Why can’t I set my monitor into a higher resolution?
You may wonder, why can’t you setup your display settings into a higher resolution? Primarily, I could only think of two scenarios, but of course, there might be other possible situations. First is, maybe your monitor can only support upto that resolution. Even if you have the latest and most powerful video card engine, your monitor is still limited to a maximum resolution.
Another reason maybe is your video card. It may only be able to support low resolution, it may not be functioning properly, or you haven’t installed the driver for your video adapter just yet. For the first two reasons, the only thing to do is buy a more powerful video card engine. For the third reason, even if you do have the best video card, not installing its driver won’t make it work properly. Especially for newly installed systems, you would be limited adjusting your screen resolution to a certain range, but after installing the drivers, there would be a wider range of available resolutions.
Samsung 906BW
One of the new LCD monitors from Samsung that meets the standards of Microsoft Windows Vista is the Samsung 906BW. Have a more enjoying experience in your computer with this Flat Panel LCD TFT (Active Matrix) which has a maximum resolution of 1440 x 900. To have a more comfortable experience, the Samsung 906BW is designed to have a viewing angle of 160 degress vertically and horizontally so you won’t have to be exactly in front of your LCD to have a clear view.
It has an aspect ratio of 16:10 giving you more space to work on especially when you’re used to multi-tasking where multiple windows are open at the same time. It has a brightness of 300cd/m2 and color depth of 24-bit(16.7million colors) giving you cool quality pictures. Other features include VESA External Mounting. It runs with 42 Watts of power.
Laptop Users Prefer Matte to Glossy
Does it matter whether your laptop screen is the traditional matte finish or the newer glossy-type finish? Laptop manufacturers and even makers of desktop LCD screens have long been marketing their new glossy, anti-reflective screens as preferable. True enough, these give off brighter, crisper images with higher contrast. However, they have a tendency to give off more glare. And they’re pricier than traditional matte LCD screens.
Manufacturers must be in for a surprise when Lenovo released results from its recent user survey, which found out that majority of laptop users prefer matte, anti-glare screens instead of the glossy ones!
Ars Technica has a good analysis of why a lot still prefer matte to glossy.
So if people dislike glossy screens so much, how come you can see entire rows of laptops in Best Buy equipped with them? There are some advantages to having a glossy screen: in particular, outdoor visibility is greatly increased. However, most of us don’t work on our laptops outdoors, but many people do use them in a work situation, where overhead lighting causes massive glare on glossy screens. Glossy screens also have richer, more vibrant colors, which may explain their prevalence on the display shelf. Newer coating technologies are able to reduce glare somewhat while maintaining bright colors and a glossy sheen.
Lenovo’s poll may not reflect the true preference of the buying public in general, as online polls tend to be self-selecting, and ThinkPad customers are more likely to use their laptops in work environments. However, the results are still dramatic. While glossy screens may be the current fad, manufacturers would be better served by offering their customers a matte option for all models.
Glossy screens are meant for multimedia viewing, and are better for the outdoors. However, considering that most laptop users–particularly Lenovo’s target clientele–are in the business sector, they would most likely prefer matte screens, which are not prone to glare (office lamps and lights are a particularly dominant source of glare).
Still, if you are planning to buy a laptop or an LCD monitor soon, don’t just follow the market hype. Do buy according to what you need. If you will be using your monitor for multimedia purposes most of the time, such as watching movies and editing pictures, then by all means get a glossy LCD monitor (or a laptop with a glossy screen). If you are going to use it predminantly for document editing, web browsing and the like, then a matte finish would be more ideal.
Refer to our previous article comparing matte and glossy screens (which come with different marketing names, depending on brand, such as ClearView, BrightView, etc.)
Dell E207WFP 20-inch LCD for a Tight Budget
Dell recently announced a new 20 inch LCD, and even tighter wallets should be able to afford to get some serious screen real estate on their desk now. The new E207WFP sports a 1,680 x 1,050 widescreen resolution, 20.1-inch viewing area and a DVI port with HDCP.
Many people expect to pay $400 and above minimum for this size of a monitor, but Dell has taken the market again, by pricing it at only $289.
The E207WFP should be available “immediately” worldwide, and definetly worth being on your 20 inch monitor short list.
Sony Stopping Monitor Advertising
If you have ever thought that Sony monitors are too expensive, you might have been right, but Sony has decided to pull the plug on marketing their monitors as the end of this year as they just don’t make Sony enough money. Some people are already speculating that this is in preparation for losing massive amounts of money in the Sony PlayStation 3 sales coming soon.
If you love Sony monitors, have no fear, as for now, they will still be available at specialized dealers. It does seem odd for Sony to stop hyping their monitors when they were the 10th largest manufacturer just last year.
Magic Message Mirrors
Wicked stepmothers/queens/other-fairy-tale-characters take heed. Your chance of owning your own real-life magic mirror has finally come. The Magic Message Mirror is actually a mirror that doubles as an alert device, which, when connected to an automated home, would give the user visual and audible indications of things that are happening within the houshold, such as garage the door opening, or your bath already being set at the right temperature, and such other mundane stuff.
So don’t expect to see Snow White or some other Disney princess when you peek into the mirror! Speaking of cartoons, the concept had been developed for Themaddicts, Inc. by animatronics guru Craig Barrof, who was also behind Universal Studios’ King Kong attraction and who gave life to the T-Rex for the Jurassic Park films.
The mirror doesn’t come cheap though, as it would cost $ 22,000 when released to the market, and this is only for the model with 10 pre-set messages. You would have to pay $600 per additional message, if you choose among the 23 standard, and about $1,200 if you need to have messages custom-made.
This is just one of the many alternative forms of computer monitors we’ll be exploring soon.
The Most Expensive Graphics Card
I never knew graphics cards could be so expensive. This is for the highest of high-end applications. The Nvidia Quadro Plex 1000 graphics units are not really for gaming, mind you, but more for workstation uses.
You could buy a pretty decent sports car for that kind of money. Or, according to Nvidia, you can have 12 mega pixel hi-def video, and a card (actually it’s more like a series of cards) that will run every PC game due for release in the next century.
“According to Nvidia, a node can achieve up to 64x full scene anti-aliasing (FSAA), deliver a performance of up to 148 megapixels on 16 synchronized digital-output channels and eight HD SDI channels. The firm says that the fill rate reaches 80 billion pixels/s while the geometry performance is rated at seven billion vertices/s.”
The cheapest model starts at $17,500, and it just goes up from there! When they’re released in September, we’ll probably give a few away. Or, maybe we’ll buy a house instead!
I hear you actually need the processing power of 20 of today’s latest CPUs to get the most out of the Quadro Plex. Otherwise, your CPU would actually be the bottleneck to great performance.
Sports car? I don’t think so. But that’s still pretty darn expensive.
Connect Monitors via USB
Newnham Research has developed a technology that lets monitors work over standard USB connections.
The technology originated from the thought that users aren’t buying two or three monitors at once, but adding on, slowly, over time, Ledzion said. Users might start out with a single-headed graphics card, but be forced to upgrade to a multimonitor card if they wanted to add another display, an expensive process, he said. The process becomes more difficult with a laptop, although products like the Matrox DualHead2Go also can split a conventional VGA/DVI signal to two separate displays.
The system, called NIVO, which creates a “virtual graphics card” is great for users who want their displays to span several monitors, but do not want to add additional graphics cards to their systems, or use multi-out graphics cards. The performance is not as good as having a dedicated video card, since USB can only handle so much bandwidth and the CPU would have to take on added load. But this is usable for office applications, where mostly static outputs (i.e. documents, spreadsheets, web browsing) are required.
Kensington has reportedly signed on to use the technology for its universal laptop docking station line.
Graphics Card Shootout by Extremetech
Extreme Tech recently featured a graphics card shootout, where the reviewers pitted 17 current models against each other. The results were classified according to price range, from entry-level $80 and ridiculously expensive (for a video card) $600.
Once or twice a year, we try to solve this dilemma with a big video card roundup. This time, we took 17 currently available cards representing the range of price points from $80 up to $600. We’ll show you benchmarks with 3DMark06 and a sample of games that are representative of the graphics-card-stressors of the day. We’ll show you which models deliver high fames-per-second per dollar, and just plain high frames-per-second. Ultimately, we hope to arm you with the information you need to figure out exactly which graphics card is right for you.
The verdict:
On the lower end, the MSI RX1300 Pro was great in the sub-$100 range. For the sub-$200 mark, the reviewers favored the new Nvidia GeForce 7600-powered series, such as eVGA’s passively cooled 7600 GS and the slightly overclocked 7600 GT. For the sub-$350 range, the reviewers went for the highly overclocked XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX, the GeForce 7900 GT XXX (also from XFX) and the ATI Radeon X1800 GTO.
On the higher end, the review found the ATI Radeon X1900 XT series to be among the best, for the $350 and up price range.
Twin-tuner TV card from Nvidia
The Register previews the latest dual TV card from graphics chipmaker Nvidia. The new dual TV card shall allow for two simultaneous recording or TV viewing sessions at any given time. Nvidia claims that this latest offering bests all other dual TV cards in terms of quality. The card even features a compression system for use with a PVR (personal video recording) software.
The new card will feature S-video, composite video, coaxial and other methods of input and output. The package even contains an FM antenna, for picking up analogue FM broadcasts!
The DualTV card is pitched at Windows XP Media Center Edition systems and users who want to be able to watch one programme while recording another. The board incorporates Nvidia’s PureVideo technology the better, the company claimed, to separate out the colour and brightness information bonded in the broadcast signal and to remove noise from the picture. There’s also an integrated amplifier to boost weak input signals.
Categories
- Acer
- AOC
- Apple
- Articles
- Asus
- ATI
- BenQ
- Dell
- Gateway
- Graphics cards
- HP
- IBM
- iiyama
- LG
- NEC
- News
- Nvidia
- Other
- Projectors
- Samsung
- Sharp
- Sony
- Tips
- Toshiba
- ViewSonic
- Westinghouse
Recent Posts
Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_recent_posts() in /home/bmonitor/public_html/wp-content/themes/bloggywide/sidebar.php on line 11