The world`s highest resolution display - IBM`s Roentgen - has started shipping 10 years sooner than expected. The 22-inch 200ppi will be used for applications including telemedicine, weather forecasting and satellite mapping.
Named after the inventor of the x-ray, the liquid crystal display monitor will offer more than nine million pixels in total. Each pixel is small enough that letters have laser printer sharpness. The design of this display allows a user to see a full page of information at one time with quality equivalent to a sheet of paper.
This technology could eventually make its way into displays for laptops, desktops, handhelds and other computing devices, says IBM.
The US Department of Energy`s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is the first customer to use this display, and IBM plans to ship the displays to other customers in 2001 and license the patented technologies to other manufacturers.
"When IBM showed a prototype of this technology in 1998, many in the industry predicted this display wouldn`t be ready for mass production until at least 2010," says Ross Young, president of Display Search, a display market research firm based in Austin, Texas.
"The technology can change the way computers are used in a wide range of areas where extremely high-resolution images are required, and I am impressed that IBM is able to produce them today."
IBM has been working on this new display technology in its research labs in the US and Japan, since 1995. The new active matrix liquid crystal display is based on research that allowed the IBM team to use aluminium instead of molybdenum and tungsten, metals traditionally used in displays.
IBM has also demonstrated the use of copper in experimental displays and plans to use copper in future display technologies. Aluminium and copper are better conductors and make low-cost, high-resolution possible.
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