Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!brl-adm!rutgers!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!hplabs!cae780!leadsv!eps2!jon From: jon@eps2.UUCP (Jon Hue) Newsgroups: comp.graphics Subject: Re: CRT technology? Message-ID: <54@eps2.UUCP> Date: Sun, 18-Jan-87 02:48:15 EST Article-I.D.: eps2.54 Posted: Sun Jan 18 02:48:15 1987 Date-Received: Mon, 19-Jan-87 03:43:31 EST References: <2029@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> Organization: New Depths of Depravity Lines: 65 In article <2029@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>, garry@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Garry Wiegand) writes: > >>[...] How long will it be before > >>we start seeing 300 dpi color CRT's available? > > > >Correct me if I am wrong, but is there any need to go past 100 dots / inch? > > lettering that looks ever-so-slightly lumpy to my eye. Commercial > establishments which do serious work use 1000-dpi-or-better film recorders. > I don't know whether they're perfectly happy with 1000 dpi, but that > sounds like it might be getting warm. Only an order of magnitude away > from where we are! From what I've learned about the printing industry, I believe that continuous tone images are scanned at 12 dots/mm (300dpi) and line art (text) is scanned at 40 dots/mm (1000dpi). The input and output (laser) scanning are done at the same resolution. 300dpi pitch monitors might allow some type of soft proofing, but there are serious color problems that would need to be solved. As it is, no one using prepress equipment (Scitex, Hell, Crosfield) trusts the monitor, they always make a proof (Cromalin) and say things like "boost the cyan 5%". To give you some idea of what film is capable of (I use 35mm as an example, you can put 8 x 10 film backs on all these film recorders) I recall 35mm film falls apart somewhere between 2000 and 3000 pixels horizontally. As far as the high-end film recorders go (Celco, Dunn), they are something like 8K x 8K addressable, but with the pitch and beam and whatnot, there are something like around 5K distinct points. Dunn goes out of his way to explain this and be honest, and no one understands him ("But their brochure says 8K x 8K and his says 5K, so the other one must be better"). > magnetic fields I have no idea... are there any color hardware engineers > in the crowd ? What are the real limits and state of the art? I'm not one, but my office is right next to someone who is. I would say that with current off-the-shelf parts the state of the art frame buffer would be 1600 x 1280 x 24 bits. We figured that if you built a 1280 x 1024 x 24 bit frame buffer, you needed LUTs with 7ns access times. Fortunately, you can buy ECL static RAMs with 3ns access times. You can also get three TRW 8-bit 250MHz ECL video DACs on one chip. The machine I fool around with at work (a couple years old) has a video section capable of running at 100MHz, though there are only have 656 x 485 x 24 bits on the screen (NTSC). BTW, if you want to see a nice color display (not state of the art, but still nice), try to get a tour of a color separation house. The Scitex Response 350 is 1024 x 768 x 24 bits. It's pretty boring if the artist is touching up a scratch in a negative, but if they are doing some actual design, it is interesting to watch (though design is a bit expensive on these machines, at ~$700/hr). I saw something interesting in a magazine. It was a set of three boards that take up two slots in an AT (one is on standoffs). It has a 68020, a 68881, a custom VLSI graphics processor, a 640 x 485 x 24 bit frame buffer (NTSC), and a bunch of DRAM, probably 4MB. It runs some form of Sys V and has virtual memory. Anyone know anything about this board set? If it isn't too expensive, it sounds like a very nice low-priced platform. I imagine that we'll see some high-resolution (1600 x 1280, 1280 x 1024) full color (24 bits) systems for electronic prepress in the near future. "If we did it like everyone else, Jonathan Hue what would distinguish us from Via Visuals Inc. every other company in Silicon Valley?" sun!sunncal\ >!leadsv!eps2!jon "A profit?" amdcad!cae780/