Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsfcgl!seibel
From: seibel@cgl.ucsf.edu (George Seibel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Where's the REVOLUTION
Message-ID: <11628@cgl.ucsf.EDU>
Date: 28 May 89 07:21:03 GMT
References: <89147.153425MDM107@PSUVM> <3804@mit-amt>
Sender: daemon@cgl.ucsf.edu
Reply-To: seibel@hegel.mmwb.ucsf.edu (George Seibel)
Distribution: na
Organization: Computer Graphics Lab, UCSF
Lines: 26

In article <3804@mit-amt> lacsap@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Pascal Chesnais) writes:
>In article <89147.153425MDM107@PSUVM> MDM107@PSUVM.BITNET (Michael Mellinger)
>wants in the next NeXT:
>>        graphics coprocessor
>>          16 million colors simultaneously.  Color printers
>
>I can't resist! So who has a display that can show 16 million colors
>simultaneously? I mean here at the lab we have a 2048 by 2048 display
>and certainly I would not want to look at 4 different million colors
>at once! Much too confusing! The highest resolution color display I

16 million simultaneously displayable colors means it's a 24 bitplane
device.  These are pretty common these days.  Serious graphics people
usually find 24 or more planes esential.   It is important for depth
cueing and antialiasing.  If you saw a nice image on a 24 plane box,
you wouldn't be confused, I assure you.   But 24 planes at 1k X 1k is
24M bits = 3M bytes.  You'll need more hardware to support all this
and actually get an image on the screen in an acceptable amount of time.
You won't see this in a $2000 computer in the very near future.  Something
to think about regarding color displays is the cost of a good monitor -
You could spend a LOT of money on a color monitor that would be nowhere
near the crisp appearance of the B/W display (2 planes, BTW) on the NeXT.
Most of the work I do is text oriented; B/W wins hands down here because
of the sharpness of the monitors.

George Seibel, UCSF