The Future’s so Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades

For the past year or so, I’ve been look­ing at finally get­ting an LCD mon­i­tor. 16ms response times or bet­ter with 16.7 mil­lion col­ors are becom­ing very com­mon. I’ve had the plea­sure of using a Dell Ultra­sharp and would not be unhappy with that acqui­si­tion. Unfor­tu­nately buy­ing a house on my income, though a worth­while invest­ment, has cer­tainly cut into my recre­ational funds. Yet there’s always a gap between what tech­nol­ogy I can afford ver­sus what tech­nol­ogy I would love to own.

As great as LCDs are becom­ing at the $300–500 price range, they don’t hold a can­dle to a high dynamic range dis­play. My employ­ment affords me the oppor­tu­nity of going to SIGGRAPH where I was able to visit Bright­side’s booth, both times they attended. Back in 2003, when Brightside’s tech­nol­ogy was an emerg­ing tech­nol­ogy it was an amaz­ing nov­elty. View­ing the dis­play as it was then felt like I was look­ing out a porthole—an amaz­ingly detailed port­hole that appeared as if you were look­ing out a win­dow at a real scene and not a ren­dered image. So when they came back in 2006, with a com­mer­cial pro­to­type, the DR37-P, I was a bit awestruck, not by the tech­nol­ogy since I was wit­ness to that 3 years ago, but that they were able to get an HD1080 dis­play ready so soon. They’re build­ing them by hand right now and for about $50 grand you can be the first on your block to get one. Just like any tech­nol­ogy, as soon as they can ramp up pro­duc­tion and improve the processes, it’s only a mat­ter of time before they too may hit the $300–400 sweet spot.

The future is bright.