That looks pretty awesome, and it makes the iMac seem even more tired which I assume was intended. It is startling to have a story about IBM extolling the virtues of Macbooks for business and Microsoft launching a platform targeting designers, it really is amazing. But setting all of that aside for a moment....
The screen. Clearly that is the thing which makes this announcement. For me, the 3:2 aspect ratio is so more reasonable for computers than 16:9. And having a zillion pixels is wonderful although my CAD package (TurboCAD) still doesn't deal well with the high DPI screen off the Surface Book, I'm sure it would look silly on this machine.
My experience with the Surface Book tells me that the PixelSense technology is really great for drawing. I have both it and the iPad Pro and not too surprising, at twice the cost, in my opinion the Surface Book's drawing experience is better than the iPad's. I base that opinion on precision of the drawing, expressiveness, and the response time.
Touch. Microsoft is really doubling down on the whole touching thing and so far Apple has stayed away from it with its compute platforms. That is both a strength and a weakness. The rest of the ecosystem doesn't always understand what to do, so you get controls that are too small to use your finger on sometimes, and odd sort of multi-monitor experiences where things appear on one screen and then when you resize them they jump to the other and try to adjust for "touchiness".
If the tools people can get their act together, and by that I mean the designer tools (I for one would love to see a schematic capture and board layout system that was touch enabled and pen enabled) then I think it is only good news for Microsoft, if they can't, then Apple will look really smart at not adopting a "gimmick".
Either way these things are hugely fun to use and play with.
"The screen. Clearly that is the thing which makes this announcement. For me, the 3:2 aspect ratio is so more reasonable for computers than 16:9. And having a zillion pixels is wonderful although my CAD package (TurboCAD) still doesn't deal well with the high DPI screen off the Surface Book, I'm sure it would look silly on this machine."
It may interest you to know that there is a reasonably priced 1:1 aspect ratio monitor available for purchase on amazon:
That is pretty cool. Oddly enough something I've been thinking about would be a high dpi "ribbon" screen, something that is perhaps 14 - 16" wide by 3 - 4" tall. To sit just behind my nice mechanical keyboard. That screen would have application specific tool bars with large icons and easy to tweak controls (sliders, buttons, etc). That would allow me to give over my "big" display to the project workspace, whether it was a circuit, MCAD design, or illustration. The "special sauce" being that I could render to it as a screen and it would have multi-touch capable gestures for the controls.
I prototyped some of that with a mimo 10" touchscreen[1] but in my vision touching a control on the 'ribbon' screen doesn't steal the mouse pointer :-). I've been playing lately with some ST Micro 32 bit parts that can drive a display and use BT LE to communicate back to the PC. It may be possible to "download" control panels to the screen and then get the feedback through a BTLE handler rather than trying so somehow hook the event handler of a standard App and have it take control selection events from this screen/non-screen entity.
So if you find a long and narrow high DPI screen, DVI, MPI, or even VGA driven would be ok. And a capacitive touch layer, I'd love to get one of those to play with.
That NEC display is nearly 4 feet long. I am thinking the same width as a full size keyboard so on the order of 15 - 18". 1920 x 480 would be ok for a display that was 18" wide and 4" tall. Although I'd prefer it be 3450 x 768 (192 dpi)
The Spanpixel ones are exactly what I was looking for! Now to try and figure out how to get them, I see that Avnet is a rep for them so perhaps they will be able to help me out.
Sure, but if you can make a prototype and develop a kickstarter that goes way over its funding goal, then you can either negotiate a better price, or other manufacturers will come out of the woodwork to serve you because there is a huge overcapacity glut on LCD glass.
Yes, I know that all alternatives are a lot more expensive. On the other hand, you could buy a 34" 4k screen and tape over the sides to get it to 1:1 for a similar price ;)
(really, I'm only slightly annoyed because I'd love to have a bunch of those on the walls as picture frames, but can't afford it)
1:1 is commonly used in medical imagery and other industrial applications, and for their sales numbers probably not a whole lot else. That's likely why the price is higher. Take a look here and notice the high count of 1:1 displays: http://www.necdisplay.com/category/medical-diagnostic-displa...
I had to make this very choice for my new workstation this summer and I went with 40" 16:9 4K (Dell 4317PQ iirc) because I wanted the vertical space. It's "retina" when sitting about 80cm away which is fine for that size, and I can have 3 apps side-by-side no problem (usually terminals + some IDE in my case). I love this display. I think the way forward is to break the ratio limitations, all of them, by moving towards gigantic dispays.
Monitors were always 16:10 or 5:4 to allow for a task bar.
Then LCD makers didn't want to make separate panels and console gaming as well as later on streaming solidified the 16:9 home entertainment AR as the defacto standard for computer monitors.
The screen. Clearly that is the thing which makes this announcement. For me, the 3:2 aspect ratio is so more reasonable for computers than 16:9. And having a zillion pixels is wonderful although my CAD package (TurboCAD) still doesn't deal well with the high DPI screen off the Surface Book, I'm sure it would look silly on this machine.
My experience with the Surface Book tells me that the PixelSense technology is really great for drawing. I have both it and the iPad Pro and not too surprising, at twice the cost, in my opinion the Surface Book's drawing experience is better than the iPad's. I base that opinion on precision of the drawing, expressiveness, and the response time.
Touch. Microsoft is really doubling down on the whole touching thing and so far Apple has stayed away from it with its compute platforms. That is both a strength and a weakness. The rest of the ecosystem doesn't always understand what to do, so you get controls that are too small to use your finger on sometimes, and odd sort of multi-monitor experiences where things appear on one screen and then when you resize them they jump to the other and try to adjust for "touchiness".
If the tools people can get their act together, and by that I mean the designer tools (I for one would love to see a schematic capture and board layout system that was touch enabled and pen enabled) then I think it is only good news for Microsoft, if they can't, then Apple will look really smart at not adopting a "gimmick".
Either way these things are hugely fun to use and play with.