (for Windows only including Vista) called LaptopTablet. You mount it onto the side of your regular LCD monitor to transform it into a fully functional touchscreen, controlled with an included pen. The gadget is priced at around $100 and seems a good alternative for Photoshoppers."
Oy ... (Score:4, Funny)
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TabletMouse (Score:5, Funny)
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I can't put my finger on it (Score:4, Funny)
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Just a gadget (Score:2, Insightful)
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Says 400 DPI on the page linked to and go check the "Example" tab for art. It's good enough for anime.
Really, Read The Fucking Article/Product Page/Whatever next time. Borderline trolling, what you posted.
Re:Just a gadget (Score:5, Informative)
Pressure sensitivity is key for most any artist, it's where the real value of the Wacom tablets lie, allowing you to control the quality of your brush strokes with pressure as you work. That's a bigger part of the tablet's advantage over the mouse than the actual "pen" method of input for many artists. This makes no mention of any kind of pressure sensitivity. Clearly, it can't make the screen pressure sensitive. Perhaps they could build a sensor into the pen that measures pressure and use the edge device for position, but that doesn't look like it's what they did, their pen looks like a "dumb" device, not a wireless pressure sensor. Even if it did have a pressure sensor in the tip, it's going to have to be so sensitive that it requires a really light touch, or else you're going to mar your screen, and that would greatly diminish its value.
As far as resolution is concerned: they say "sampling" is at "about" 400 DPI (whatever that means), but then it says "recognized resolution 0.2mm" which is about 125 dpi. The Wacom tablets artists work with recognize a resolution of about 5,000 lines per inch.
I'm sure you can draw a cartoony sketch with it just fine, but there's no way this device as it stands now is going to replace tablets for professional artists. That doesn't mean it's worthless. A lot of thing you want to do with touch sensitive displays isn't professional art. These could be a much cheaper alternative for touch-sensitive user interfaces and games and such. Maybe in future generations they will add some sort of pressure sensitivity through the pen and increase the resolution by an order of magnitude. Until then, the "borderline troll" is correct.
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Not to mention that the Intuos3 series is capable of sensing pen rotation and x/y tilt. You need plugins and whatnot for some of these effects, and some features aren't present with the bundled stylus, but the feature-level on these tablets and accessories is absolutely astounding. Not to mention that each stylus, even among multiple of the same type, has its own unique ID, and can be associated with different tools. You can have an array of styluses, each with a different color, brush size/type, and opa
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No, I did not think that. As other people have posted before [slashdot.org] in this discussion (at +5), "conventional graphics pads/tablet PCs" have screens that are tough and scratch resistant and are designed to be pushed on all day with the tip of a stylus. This would destroy conventional LCD's. So, as I said in my post:
1. It doesn't appear that this device has any pressure sensitivity, and
2. If they wanted to a
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Considering that a Wacom Cintiq is well over two grand (for a 21" LCD), for that particular market such effort would be worth it -- $300 + $100 + a little work is a Hell of a lot better than $2500!
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I'm curious to see how well it works, and I appologize if my comment came off as trollish.
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(Now I need some utility to make my PC mouse pointer able to appear on my PDA screen when it's in the cradle on my desk, the same way it does with the laptop LCD and the 19" monitor next to it!)
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If you're going to do that, why not buy a Tablet PC? The price premium over a regular laptop is the same as the cost of a Wacom tablet, and you'll have the (IMHO, much better) experience of actually having your drawings appear under your pen instead of drawing in one place and having it show up somewhere else.
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Ugggh ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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A telling observation, since it was gorilla arm [catb.org] that pretty much killed the touchscreen as a primary input device (except for applications where the user only spends a short time using the device, such as ATM screens).
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On a related note, I just spent a week walking around various facilities for 8 hours a day holding a tablet PC and entering data using the touchscreen and onscreen keypad as needed. While the screen-tapping wasn't too bad as long as I could rest my wrist against the tablet (which helped with
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it works a treat as long as you position the tablet guts somewhere away from the main power/data cables behind the LCD.
(If the cables are across the active surface, the tracking is screwed, mine has a nice area on the screen just able to fit a 6 inch touch panel).
The downside to this is the entire screen is not touch sensitive and there isn't a 1:1 relationship.
I ended up writing my own graphic software to work with it, and have since *downgraded* to runn
Why LCD only? (Score:2, Interesting)
Very interesting product either way. Seems better and cheaper than a Wacom.
Curves of CRT? (Score:3, Insightful)
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The product page however still says that you can use the gadget with any flat surface, but I don't have the heart to tell more of my fellow Slashdotters to RTFA. There's no need to ruin your LCD.
One thing
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Except Wacoms have pressure sensitivity, don't they?
Smashing (Score:5, Interesting)
Aren't normal LCDs a bit fragile for this? (Score:5, Informative)
My boss and several co-workers regularly touch the LCDs here in the office, making the surface bend and distorting the image and it makes me wince everytime.
William
(who is looking forward to _all_ LCDs coming w/ some sort of digitizer built-in after manufacturers decide the added durability and lessened expense of one manufacturing line instead of two makes economic sense)
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The screens were all right though.
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Personally, I'm pissed off that there are still so few t
TabletPC availability (Score:2)
William
(who bought a Stylistic 'cause he got tired of waiting for Apple to make a replacement for his Newton)
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Also, the thin piece of glass in the Tablet screen is in addition to the normal piece LCD pane --- adding this contributes to the parallax problem one gets w/ the offset caused by the display being beneath a panel to begin with.
William
ICK. (Score:4, Informative)
as for photoshoppers, doodling on a monitor sucks. Using a pen tablet on the desk is far easier and way more intuitive as well as not having your hand and pen device in the way blocking your view.
This is a neat device, but for the price you can get kits from ebay to add a real touchscreen layer to your lcd or laptop instead of something that requires a special pen.
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Most of the sucky tablets have the wacom style magnetic pen system. worse ones have a battery in the pen.
Only the best are resistive types that give an X+Y signal back and are typically found on high end commercial touchscreens.
so you get both because you have a finger sensitive type. if you got the other type you
Photoshoppers ? (Score:4, Informative)
Most pros I know use a Wacom in Photoshop or Illustrator, but mostly they're mouse people.
I can't imagine that a serious Photoshopper would want to use an LCD screen and draw on it with a stylus, it's just not accurate enough.
OT: CRT Vs LCD (Score:3, Insightful)
LCD displays have improved since the late 90s and the advantages of CRT monitors are becoming fallacy.
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VGA cables really aren't well designed, with all the pins so close together like that. A good CRT using a 13W3 or seperate shielded RGB cables will look a lot better, especially at high resolutions. LCD screens look like crap through VGA connections too...
My basis for this, are the old 21" and 24" SUN/SGI CRT screens... They have dual VGA/13W3 inputs, and the difference is quite noticeable, even on the same system if
Re:Photoshoppers ? (Score:4, Informative)
The reason they're mouse people more than tablet people is that most software sucks on a tablet -- many on the common UI elements that work well with a mouse fail completely on a tablet. You really have to design with pen based interaction in mind.
Look at Alias SketchBook for an example of a UI that works well on tablets
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I'm about as serious as they come in regards to Photoshop and completely disagree with you. I use a Cintiq [wacom.com] (Wacom) daily which is a LCD screen controlled by a stylus. And sketching on screen with a stylus is unequivocally superior to sketching with a mouse (and on a separate tablet IMHO). It is simply natural to look at what your drawing.
In regards to TFA, pressure
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And it looks like it can be tilted correctly, so that you can "write" / draw on it properly.
You're right about pressure sensitivity too, hadn't thought of that (not being a Wacom user or designer, although I use Photoshop for serious photo touch-up, I'm not someone who'll draw / illustrate in software)
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This thing sucks (Score:2)
But Jesus, why does it have to be this huge cancerous growth hanging off the side of the laptop?
Only $100? (Score:2, Interesting)
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(*Liquid Crystals Leaked Out So It's No Longer A Display)
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just dont touch too fast (Score:3, Funny)
touchscreens, ugh... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm talking about a laptop/tablet configuration.
yes, the idea sounds great and people will say that their productivity will increase, yada, yada, yada, but MOST people who say this have never used one or experienced the frustration when their touchscreen goes out of calibration, which will happen ALOT!!!
I support a salesforce of about 200 who use various touchscreen PCs from HP Ipaq to Fujitsu tablets and lap
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slashdotted (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/a3c962572c00cfd4
Neat! (Score:3, Interesting)
The company's in Korea. Any slashdotters there trying it with linux / trying it out in the store?
This could really hurt Anoto, which makes an extremely advanced system of bluetooth/optical recognition pens and special paper using a pattern that is unique for every page.
Anoto, like the Flypen toy based on its tech, has all kinds of applications. For example a checkbox called "Fax" at the bottom of a sheet of paper that when you check it, it gets faxed. Navisis has a portable version for pdas and maybe phones, called the phone pen which looks quite cool, and the mouse version that works on your table top is quite neat too. They do sell protective covering for your lcd as well, anyway I'd like to hear from someone who really uses it, and then hear about if it just looks like a mouse to the system or if it needs a driver.
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Cool, but (Score:1, Redundant)
Down with the mouse? (Score:1)
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There are already touchscreen kits (Score:2)
e.g.
http://www.magictouch.com/builtin.html [magictouch.com]
Given a few years, they'll be built into almost all screens.
sounds familiar (Score:2)
Sounds like simliar technology.
It's called a whiteboard recorder (Score:2)
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Power Pen (Score:2)
About Damn Time We Change GIMP's Name (Score:1)
an alternative for Photoshoppers...
and GIMP/GIMP pimps/GIMPoids/GIMPles/GIMPhomaniacs
take your pick
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LCD second monitor flat on desk? (Score:2)
cool, I'll just spend an extra $100 on a 17" or 19" LCD monitor and lie it flat on the desk. I'll drive it with the second monitor output of my graphics card. For screen protection I'll buy some kind of 3M film from staples for $10 a roll or a 200 pack of laser printable transparency sheets.
or even - I could roll my own context sensitive touch tablet, instead of a $1500 OLED keyboard
...with new gadgets comes new opportunities.
"Photoshoppers"?? (Score:5, Funny)
sincerely,
- Adobe
huh (Score:2)
Until I get to: The gadget is priced at around $100 and seems a good alternative for Photoshoppers.
Im not much of a phtotoshopper, but what unmet need does this meet for photoshoppers?
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Not a touchscreen (Score:1)
Ultrasound? (Score:2)
2. Ultrasonics can be quite destructive, both on the laptop screen and on the bones in your hand (again, more of a problem at high power levels).
Oxymoron of the century... (Score:1)
Blast from the past (Score:2)
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Not for Photoshop (Score:2)
In the same way that a cut finger is an alternative to a pencil.
Actual art tablets that are specifically designed to use with Photoshop (and vice versa) start at $99.
note taking (Score:2)
NAVisis is not really new with this technology (Score:2, Informative)