Displaysia

Bad news everywhere. The sunken barge shifted in the Mississippi last night, spilling yet more oil into the river. Stacy Head (my Council rep) is attacking Jerome Smith for no good reason. Derrick “Saggy Pants” Shepherd is going down in flames.

But I don’t care, because I got a new monitor at work.

Actually, I got the monitor a couple weeks ago, only to discover to my chagrin that I couldn’t get full resolution without a graphics card upgrade. So it’s been sitting to the side, unplugged, until today.

The card has arrived, and I am rocking four megapixels.

Here’s a comparison of my previous display with the new one.

[full resolution]

The inner image is what I’ve been looking at since November of 2004: a 1680 x 1050 Cinema Display by Apple — a paltry 1.76 megapixels.

That new graphics card arrived today, allowing me to use the new Samsung SyncMaster 305T Plus at a full 2560 x 1600. It seems I needed a card with dual link DVI, and the Radeon 9600 Pro (PC & Mac Edition) did the trick.

I should give credit to Parasit for the beautiful photo of Kalix Älv which I’ve been using for my desktop wallpaper the last few weeks. A frozen river is a wonderful thing to contemplate when it’s summer in New Orleans.

By way of further comparison, I excavated a picture of my old dual monitor setup from 1999:

And here’s a screenshot of that desktop, circa October 2001:

[full resolution]

Those two monitors together created a 3200 x 1200 display. Maybe that should be expressed as 1600 x 1200 x 2? Either way, it was 3.8 megapixels.

So, all these years later and I’ve gained only about a third of a megapixel. Hardly seems right. But the dual-monitor rig was CRT. This new thing is LCD — so much easier on the eyes. And it’s a single monitor, not two. All in all, a big improvement, and undoubtedly the best monitor I’ve ever used.