i decided im going to save for an ibm t221

I own one of these, having picked it up in 2003 for a project I was doing at the time. To the best of my knowledge, this monitor had the most pixels you could get on a single screen for any price. To the best of my knowledge, this is still true even today (late 2011). This is its biggest strength and, oddly, also its biggest weakness.

3840x2400. That's a LOT of pixels. 22.2" display. That's not a lot of area. So what you're getting here is a whole lot of pixels, crammed into an ordinary-sized monitor. If you have perfect eyes, you can fit a whole lot of data on the screen, and it will be beautifully sharp. You can make your browser window really tall and see way more of a page than ever before. You can make your browser window really wide and all the paragraphs will be one line long. You can fit six or eight pages of a document on the screen all at once. And you can fit a whole lot of windows on the screen, with barely any overlap. Unfortunately, this is a really uncomfortable way to read things. Everything is really small. So small, you probably can't read it without leaning really close and squinting.

In a nutshell, you CAN fit a lot of data on the screen at one time... but you don't want to.

As it happens, that's not what the monitor was designed for.

What it was designed for was to display images in beautifully high resolution. And it does this very very well. When you're displaying images, you mostly don't care to see individual pixels. Indeed, you specifically DON'T want to see individual pixels. Normal monitors show you (more-or-less) 100 pixels per inch. This doubles that, and you get (again, more-or-less) 200 pixels per inch. It's not the same as the 600 dpi you get out of a modern color printer, or even the 300 dpi you'd get out of an older color printer, but it's close enough for almost all purposes.

Of course, you have to ask yourself... Under what circumstances do you need that kind of clarity from your images? Chances are, if you're looking at pictures you've snapped on your digital camera, the camera shake inherent in not using a tripod introduces enough blurriness that you might as well be using a normal (and much cheaper) 100 ppi monitor. There's no practical difference. Of course, it's "nice" to know that you can display the full resolution that comes out of your camera without having it "reduced" to fit your screen, but realistically, unless you're a professional photographer with a tripod and excellent lighting, you'll probably never notice a difference.

So. From a purely practical standpoint, my experience is this: It's a really super-cool monitor demonstrating amazing technology. You've never seen anything like it. Plug this baby in and right away, you'll say "Wow!" And.... a week later you probably will have stopped using it. Because, you know... your eyes just aren't that good. And if you're going to resize everything back to a normal size, you've lost the whole point of the monitor.

And a few other niggling points: It has a fan. Yes, a monitor with a fan. Not a horribly loud fan, but still a fan. Also, it's heavy. Not as heavy as the old 19" CRTs that some of you may still remember, but still quite heavy for an LCD. If you want to mount it on a monitor arm (which I did), you'll need a very sturdy/expensive one. And finally, it can be a real pain to make it work at peak capacity. Yes, you can plug in a single DVI cable to a decent video card, and drive it at full resolution, 3840x2400. But it will be a really low refresh rate. Something like 12 (yes, 12) hertz. It's usable for text, but don't try videos, and forget about video games. To drive it higher (I believe the max is 48Hz, if you do everything perfectly right), you need to hook up two dual-link DVI-D cables and somehow convince your video card(s) to treat them as a single display. Many video cards will do this these days, but they can take some convincing and/or special drivers. I even got it to work on Linux, but again, it took special software. 48Hz might be OK for video, though I doubt it -- I'd expect some odd beating effects. Besides, what video would be any kind of useful (non-postage-stamp) resolution? I'm not really a gamer, so I don't know, but "maybe" you'd be willing to play games at this frame rate. But why bother? They'd probably look better on a 40-inch 1920x1024 hdtv anyway.

In a nutshell: If you have a very special purpose for which no other monitor will do, this might fit the bill for you. Don't plan on using it for your primary monitor, though, even if you do have a perfect use for it. It would drive you batty. Everything is just too small.

But it sure is cool.

lucasarts wrote:fuck hd televisions

ibm t-mothefucking-221