By Richard Shim, ZDNet News

Big Blue claims its high-definition flat-panel display reads like the printed page. But it won't be available to consumers for five more years.

IBM Corp. on Friday announced that it has begun shipping a high-definition flat-panel display offering paper-quality resolution -- a decade ahead of schedule.

The new display offers an image quality that is twice as good as is currently available on LCDs, but it won't be available in retail stores for another five years, according to IBM officials.

Industry analyst Ross Young from DisplaySearch had predicted that mass production of such displays was more than 10 years away, but IBM drastically undercut that estimate.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is the first customer to receive the new 22-inch panels, will ship more displays in 2001. Because the screens are not available for the general public, they do not have product names.

Priority for high-end customers

Kai Schleupen, manager of the display, design, and electronics team for IBM's Watson Research center, said the new displays will initially go to high-end companies who need the technology first -- in the medical, financial, and government markets.

The new displays have a 3,840-by-2,400 resolution, which translates to 204 pixels per square inch, or 9 million pixels overall. LCD panels on the market today have in the range of 88 to 110 pixels per square inch.

The new displays have an aspect ratio of 16 to 10, which will allow users to view two full-sized pages side-by-side on a screen.

Schleupen called the new displays a step closer to the paperless office. He also said it is intended to be used as a desktop monitor and to go into some notebooks.

New horizons

But Young also sees other, more exciting horizons for the new display technology.

The 22-inch displays will be a niche product for high-resolution applications," said Young. "IBM has shown they can do it at 22-inch, but the challenge is to do it with smaller sizes."

Young cited e-books as a great opportunity for these higher-resolution displays, but sees power management as a major obstacle.

"Typically, higher resolution means higher power consumption," said Young. "Once they figure out better power management, e-books would be a great fit."

IBM Ships World's Highest-Resolution Computer Display

Reprinted from IBM Research

Yorktown Heights, N.Y., November 10, 2000 -- IBM is shipping the world's clearest computer display -- 12-times sharper than current displays -- 10 years sooner than industry experts said it was possible.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is the first customer to use this breakthrough display. IBM plans to ship the displays to other customers in 2001 and license the patented technologies to other manufacturers.

With 200 pixels per inch and more than 9 million pixels in total on its 22-inch screen, the new display is as clear as an original photograph and 4.5-times sharper than top-of-the-line high-definition television screens.

Applications for this technology are wide-ranging, encompassing any field that requires extremely high resolution images -- telemedicine, weather forecasting, publishing and graphic design, product development, satellite mapping and more.

This technology could eventually make its way into displays for laptops, desktops, handhelds and other computing devices, making the viewing of video and digital photos a completely new experience.

"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," said Ross Young, President of Display Search, a leading display market research firm 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."

The Ultimate Display for the Ultimate Supercomputer

The Livermore Lab will use the displays to study the operation and aging of nuclear weapons using 3-D model simulations that are crunched by the world's fastest supercomputer -- the ASCI White machine IBM shipped to the Lab in July.

The resolution on this screen is so precise it can be used instead of wall-sized theater screens, allowing expert analysts to operate independently at their desktops. Lawrence Livermore is expected to receive about 10 more of these high-resolution displays by mid-2001 to further this research.

"The success of the IBM ASCI White supercomputer to simulate the physics of nuclear weapons has presented another massive challenge for our Lab: finding a practical way to interpret and understand the enormous amounts of data generated by the supercomputers and the advanced computer codes they employ," said Dr. David M. Cooper, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory CIO and Associate Director for Scientific Computing. "To study this data properly, we need to view and understand these 3-D visual models. The resolution offered by the IBM displays makes that possible on the desktop."

Wide-Ranging Applications

Users who need to view large volumes of complex data will benefit from the high-resolution and high-content displays, significantly reducing eye strain and the need for printing hard copies.
The new IBM displays can help revolutionize:

• Medicine -- speeding treatment by replacing conventional film X-rays. Physicians will be able to view digitally photographed X-rays immediately on the display. The X-ray images could also be sent online to specialists around the world for instant feedback and counsel.

• Automotive -- improving safety and saving millions of dollars by automating design. Crisp digital images can replace hundreds of hand-built design models for all the different parts of the car, allowing for instant changes and speedier development.

• Weather Forecasting -- improving early warning forecasting. Large printed satellite maps and photographs can be replaced with photo-quality digital images, allowing meteorologists to quickly interpret weather patterns and instantly share them with colleagues around the world.

• Design -- increasing productivity. Designers ranging from publishing, fashion, furniture, home building and beyond can save time and reduce eye strain through high-resolution displays, while also reducing the need for printing.

IBM has been working on this new display technology in its research labs in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and Yamato, Japan, since 1995. The new active matrix liquid crystal display is based on research that allowed the IBM team to use aluminum 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. Aluminum and copper are better conductors and make low-cost, high-resolution possible.

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