Panasonic pitches Ultra HD 4K x 2K monster tablet Asus has an 18.4-inch tablet-cum-all-in-one-desktop-PC on display this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), but Panasonic has it beat: the Japanese giant is showing off a Windows 8 slate that not only packs a 20-inch display but sports an Ultra HD resolution. Yes, Panasonic’s mammoth fondleslab contains 9.8 million pixels …
Yeah that's great for text, but unless app development has improved, it's likely that quite a few Windows based apps break will you do this.
I've seen programs where dialogue boxes and pop ups are impossible to do anything with it as the buttons have been pushed out of the fixed size window due to increased text percentage on Vista / 7.
Apple have the right idea when it comes to the high res screens, why can't Windows do the same?
>I've seen programs where dialogue boxes and pop ups are impossible to do anything with it as the buttons have >been pushed out of the fixed size window due to increased text percentage on Vista / 7.
I've seen that in some XP applications in Win 7 when the text size has been at 125% or 150%. I've also seen users set their output to be less than the native resolution of their monitor, so that text is bigger.
>Apple have the right idea when it comes to the high res screens, why can't Windows do the same?
My understanding is that it was one of the things that was dropped from Vista along the way... but I'm fuzzy on the details.
> I get the sense that you don't have a lot of experience developing on WPF or WinRT. It scales just fine. Go
> create a winRT app and deploy to the simulator to test on different resolutions. I think you'll see that most win 8
> apps will probably work just fine.
Perhaps WPF or WinRT applications will scale fine, but that's small comfort when existing applications don't.
Macromedia DreamWeaver and Spyboy Search & Destroy both come to mind as applications whose UIs broke somewhat when the "Large Fonts" was selected.
"Perhaps WPF or WinRT applications will scale fine, but that's small comfort when existing applications don't."
That is the unfortunate legacy Microsoft have to live with, they still support very old apps on their platforms (unlike Apple), did you know that you can even run 16-bit Windows 3.0 applications on Windows 7 (32-bit only though).
Microsoft have actually been pushing developers, albeit unsuccessfully, to accommodate the DPI setting since it was introduced in (I think) XP. When developing the application you get the choice as to whether you want Windows to handle non-96dpi settings or whether you handle it yourself, obviously lots of developers still take the easy option, and even worse there are some developers who tell Windows not to handle the scaling but then they don't bother to implement or test at anything other than 96dpi.
(FYI, selecting 'Large Fonts' is not the same as configuring windows with the display's true dpi, 'Large Fonts' is for people who would have difficulty reading the text even at 96dpi.)
I want one to use on the train. iPad's are just too boring these days. Also, watching video on the go is finally sensible without having to put up with piddly screen sizes. Now can someone produce a portable 7.1 surround sound system, beer fridge and popcorn maker combined?
Next time some little scrote starts listening to their tinny 'music' on their tinny mobile phone speakers, I can whip out my portable home cinema, and drown them out properly...
Dump all the decent commercial software along with Windows then.
There's tons of really good drawing and graphics tools on Windows. Linux has some, but not as many and the quality isn't as good.
Not to mention that if your distro buggers up then using a pen on a command line would be very tedious, especially VI which is hard enough for many people to get their head around using a keyboard (I know the basics myself).
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Im thinking DNLA streaming to your smart TV in your living room.
A great party piece !!
What about home automation ... imagine hanging one of these on the wall in your lobby, you could show really detailed stuff about your house on it lol
Or better still use it just like the original "Microsoft Surface" by placing it on your coffee table !!
That looks really cool.
Kudos to them for giving it a decent screen resolution, too.
The biggest question is whether there will be enough apps that take advantage of this. It makes me want to put it on a table and use it to play multiplayer games with other humans (in meatspace, not online)... but the feature you'd want for that, orienting display toward current player, etc, would need to be implemented on a per-app basis, and I don't think we'd see this unless there were a hell of a lot of sales.
If I was more of a baller, this would totally be on my shopping list.
The shopping channel has been selling 24inch Android fondle slabs for at least the last 3 months. Both manufacturers mentioned here, seem a bit out of touch with the market. I noted Argos selling their own android tablet last week, much cheaper than Amazon or Google. Looks like the 7 inch market will be at £70 by midyear!
They could be on to something.
I think this might be the future CAD-station.
Coming from the drawing board where we used to draw lines with a pencil, we've come to draw lines with the mouse and look at the result on the screen. Then we started to put in "objects", but that was the software side.
Looking at the hardware side, it looks like we've come full circle and are back at drawing lines directly on the board.
You young guns don't know what I'm talking about but the other dinosaurs surely remember the size of those drawing boards.
And slide-rules ! ! ! Anybody remember slide-rules ? ? ?
...
Never mind, I digress.
That's me in my prime, wearing a high hat
Last summer my old school was hosting a county manufacturing thingy in its sports hall, and I popped along. I bumped into my old Design and Technology teacher and he showed me around my old workshop and classroom. The room in which I had learnt to lay out engineering drawings by hand was now full of Solidworks workstations. I'm only 32. When I got to uni, we were taught parametric CAD on a Unix mainframe... only one workstation in the suite had a graphics card powerful enough to rotate a shaded model view.
I personally don't think we will come full circle completely, in the way you suggest... because things like connected laser measures, 3D scanners, and Kinect-like devices will allow some scope for CAD to advance. CAD can become something that the designer uses whilst walking around the workshop.
>>And slide-rules ! ! ! Anybody remember slide-rules ? ? ?
Yes, I had a British Thornton;-) It was bought for me with an educational grant back in the 6th form. Way back then we were also using the art class double period to manually perforate our weekly batch of IBM punch cards to get into the school's run time slot (1 hour) on some distant mainframe... Nowadays it's carpal tunnel issues, back then it was going slightly deaf (from everyone punching out the cards) and temporary blindness from all that squinting (to absolutely guarantee getting the hole in the right place otherwise it'd be over a week before the disappointment of getting the wrong printout back).
Reverting back yes! But that's a good thing - the mouses actually killed the good stuff.
Sooo ... when's the A0+ / E+ / around 50"x40" ~ 65" screens going to be available on those tilting stands? Now that I'd like! You actually have to move the screen up/down in order to reach it all. And of course our PPI should still be not much less than 300 - otherwise it's just not crisp enough: so 15000x12000 pixels then!
Now at that res I can work! No need for panning and zooming and stupid stuff like that anymore!
But wait ... do the CADs actually "work" with a pen tablet interface? I remember those digitizing tablets - and their interface was deprecated at some stage wasn't it? So they'll need to resurrect those SummaGraphics / Calcomp / Genius Sketch / etc. drivers which last time started failing when Win 2k came out, and were totally inoperable on XP. Those old digitizing tablets had that 15000 DPI accuracy then (on DOS of all things). The only issue was they were screen-less, you worked blind and needed to view what you were doing on a 24" CRT next to you.
Hey, someone has an LCD panel better than the one in the IBM T221 monitor!
You know, the 3840 x 2400 22" screen that came out in 2001 and still goes for about $1500 on ebay, with the special doodads you need to hook it up to a modern PC.
Just give me the screen with a DisplayPort connector, please.
Oops RNixon... looks like you got fleeced... I bought 3 T221 (Dual Link DVI compatible DG5 revision) screens about 18 months ago from Yahoo Auctions in Japan. One for a Mac Pro, one for my 27" iMac and one for a Mac Mini... All for the tidy sum of $800... Not bad considering that they cost ¥980,000 (about $13,000) in their hey day.
I did have to buy the special cables (handmade at $180 for 3) but still... not bad.
They are built (and styled) like a tank, but without a doubt, the best screens I've ever owned.
I would love a large-screen tablet. I play in a big band, and have to lug around two huge ring-binders of charts to rehearsals. Before each gig I have to pull out the charts we are playing and put them in order in another binder, and then put then all back afterwards. Plus if there are any changes to the set list on the fly it involves flicking around and potentially diving into my bag for additional music.
A few guys in the band have put their music onto ipads / android tablets, and from a practical perspective it's ideal - easy to carry, easy to manage, great for gigs etc. I know a lot of musicians who have done the same, both for gigs and also for practise purposes, especially musos who travel.
But the big drawback is the screen size. Regular tablet screens are just too small to be comfortable to read music from.
Something this big that would allow two pages to be seen at once at A4 size would be absolutely perfect.
Of course, a muso tablet would also need to be cheap, in order that poor struggling artistes could afford one...
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