Wide Screen, Very Clear, Quite Expensive
Written: Nov 20 '99 (Updated Dec 01 '99)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Big viewing area; clean and steady image; bright colors
Cons: Expensive; requires special graphics card so can't easily be moved to other computer
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| jakob's Full Review: SGI / Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics 1600SW + P... |
Silicon Graphics' 1600SW is a very high quality flat panel display in terms of brightness and image quality. The image is very crisp, the colors are clean, and the viewing angle is more than adequate to have other people look at the screen with you.
The screen has a different aspect ratio than most PC monitors: it is 1600 pixels wide but only 1024 pixels tall. This gives it a distinct wide-screen appearance which looks very cool and has two usability benefits: (1) The Windows taskbar becomes more usable when there is room for buttons for more open windows. (2) It is possible to have two Web pages open simultaneously and view them in full-sized windows (unless the designer has been overly aggressive and assumed windows that are more than 800 pixels wide - luckily, this is rare).
At the same time, I think that 1024 pixels is too short for a high-end monitor: so many Web pages are scrolling these days that it is often impossible to see all the main features when you cannot make the window any taller than 1000 pixels (remember that some pixels are eaten by the task bar). As computers get used more and more for reading and for accessing large amounts of information, taller displays will become preferable.
My display came with two manufacturing errors: one pixel that is always white and one pixel where the blue color doesn't turn off. One of my friends who is a director of a high-end Web design shop in London bought one of these displays for his Mac (it works with both platforms, though you have to specify which one when buying the display in order to get the correct video card - and of course they sock it to the poor Mac owners and change them an extra $100). The unit he originally received had *five* broken pixels. So he sent it back, but his second unit also had some broken pixels and this time SGI would not take it back, claiming that up to 3 dead pixels had to be assumed on flat panel displays these days.
I am not sure that I agree that *any* broken pixels are acceptable at the price charged for this display. On the other hand, I must say that the 1.5 broken pixels on my display (out of 1.6 million pixels on the screen) do not bother me most of the time. I only notice the broken pixels during the boot-up process and when I encounter a "cool" design with a black background. Most of the time, I view Web pages with white backgrounds (after all, users spend most of their time on usable sites and not on cool sites) or I work with word processor documents. And neither the white pixel nor the blue pixel are noticeable under these circumstances.
Before I could use the flat-panel display I had to open up my 16-months old PC to install a new graphics card. Even though I am not a hardware guy by any means, this was pretty easy, but of course it's a pain to have to do this. The need for a special card also means that there is no simple way to move the display to other computers if needed. And I have to carefully store the old graphics card in case I ever need to use my old monitor again (or more likely: give away my old PC and get a giga-hertz model next year and transfer the expensive flat-panel display to the new machine).
The special graphics card that is necessary to run the display does not allow the use of a second monitor, though dual displays are supposedly supported by Windows'98. I don't know what happens if you install the graphics card on a Mac which has traditionally been better at supporting multiple monitors.
The software (drivers to run the display) is very easy to install (plug-and-play worked in this case), but somewhat difficult to operate and adjust. The display is extremely bright by default, so I had to reduce the brightness setting substantially to be able to get a pleasant viewing situation. I also had to adjust the gamma correction, but doing so is quite difficult. And if you cancel your gamma correction, then the software also resets the brightness back to the blinding level...
The flat-panel display has three benefits:
a) Bigger viewing area than on my previous monitor (1600 pixels wide instead of only 1200 on my old monitor)
b) Much smaller than the monster CRT I used to have. It will be easier to fit into many office and home environments where a traditional 21-inch monitor would be too big.
c) Steady and sturdy image without the flicker you get from CRTs and without the fuzzyness you also usually get since a CRT is never perfectly aligned on all colors on all pixels.
It could have a fourth benefit as well: Better anti-aliased fonts (that is, faster reading speed) using Microsoft's new ClearType technology. But they haven't released the software - only bragged about it at Comdex.
The obvious downside is to pay $2,500 for a monitor. But you look at the thing all day, so it's probably the most important element in your work environment. I view a good but expensive monitor as a good investment.
IBM has an even better monitor coming out with about 4,000x2,000 pixels, but it reportedly will cost about $7,000, and I am not sure I am willing to pay that much for a monitor, even though it would probably cost-justify itself due to the increased productivity from being able to see more info.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jakob
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Member: Jakob Nielsen
Location: Mountain View, CA
Reviews written: 20
Trusted by: 99 members
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