[WEB4LIB] Re: Large screen monitors for public computers

[Lee Jaffe]

I had a very informative experience about six months back which taught
me a lot about display technology.  We'd been complaining to Apple about
the poor resolution on a batch of iMacs we'd received.  Now Apple is
very proud of the iMac display, and perhaps a little defensive.  Our
complaints went straight to the head of their display engineering dept.,
who sent out one of their engineering consultants to look over our
problems.  It happens that the guy they sent was the former head of
the division, now retired, but working as a consultant to Apple.

The tech was very affable and spent a long time demonstrating and
explaining the features of different displays.  He had a special scope
which allows him to see and measure individual pixels in relation to
each other.  To give you an idea, each pixel looked about the size of a
dime when viewed through this scope.  We had several other displays
on our bench when he was here -- including a Dell Trinitron and a 19"
Viewsonic -- and he spent time examing and comparing these to the
iMac and talking to us about the advantages and features of each.

Interestingly, the Trinitron display doesn't show as pixels, but as
vertical lines.  The Trinitron system uses a system of fine wires to
distinguish the image elements, instead of the dots most other displays
use.  The tech explained that this gives a sharper appearing image,
at least initially.  Over time, however, the wires warp and move and
the image quality decays over the life of the monitor.

The real surprise of the session was how impressed the tech was with
the 19" Viewsonic.  He kept going back to it with his scope, saying, "I
can't believe how good this looks!"  We'd already bought quite a few
Viewsonic monitors in our Library and folks like them a lot.  It was
nice to have technical corroboration to our untechnical preference.

I bring this up because I've always wondered whether Sony lives
up to its reputation.  It seemed to me that there was some kind of
halo effect that lead people to assume that the little extra, sometimes
a lot extra, was somehow justified.  I'm not saying that the Sony
displays aren't good but they may not be that much better than other
models and may not be worth the extra expense.

-- Lee Jaffe, UC Santa Cruz

BTW, the tech also determined that the iMac displays we were
complaining about did not meet Apple's specs, and were in fact faulty.