The New Silicon Graphics 1600SW Flat Panel Monitor
Flat Panel Monitor Wins Prestigious Award
Enhancing Utility and Performance
With its full-color digital display, sleek form factor, 1600x1024
resolution, and ultrafine dot pitch, Silicon Graphics 1600SW provides substantial and important improvements in
image quality for all kinds of visual computing environments,
satisfying the most demanding high-information applications
for content creation, desktop publishing, CAD, and imaging.
This article gives you a quick tour of several key
innovations we've engineered into this new monitor that are
aimed at letting you work with less fatigue, greater
precision, and reduced cost. And in implementing these
technologies - including wide aspect ratio, an optimized
color management system, pure digital interface, and ergonomic
enhancements - our goal is to bring together and improve on
all the best aspects of digital LCDs, giving you advantages
that are impossible on a CRT without compromising image
quality.
Wide Aspect Ratio
Most important and immediately apparent is the wide aspect
ratio of the Silicon Graphics 1600SW monitor. Traditionally,
most CRTs present an aspect ratio of 1.25 to 1, height to
width, at 1280Vx1024H pixels. At 1600Hx1024V pixels and an
aspect ratio of 1.6 to 1, Silicon Graphics 1600SW lets you allocate much more real estate to your
application and gives you a wider view into your
development environment. In fact, the monitor's 17.3-inch
SuperWideTM diagonal format accommodates two full pages of information
side by side, with room left over for control
panels or icons. The wide format has no impact on the way you
program applications; its extra screen real estate simply lets
you see and have access to more information as you work.
Beyond these very evident benefits, we elected a wide
design because it creates a machine interface that more
closely allies with the way the human cerebral cortex "reads"
information: from left to right, right to left, horizontally
instead of vertically. Humans owe this tendency to the fact
that for our ancestors, the ability to quickly scan the
horizontally composed vistas of the African plains often meant
the difference between life and death. This basic survival
skill became hardwired into the human cerebral cortex along
the course of evolution.
Tighter Human/Machine Interface
In our new monitor we acknowledge and cooperate with this
built-in evolutionary artifact by arranging the machine
interface to fit the human, rather than forcing the human to
bend to the machine. So we designed Silicon Graphics 1600SW to
use a horizontal format with an eye toward helping you work as
efficiently as possible and tackle as much information as
possible - and give you today's equivalent of the plains
dweller's survival techniques. Since today your survival is
based more on the quality of your work than your ability to
avoid a charging mastodon, we think your most cunning weapon
is having the best possible interface with your computer. And
using a flat panel LCD we can give you this horizontal wide
aspect ratio advantage without any compromise to image
quality.
By contrast, CRTs can't achieve the same wide aspect ratio
without sacrificing brightness, color management, and
consistency of line and graphical information, particularly in
corner pixels. That's because the scanning beam in a CRT
emanates from a single point and has to shine at a tight angle
to reach across the outermost areas of the screen. This causes
pixel pitch to widen out at the corners, affecting the drawing
of straight lines. With a flat panel, the corner pixel is just
as easy to reach as the middle pixel.
Also tied to aspect ratio is our monitor's inherent
advantage in using a flat surface to eliminate image
distortion. Most CRTs are curved to aid in compression of air
against the CRT bulb, and to attempt the same wide aspect
ratio for this curved surface again creates high distortion of
text, images, lines, and graphics. On the outside looking in, as
you try to position the CRT to find the sweet spot for the
content you're viewing, it's very difficult to avoid tradeoffs
in glare or distortion in another area of the screen, since
there is always some part of the monitor that catches room
reflection.
With a flat surface, once you adjust the viewing angle, the
entire panel is in the sweet spot. To guard additionally
against reflection, we also we also provide an antiglare
coating on the Silicon Graphics 1600SW screen.
Flicker-Free and TFT
Flicker, arising from the CRT technology's inability to keep
subpixels at a constant hue, color, or brightness at any
given moment in time, is the bane of any person who does
computer work for extended periods of time. We know that in
the developer's world, this "extended period" can stretch to a
24-hour stint in front of the monitor at certain phases in the
application development cycle. This is one more reason why we
elected an LCD platform and active matrix liquid crystal
technology for Silicon Graphics 1600SW: it's free from
flicker, both perceived and subliminal.
Unlike the CRT energy beam, which must individually address
the phosphor dots in a large number of subpixels, our active
matrix liquid crystal technology employs a series of shift
registers to update information in a fashion that's more
rational, more efficient, and free of distortion and flicker.
These shift registers load data into rows, one row at a time,
simultaneously addressing all 1600x3 pixels across each
row. Data fills a shift register and then
dumps into the corresponding row of pixels, and the
load-and-dump procedure is then continually repeated to supply
data to the screen. What's significant in this process is that
in all, the LCD has only about 1,000 rows to contend with,
rather than the five million pixels that the CRT primary
beams have to address.
In addition, we use thin film transistor (TFT) technology to
supply constant voltage to the screen, which maintains uniform
brightness. The scanning pulse charges capacitors to a given
voltage that's consistent with the gray level you want the
subpixel to display, and then the TFT gate closes and the pulse
moves on to the next row. Once the addressing scan leaves, the
capacitor continues to supply the pre-selected voltage to the
subpixel. So for the entire time the scanning pulse is not
physically at the pixel, the pixel doesn't know or care,
because it has a constant, uniform, never-ending supply of
voltage all to itself with no degradation in data.
For you, this translates into a constant view, constant hue,
constant saturation, and constant tonal texture -
throughout the complete refresh cycle. The entire area of each
subpixel is supplied with that color, tonal texture, and
saturation, giving you a much more uniform image that
substantially reduces eyestrain and fatigue.
Precise Control over Image and Color
In addition to the wide aspect ratio and constant display,
we've incorporated several other innovations into Silicon Graphics 1600SW to give you the finest image and color control
on the market today. That's particularly valuable because if
you're developing applications that employ precise color or
moving graphics, you need precise control over color and
ultrafast pixel response for artifact-free video replay or
animation.
For example, Silicon Graphics 1600SW has a contrast ratio of
over 300 to 1, five times what's possible on a CRT in ambient light.
We provide 16.7 million simultaneously available colors, far exceeding
what CRTs and other flat panels support. The color saturation that we've chosen
is the highest in the flat panel industry, at 62 percent of the NTSC, and equivalent
to or better than most CRT monitors.
For moving images, we use a compensation film to counteract
the positive birefringence that naturally occurs during the
polarization of liquid crystals, to eliminate blur
and still let you view moving images at 30 frames per second. This is superior to the
In-Plane Switching (IPS) technology used in other flat panel
displays, which restricts movement to 10 frames
per second. In addition, the Silicon Graphics 1600SW display
is also three times brighter than a typical CRT.
The ability to set color temperature to simulate the
application environment is also important when you're
developing applications that require exact color
representation. For a CRT to change a color temperature, it
must condense the gray-scale range of some of its guns. This
results in primary colors that quickly become unstable on
screen - making it nearly impossible to simulate color as it will
appear in the finished graphic on or in the target medium.
Worse yet, the CRT that offers relatively greater accuracy in
setting color temperatures also comes with a relatively
greater price tag.
As an LCD, Silicon Graphics 1600SW translates color temperature into
a constant voltage, using a separate system that doesn't compromise
color representation. This system works by adjusting the white balance
for the color of the back light, without touching the set points of any of
the gray scales for any of the primaries. The benefit to you is an entirely new
dimension of control over the viewing environment, and the ability to understand and
work in the same venue as your client or end-user by setting color temperature at the
appropriate level for the graphic. Of all the flat panel LCDs currently on the market,
only SGI provides user-adjustable white balance for color control.
And for sharpness of image, the 110 dpi resolution of the
Silicon Graphics 1600SW monitor is a much-needed tool if you
develop applications for high-information content display,
such as medical images, satellite, military, or film, which
require extremely finely rendered images, text, and graphics.
For a CRT to pack this much resolution onto the screen, the
image would be unstable or fuzzy, producing more strain and
fatigue for the eyes.
Pure Digital Interface
Another significant contributor to the inherent high resolution
of the Silicon Graphics 1600SW display is its high pixel clock rate - how fast image
data is transferred from the computer to the display. We meet the high transfer and timing
requirements for very high resolution and precise color control by using a pure digital-to-digital
interface between computer and display. By
sidestepping an analog conversion we're able to avoid data
corruption and further reduce eye fatigue through elimination
of flicker.
A Focus on Ergonomics
The small footprint and light weight (16 lb/7.2 kg) of
Silicon Graphics 1600SW lets you conserve space and enjoy more
unfettered computing since the monitor is easy to move around.
It can travel to your office at home, to another room, or even
to another hemisphere since, unlike a CRT, it is unaffected by
shifts in the earth's magnetic field. (We tested it to 35 amps
per foot, which is 70 times beyond what a CRT can handle.) For
smaller journeys, however, the nine-foot cord also helps you
unmoor from your desk, and you can detach the monitor from its
stand and hang it on a swing arm or work with the screen on
your lap.
Dollars and Sense Investment Protection, Cost Effectiveness
You're probably familiar with our singular efforts to bring
the maximum number of pixels to the desktop. In pricing
Silicon Graphics 1600SW well under U.S.$3,000, we're also trying
to bring our product to the maximum number of people. And
there are a couple of other design decisions that protect your
investment and provide excellent value.
The monitor's digital interface is upgradable to future
display resolutions that exceed HDTV (1920x1080). We've
chosen lamps that if used eight hours a day at full brightness,
for example, will go 20,000 hours (seven years) before they
reach half brightness. At 235 candelas per meter squared at the beginning of life, at the end of their half-lives these
lamps will be 50 percent brighter than a CRT is, at 100 or 120 candelas. And at the
end of their lives instead of throwing away the entire unit as you must with a CRT,
all you need to do is bring the monitor to a service center and have the lamps
replaced.
Despite its brightness level the unit is also easy on power,
pulling only 29 watts - one-tenth what's required
for a typical CRT.
And finally, you can swap the monitor with your Macintosh®, PC, or
SGI® O2TM workstation (requires adapter
for the workstation); the unit runs on Windows® 95, Windows 98, Windows
NT®, and Mac® OS computers.
Hardware and Software Support
The Silicon Graphics 1600SW works with the following platforms:
- Macintosh running Mac OS 8, using PCI Revolution IV-FP(tm) card from
Number Nine Visual Technology Corporation; this bundle available in Q1 '99
calendar year
- PC running Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, with an available PCI or
AGP slot and a PCI Revolution IV-FP card from Number Nine Visual Technology
Corporation. The Nine card includes a digital display connector for attaching
the monitor to your PC
- Any Silicon Graphics O2 workstation running IRIX 6.3 with a 6.3 patch
CD or IRIX 6.5.2.
The Silicon Graphics 1600SW flat panel display software kit, which will be
shipped with the flat panel display and adapter card, will include two 6.5.2
overlay CDs and the 6.3 patch CD. The overlay CDs cannot be used to upgrade
from 6.3, only from 6.5 or 6.5.1.
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