Giant, like, at least the size of a 50" tv, or so; I’m basically looking at the wall behind this dinky little flatscreen (which does have decent picture quality). This monitor is a 19", and I really would ideally have…about four times this amount of space. (Oh, and this monitor I’ve got now is at 1900x1200).
So, given the current state-of-the-art, is there any sort of reasonable way to get a really big monitor?
I’ve basically got two ideas in mind, thus far:
-use a television (presumably one having very high resolution – cant have blurry text)
-use a digital projector (again, important that I be able to retain resolution)
So, anyone got any ideas? Yeah, I used an ambiguous term – “reasonable”, but I’m more just curious what it might cost to get something like this. I’ve just recently seen some very impressive televisions, including a couple which were nearly as thin as…an iPhone (seen those? I was really impressed, they only are about 1.5cm wide, truly “flat”). Oh, but, anyway, I saw several very large plasma (and non-plasma) TVs, a few of which struck me as surprisingly cheap – like, a 50-something inch for $1500 (?). Are these prices going to continue to drop? What’s the difference between plasma and non-plasma? Has anyone here used a large flatscreen TV as a computer monitor, and if so how’d you like it?
This is a trifle confused. Do you want physical size, or do you want resolution, or both? If you want physical size, a conventional 50" flat screen TV will do fine. You just end up with exactly the same image, just bigger. For computer use, perhaps not a great idea.
If you want to maintain the same resolution, but have a bigger screen, things get expensive quickly. There are stackable LCD displays. They are constructed so that you can tile a screen with them. I was once lent an IBM 2000x3000 pixel display that was made from four such tiles. It was a 19" screen. It was jaw dropping. So was the price. About $15,000 Oz from memory.
You can do projection systems with stacked projectors. So four 1080p capable projectors will get you a workable large format image. You need a reasonably high end graphics card but nothing extraordinary. This is likely the easiest and cheapest option. You will have problems aligning the image to make the edges seamless. High end systems use special blending boxes where you overlap the images and fade from one projector to the other, avoiding a sharp transition.
If you’re looking for big on the cheap, a projector is probably the way to go. You can get a 1080i HD projector for less than $400, and make the picture as big as you want. If you have a big white wall, you’re all set after that; if not, or if you want better image quality than a painted wall, you’ll need to spend some money on a screen.
If you’re just looking for an immersive gaming experience, the above solution is probably the best route to go for putting up an image that takes up a large part of your visual field. If instead you are doing intensive work that requires simultaneous access to a lot of visual info (spreadsheets, PDF’s, CAD drawings, etc.), then what you want is pixels. That’s the direction I went: I have a 30" widescreen monitor from Dell, and I love it. Part of what I love is the resolution, 2560x1600, quite a bit finer than HDTV. I can display a lot more information on that screen - two pages of a Word doc side by side, with the text completely readable. That solution is not particularly cheap, though, somewhere in the neighborhood of $1400.
A slightly cheaper solution for displaying a lot of info would be two 24" widescreen monitors side by side. At 1920x1200 pixels (and $550) each, that’s 12% more total pixels than my 30" monitor, for $300 less. The downside is the visual disconnect between the two monitors at the center of your field of view.
Those huge TVs don’t usually go beyond HD resolution (1920x1080). So if you hook a computer you won’t get 4 times the desktop space, you’ll have exactly the same space, but everything will just look bigger. You could make fonts and icons smaller but then the image quality would suffer.
Don’t neglect the possibility of multiple monitors. 2x 24" or 2x 27" may suit you just fine. Nvidia Geforce cards can cope with 2 monitors; ATI/AMD Radeon cards can cope with up to 6.
BTW 1920x1080 on a 19" monitor is overkill.
Plasma displays give a better (IMHO) TV / video picture than LCDs, but they’re heavy and power-hungry. You should absolutely not use a plasma display as a computer monitor since they still suffer from burn-in.
If you are going to get a TV for a monitor I would recommend a proper 1080p rather than a 1080i. I really doubt interlaced resolution will be around for much longer anyways.
On the monitor front I have noticed it is getting increasingly harder to find monitors above 1080 resolution. I bought a Samsung at 2048x1156 last spring, it was cheap too - just $200. I thought about going multi monitor a couple months later and this model is no longer available; in a quick search online I couldn’t find any monitors over 1080p.
As mentioned above, there isn’t any point in “large” unless you bump the resolution. Otherwise you’ll end up with no more sharpness than sitting closer to a smaller monitor with the same resolution.
So if you decide on a larger monitor, make sure your video subsystem will support the desired resolution.
If you opt for a large 1080p TV, make sure it has a mode where it just displays the signal pixel for pixel. I have a computer plugged into a nice little 32" Panasonic and there’s no way to get it to display the computer video signal unprocessed. It insists on doing its image massaging on all inputs. This means that fine text ends up looking like the image has been resized, which would really suck except that I only use it for video output. Computing all happens on actual monitors.
I have a 42 inch 1080p monitor I have been using for a computer monitor for years. When I’m sitting at a regular computer distance I usually have have multiple windows open. This is good, since it is hooked to a quad core computer where I’m often multitasking. About the only things I do full screen is photo-editing and watching movies. You can get a good 42 inch monitor for less than $500. Frankly I don’t think anything larger is much use for an individual. Even on the 42, I have to move the window down sometimes to avoid getting a crick in my neck.
Exactly. “Affordable” (that’s ~ $1000 - $2000) monitors that actually take advantage of the available screen size to put in lots of pixels are going to be 30" @ 2560 x 1600 (which by the way is a great resolution - you can put 2 readable A4 pages side by side with plenty of space left over on those screens). Any size less than 30" will lose you pixels, and increasing the size generally also will since then you get into “home theater” territory instead of “close-up work”.
So 30" wide screen is the current best size for high-resolution computer monitors and has been for at least 2 years now. If you really want to you can put two of those side by side (portrait or landscape), but I’ve tried it and really, the field of view is just too large if you do that - you end up having to move your head too much to be really useful for most applications. A 30" wide screen + a 24" portrait pivoted screen might even work better.
What’s the cheapest way to get a giant computer monitor? Buy a giant computer, of course! The monitor comes with the system! With your giant computer, you can get some giant keys as well.
That’s not entirely correct. The OP is currently using a 19" monitor at 1920x1080 and could easily run a 24" or even 27" monitor with minimal loss of image quality.
