Originally posted October 12, 2005 9:23am


Some of you have probably read my earlier story on the CIE1931 and Monitor Evaluation which was about this monitor. We got this in a week or two ago thanks to a contact my boss made at SigGraph 2005. It’s an engineering prototype, so it’s a bit rough around the edges. I don’t have a picture, but it’s almost identical in appearance to the LCD2180UX, with one important difference.

Most LCD’s use Fluorescent backlighting, meaning there are small fluorescent bulbs to light the display. You can find more about this on a great HowStuffWorks.com article on LCD Backlight vs. Reflective Technology. Basically, liquid crystals generate no light of their own, only allow or prevent light from passing through, so an external source is required. Calculators & small electronics use mirrors to just reflect light back at you, while monitors and camcorder displays use backlights to project the image at you. Fluorescent has problems, tho, in that the light from a fluorescent bulb doesn’t encompass the entire visible light spectrum, as would be required for full “true color” resolution. I’m sure you learned in school that if you combine all the colors of light, you get white. The same works in reverse, if you shine a white light through a set of filters you can construct any individual color. In the case of a LCD monitor, the filters are the liquid crystals. Unfortunately, we didn’t start with pure white light, so some colors just don’t come out quite right. That why the CIE 1391 Chromatograph comes out with certain areas incorrect, those colors simply can’t be seen.

This is what makes the LCD2180QX so special, and unfortunately so expensive. It uses new white LED technology for the backlight. That gives you a much closer to true-white light that’s capable of emitting those few colors that the fluorescents can’t hit. The result: The colors are truer, brighter, and more crisp than any LCD on the market today. It’s hard to believe until you see it in action, right next to a classic LCD monitor. Even properly calibrated and such, the difference is plainly visible in comparison.

This particular model also sports a whopping 2048×1536 resolution, which takes a little getting used to. Using it requires you use Dual-link DVI (Requires support in the Video Card, and a proper Cable) or an analog VGA connector. We didn’t have a dual-link cable handy, so I’m using the VGA cable right now. The image is unfortunatley a bit fuzzy, but I’m attributing that to signal loss in the cable. I’m hoping we can get a dual-link cable soon and I can try that as well, If we do, I’ll bump this article with information.

The downsides of this monitor: Price.. We were told that the “lower grade” of this monitor, only capable of 1600×1200, was $6,500. So, that means I won’t have one at home anytime soon, and I probably won’t have one at work anytime soon either.


Update Dec 19, 2005: Here’s a picture of the monitor sitting on my desk at work. It’s running Windows XP64 (2-line taskbar), and I’ve got ACDSee 8 up fullscreen. Maybe I can get a desktop image tomorrow.

Update Feb 7, 2006: Finally got the Dual-Link DVI Cable we had been waiting for. Read the story in Part 2.

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