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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 1600SW Flat Panel Monitor

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 Image

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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Copyright © 1999, Silicon Graphics, Inc.