7 ms·

People talk about Retina displays etc ... but back in 2003 (yes, 10 years ago) ViewSonic had even higher resolution display called the "ViewSonic VP2290b" [1]

• TylerE 13y ago
  Those cost like $20k though. If this is available for under $1000, it's a game changer.
  • alberth 13y ago
    It cost approx $8,500 [1] when released. Also keep in mind that it wasn't until extremely recently (last few years) that LCD priced have dropped liked crazy. People back in 2003 were use to paying these kind of prices. It's simply amazing how today, you can buy an highly performance computer ... even laptop, for less than $800. [1] http://gizmodo.com/017019/viewsonic-vp2290b-mega-monitor-lusted-after-reviewed http://gizmodo.com/017019/viewsonic-vp2290b-mega-monitor-lus...
    • TylerE 13y ago
      That's a later model. The original IBM T220 cost $17,999 (In 2000 dollars, $24,300 in 2013 dollars). It wasn't until 2 years later that the price dropped below $10k.
    • gcb0 13y ago
      yeah, it was around the $12k line. but also keep in mind, that cheap LCDs were in the $2k line. So not too much in terms of high end specialized gear. today low ends are $200, and the high ends for $1.2k are uninteresting at best.
    • spitfire 13y ago
      Part of that cost was due to the market though. IIRC it and others like it were targeted at medical imaging and to a limited degree publishing. If you're an oncologist looking at MRI images, $8K is a Starbucks money.
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• bri3d 13y ago
  Technology has come a long way, though - the VP2290b was a thick and heavy behemoth that was extremely difficult to drive using the signaling technology of the time. Plus, even the final revision of the T221 required being driven as either two monitors using one dual-link DVI and one single-link DVI or as four monitors by using four single DVI links. Even then, the internal refresh rate was a slightly annoying 48Hz. The T220/T221 really were ahead of their time but convenience and standard size of the new generation of "retina" displays shows how far we've come.
  • alberth 13y ago
    IMHO, the reason why the ViewSonic/T220 wasn't adopted in wider use isn't because of the reasons you listed above. It was because very few graphic cards could push that many pixels back in 2003.
    • tjoff 13y ago
      If you could afford the monitor the graphic card would hardly be an issue.
    • ANTSANTS 13y ago
      That, and lack of operating system support for high PPI displays. A friend of mine has his PC hooked up to a plasma TV, and it's absolutely astounding how poorly Windows 7's UI element scaling "feature" works, in 2013.
      • Volpe 13y ago
        A plasma TV has really LOW PPI... Like it's 50+ inches with only 1080 pixels down the screen... That's like a factor of 10 worse than retina displays...
        • ANTSANTS 13y ago
          No kidding. The effective PPI (number of dots that make up the display / size of the image being projected onto your retinas) of a large TV viewed at a distance is pretty high, though, so both "retina displays" and large, low-resolution TVs viewed from a typical distance require large fonts etc. to be legible.
• mseebach 13y ago
  There was some ThinkPads (and some Dells, too, I think) with a very high density displays. Don't see too many of those anymore, except MacBooks.
  • mertd 13y ago
    Somewhere in early 2000s, vertical resolutions for all laptops magically got locked to 768 lines and most users neither noticed or cared.
    • jlgreco 13y ago
      I think it was during the second half of the '00 decade actually. I remember 1050 vertical being popular at least until 2007.
      • rev 13y ago
        Correct. Many Thinkpads had 1050 and 1200 until 2007 or so. It went downhill from there.
  • OrsenPike 13y ago
    I had a 15.4" Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop from 2003 with 1920x1200 and it was amazing. When I released it a few years later it was not possible to buy a laptop from Dell with that resolution :(
    • Osiris 13y ago
      I have a D830 with that resolution and I've used it exclusively until just the last few months simply because it was so difficult to find a (cheap) replacement. I now use a 13" Zenbook that has 1600x900.
    • LeonidasXIV 13y ago
      I have a T42p with 1600x1200 display. I am actually afraid to use it in fear it might break so I use a T41 from the same time period with 1024x768 :(
• smackfu 13y ago
  Even though it existed, it only had niche use cases at the time. Mainly viewing high DPI images.
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  • randallu 13y ago
    Ford bought hundreds of them for CAD/CAM work. I had one at SGI to add support for high DPI to IRIX in 2003.
• EvanAnderson 13y ago
  There's a Viewsonic VP2290b on eBay right now: http://www.ebay.com/itm/190846605823 http://www.ebay.com/itm/190846605823
• spartango 13y ago
  Indeed, the medical imaging industry (radiology particularly) has been relying on monitors like these for the last 10+ years: http://www.necdisplay.com/category/medical-diagnostic-displays http://www.necdisplay.com/category/medical-diagnostic-displa... These monitors use IPS panels, run upwards of 5MP, and have better color depth than consumer-grade monitors. Often times they are grayscale (most of these images are not colored). These monitors are extremely expensive (~$20K), but they are FDA approved for diagnostic use. And yes, radiologists do need them. Interestingly, as digital imaging proliferates across other medical disciplines (such as pathology), the costs of these high resolution displays and appropriate GPUs have been cited as a barrier to digitization. It seems that now prices are falling fast enough to make that excuse go away. Radiologists and pathologists seem to love retina iPad displays...
  • jlgreco 13y ago
    > Radiologists and pathologists seem to love retina iPad displays... Does the FDA allow them to be used for diagnosis, or do they have to 'technically' make the diagnosis after looking at one of those monitors you linked (or similar from another company)?
    • spartango 13y ago
      The FDA has actually cleared a couple of iPad apps for diagnostic viewing of radiological images; the ones I'm aware of are Nephosity and MobileMIM, and they can be used for x-ray, CT, PET, and MRI. I believe these are being cleared as Class II devices under the section 510(k) premarket notification process. Briefly, Class II devices include those that may be useful for diagnosis but aren't strictly necessary to sustain human life. The distinction has subtlety, so excuse the simplification. The 510(k) process has you explain that your "device" (hardware or software) fits into some existing category of medical device and is equivalent to those existing devices. It's not a particularly stringent process and generally doesn't require clinical trials. Note that in this case, "device" entails the iPad and app approved as a single item. So for radiology, certain setups have been cleared, yes. --- What's interesting is that on the pathology side, digital systems have not been cleared for primary diagnostic use, unlike in radiology. That means that a pathologist cannot diagnose a cancer based on a digital image of a biopsy alone. Indeed, the FDA has ruled that digital pathology systems are Class III medical devices (necessary to sustain human life) and thus require a premarket approval(PMA) process. Unlike 510(k) approval, PMA requires a clinical trial phase that can take years (and millions of dollars). While this seems arbitrary, there's actually decent logic to it: pathology often provides the last word in the diagnosis of many diseases, from malaria to cancers. The FDA is being very cautious, as compromised pathology work caused by unvalidated technology would directly impact patients.
• kylek 13y ago
  Agreed...I'm a bit disappointed that my 4.7" smartphone screen is 1080p but "that's all" they can squeeze into a full sized, full powered 31.5" display? zzz
• leephillips 13y ago
  The iPad retina screen is 264 dpi. Your face will probably be a bit farther from the 22" screen, but still.
  • comex 13y ago
    To add a better bound, the lowest resolution display Apple has called a Retina Display is the 15" MacBook Pro at 220 dpi. So although the ViewSonic in question was larger than any of the Retina Displays and almost as high resolution as the one with the lowest resolution, and was produced ten years ago, it wasn't actually higher resolution. :)