In Praise of Hardware
I did love my old Mistubishi Diamond Pro CRT monitor. There's something about bouncing electrons about in an infinitely variable way (I know that's probably not what is happening) at any resolution you like, when you're scraping your laser mouse around, a pixel at a time, to fill a corner in a drop shadow on an E4 widget for a presentation. I did like the colours of that monitor. I did like the fluid, ghost-free, crisp redraw you got when you ejected from a Eurofighter in the Battlefield 2 expansion pack. I did like the 4 port USB hub in the side of it.
It was, however, enormous, of course. I mean, I have a huge desk in my office, but that monitor had a footprint like a Brontosaurus. So when I had the chance to swap it out for an LCD, I was keen, but kind of wary. But I needn't have worried. The LCD on offer in this case was a Sun 24.1 inch flat panel monitor. That's a 1920x1200, 2.3 million pixels resolution, 16ms (12ms gray-gray) response time, HD/HDTV-ready, +/- 89 degrees viewing angle, 0.27mm pixel pitch, ultra-fast, motion-enhanced, 24.1 inch flat panel monitor.
I couldn't get the Mitsubishi off the desk quick enough (save for a couple of near-hernias) and get the new monitor up and running. I thought I might have a whole bunch of calibration to do and have inf files all over the place that I was supposed to do something with, but no. I just plugged this thing in, hooked up the graphics card and that was it. Perfectly clear, bright, and colour-rich screen, which, if I got really close to, like I end up when I'm photo-editing, I couldn't even see the edges of.
Its been on my desk for a couple of months now and not a flicker or a pixel out of place. I've had to rearrange all my desktop environments, of course, with so much space on offer. What that means is that I can have a Go Live workspace on one side of the screen and Firefox on the other. They don't even overlap. I can also pretty much view 1600x1200 images at 100% in Photoshop without any scrolling around working out where I've overdone it with the levels on a huge picture of someone's eye.
Its also rather good at running, say, Half Life 2 at 1920x1200 with everything on, but that's not the kind of thing I might do while I'm supposed to be putting together a presentation on customer touchpoint journeys for a meeting on Thursday.
Tunes: Datarock: Laurie
