You know, lots of store have em…an array of video screens, arranged so that you see a giant image. I would construct mine from 20" monitors, perhaps a 5 by 5 array. thay would give me a nice big picture…and at a fraction of the price of a projection monitor.
I sthis an easy thing to do? :rolleyes:
I can’t imagine how this would work out cheaper than a projector, but the problem breaks down into two parts:
Image slicing - you need some way of dissecting your incoming image into the right sized ‘tiles’ and sending each one to the right monitor - if you’re driving the thing from a computer, then you’ll need one graphics card for each monitor and it will probably have to be quite a grunty machine to be able to handle the process and hardware (if you can find a way of accomodating sufficient graphics cards).
Retiling the image - you could just ignore the fact that the viewable areas of your monitors don’t join up seamlessly, but while that probably works OK for displaying commercials and the like, I suspect it would make home cinema viewing uncomfortable at best.
Or you could attempt to modify the monitors so that there is no seam (and this is where it gets interesting; on large commercial multi-monitor walls, the front of each monitor is fitted with light-guides that ‘splay’ the image a little, making it larger than the viewable area of the individual monitor and enabling it to join up at the edges. Trouble is that in order to do this (and still have a flat screen), the light guides at the edge are a little longer than those at the centre (and they travel at a different angle too) - in theory, this can be compensated by forming them cleverly and designing a little more loss into the shorter guides near the centre, but in practice, it is nearly impossible to completely eliminate the visible seams.
25 screens at a nice cheap price of $100 each is still $2500 before you consider the computer and software.
If you’re talking LCD then it’s more in the $7500 range.
The heat alone generated would drive me mad 
For $2500 You should be able to pick up a projector, though probably not the best.
You can get a decent rear projection display for about $2,000. As for the image tiling, you can get a dedicated box designed to do this, but that’s an additional cost. Plus with conventional CRTs, you’d have a fairly large border between the images.
Building a superhero base?
Thought I’d check on eBay and here’s a 9-monitor model with a starting price of £2K (monitors included), but the photograph doesn’t exactly sell the concept, does it? - “Now you too can obscure important details with an unsightly black grid!”
History: 0 bids
Oh my God Mangetout, that thing is just horrible !