By John Keller
PALO ALTO, Calif. - Designers at dpiX Inc., a Xerox company in Palo Alto, Calif., are introducing an ultra-high-resolution monochrome flat-panel display for intelligence analysts and others who need photo-quality electronic monitors.
The new 19-inch Eagle-SR active-matrix liquid crystal display (AMLCD) has a resolution of 2,560 by 2,048 pixels - 5.2 million pixels in all - and 256 levels of gray. That marks a huge increase in clarity from the highest-resolution color dpiX display, the 1,280-by-1,024-pixel Eagle-19.
The Eagle-SR "is designed for surveillance and reconnaissance - image exploitation and C4I systems - with data that comes in digitally," says Greg King, the Eagle-SR program manager at dpiX.
The new display shows images with virtually the same clarity and contrast as a black-and-white photograph. "This can replace the film-and-light table, but is much faster," King claims. "The user can pan and flip and easily compare images electronically, while having the same sharpness and acuity of film."
Its resolution and contrast, which come largely by separating the imaging and backlight components of the display, also presents the user with far less eye fatigue than competing cathode ray tube displays, King says.
The display comes with PCI or S-bus interfaces to make it compatible with PCs or Sun workstations. Soon to come will be a graphics accelerator card to speed image loading.
Designers at dpiX built the display to military and intelligence community specifications, yet company officials plan to offer the monitor as a commercial-off-the-shelf item. "We call that `dual use by design`," says Chi Huan, the dpiX director of corporate marketing.
The first Eagle-SR models are selling for $25,000, but King says he expects that price to come down by 30 to 40 percent by the end of the year as manufacturing levels increase.
Engineers at dpiX manufacture the display glass for the Eagle-SR at their Palo Alto, Calif., fabrication center, and plan to work with companies such as Planar Systems in Beaverton, Ore., to ruggedize the display for harsh military environments, King says.
For more information, contact dpiX by phone at 650-842-9600, by fax at 650-842-9808, by post at 3406 Hillview Ave., Palo Alto, Calif. 94304-1345, by e-mail at [email protected], or on the World Wide Web at http://www.dpix.com/.
