The viewing area is six inches smaller than my television. The front of it is sitting six inches from my face… give or take a few inches. It’s an HP ZR30w 30″ Monitor and, well, it’s massive. I had the opportunity to receive one from HP and the subsequent joy of basking in 1.07 billion colors of warm LCD power over the past month. This is HP’s largest LCD monitor, beaming 2560 x 1600 high contrast pixels into your eye and borders the line where people freak out about the size of an object on your desk. It has replaced one of my 24″ monitors, has changed my screen usage and has proven new ways to heat small office spaces. Here’s the rundown.
‘displays’
Product Visualization? Augmented Reality? It Goes a Little Sumthin’ Like This LEGO Man
You’re running down the isle, pouring consumer goods into your buggy and in the crazed rampage you wonder exactly what that boxed ham slicer is gonna look like sitting on your counter. It’s hard to imagine, but the first word you think is HIDEOUS.
You move on to the LEGOs and there, shining in brilliant digitized glory is the LEGO Digital Box interface. You hold the box out and instantly you see the product 3-dimensionally in it’s completed state. *gasp*
You must have it.
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The Lenovo Dual Screen Laptop. How Would You Use It?
I’m telling ya, you wake up one morning and screens are just sliding out all over the place. Soon they’ll be yelling, ‘touch me!’, ‘no, touch me!’ – but for now look what Lenovo is sliding out to the masses January 5th at CES.
The Lenovo W700ds. A laptop with a slide-out secondary screen. Magnificent, don’t ya think? Kinda malignant tumor looking, but with the specs this thing has, you could run a little 3D modeling, a little video editing and more. Check it out.
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Two Crazy Cool Spreadable, Flexible Display Technologies
As if Multi-touch technology wasn’t enough to make you sing and dance through the forest of TechBlogs, two developers have been working with Plasma and OLED technology to make whatever displays will be in the future thinner, more flexible… and yes, spreadable.
Flexible Plasma monitor
Shinoda Plasma has create a supper-thin (1 mil), super-flexible (wrap-around) plasma tube array (PTA) that measure at 1 x 1 meter each. They can be linked together to form long screen and they’re working on larger ones. The current resolution is crap-errific, but it’s as light as a 8 lb hamburger. Of course the only thing people can talk about using this for are signs and advertising. puh-lease! There’s other people out there that use monitors!
Spreadable OLED
No good photos here, but imagine accidently spreading some organic light-emitting diodes on your toast. yum. What’s super rockin’ about this is the same technology can be used for solar panels. So, you basically a mobile phone shell could be infused with a self-powered, self-lighting gel. Same with you monitor, watch, lawnmower, etc. Fixed screen OLED Monitors should be out more near 2009 (Sony has one now). Psst… they use a lot less power and have a glorious 1,000,000 to 1 contrast ratio, but are dang pricey now. It’s sad though, the spread-tech is still about two-years out for prototypes.
Via TechNews and PinkTentacle
The Future Of Laptop Screens. Replacements?
There’s an interesting segment in technology that really has the largest direct effect on how we work and how teenagers spend 20+hours of their week. The Screen. That amazing peripheral you’re gazing into right now to which we’ve come to view the entire world through… until it goes black or your laptop is yanked off the table by a toddler.
From the ready availability of laptop screens it seems as if this happens to quite a few of them. Without a doubt, in the near future, we’ll put the isolated workstation aside for the ultra-portable laptops that have the same capabilities. I’ve developed a lot of interest in the displays over the past few years because of the advances in technology with thinner laptops like the Sony Vaio or Macbook Air, flexible OLED screens and of course all the multi-touch stuff that has come out.
Then, the prices of LCD’s drop off so much because of competition and increased manufacturing, Best Buy stop carrying the tubes, and I wonder if I can just buy a whole palette of replacement screens to cover the wallpaper I have yet to take down in the bathroom. How sweet would that be?… How expensive would that be? And then replacing them along with the lightbulbs when they go out?
On top of that, there’s the business side where you could invest in the companies producing laptops or in the manufacturers pumping out the screens. To use the California gold rush analogy: It wasn’t the miners who got rich; it was the people who sold the picks and shovels. Who has the next best shovel?
The technology is certainly changing. More than anything though, I’m just glad I don’t have a huge CRT sitting on my desk anymore.




