Apple lets young Tiger roar

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Don't worry. Formac will almost certainly...

... come out with new aluminum-cased versions of their line of Mac-compatible monitors. Their current line have a lucite case that is stylistically compatible with the G4s just as the Apple monitors are, without being knockoffs of the Apple design. I actually find the Formac monitors more stylish than the Apple ones!

That's not all: the Formac monitors are brighter, have a wider viewing angle, better contrast ratio, truer colors (indeed, they were the very first LCD monitors that could be precision color-calibrated, a feat that had previously been reserved only for high-end CRTs), have fewer pixel anomalies per panel, and yet retail for substantially less than the nearest Apple equivalents!

The downside is that, at present, Formac has no equivalent to the 23HD or wide-screen 20-inch monitors, let alone the 30". They do have 17", 19", and 20.1".

http://www.formac.com

For the record, the new Apple 30" monitor is NOT the highest-resolution flat-panel desktop or workstation computer monitor ever. IBM has for some years had the Model T220 (now replaced by the T221, which has the same specs but requires different video cards capable of driving such a huge display: the T220 wanted a special Matrox card, while the T221 wants an NVidia Quadro 4 980 XGL or better [including the Quadro FX 1000, 2000, and 3000, and presumably the new 4000]), and Viewsonic and another company have had equivalents. These babies are roughly the same physical size as the 23HD (22.2" diagonal, 16:10 aspect ratio), but have DOUBLE the resolution in BOTH dimensions, which means QUADRUPLE the overall resolution! The 23HD has 1920x1200 resolution, while the T220/T221 has 3840x2400 (subtantially higher than even the forthcoming 30" Apple monitor)! Think about that for a minute: imagine an Apple Cinema 23HD displaying a full-screen image or display of some sort, and now imagine shrinking that display so that FOUR full-screen images now ALL fit on the screen at the same time (one in each quadrant of the screen), EACH with the SAME number of pixels that the ENTIRE IMAGE had before! Then shrink the screen a bit more while keeping all of the pixels, since these babies are only 22.2" diagonally and the 23HD is 23"!

Or, to put it another way: the dots-per-inch resolution of this panel (204dpi!) exceeds that of fax machines in Fine Resolution, or of the original Fargo Primera dye-sub printer, and approaches that of first-generation laser printers! Unlike all of those technologies except for the dye-sub printer (the Primera had 203dpi), each individual pixel of the monitor can display any of 16,777,216 shades of color, so you hardly ever see individual pixels! The 23HD is only about 100dpi resolution (it's slightly larger physically, remember).

The IBM T221 will set you back about $8400 list, not counting the required NVidia Quadro card.

Posted by: Joel R   Posted on: 06/29/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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