Computer display manufactuerers are lazy...

[phong]

Virtually every piece of computer hardware is improving at an exponential rate - CPUs are the most famous, tied to Moore's law. Similarly, hard drives and other storage media are increasing in capacity at a similar rate. RAM is likewise becoming faster, cheaper and higher in capacity. Even printers - back in the day when you had a computer operating at a few tens of megahertz, your dot-matrix printer could print a similar dpi. Now we've got CPUs operating at a couple thosand megahertz and printer resolutions of the same magnitude. Scanners roughly paralell printer development...

What the heck is wrong with the monitor people? By now I should be able to get a flat panel display a yard across operating at a few hundred dpi with contrast and color rendition 10 times better than our current monitors, all for a couple hundred bucks. A friend of mine has an old vga monitor (about 12" or so) that he originally used with his 286. It's maximum operating resolution is 640x480x24bpp (I've used it personally at this resolution). Even being generous, today's equivalent is a 19" operating at 1600x1200x24bpp. That's about an improvement of about 10 by my calculations of about in total operating capacity. During that same time span there's been a 200-fold improvement in CPU performance. I think we're all getting scammed!
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"An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head."
-- Eric Hoffer

[pjp]

I think LCD technology has been difficult to improve. Quality of the screens (visible dead pixels) being the number one problem. Also, there are several new technologies out there waiting to compete. Organic LED technology being one of them.

In the meantime, perhaps the ViewSonic VP2290b will satisfy your needs.

• 22.2" widescreen 16:10 aspect ratio
  
• 3840 x 2400 optimum resolution
  
• 9.2 mega pixel (27.6 million RGB dots)
  
• ultra-high 3840x2400 9.2 mega pixel resolution
  
• 204 pixels per inch

Only $8K or so. IBM has a similar one (they made it first) and the cost has dropped significantly. IIRC, it was $14k when it first came out.
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