3dway

I was looking into the possibility of viewing a D size sheet at full size. The diagonal measurement of a D size sheet is 43" (about). LCD tvs are this big, but the resolutions are 1080 pixels vertically. I assume monitors are similar. I stumbles acorss this article from 2003 and realized that things have come a long way since then.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=8578


To view a D size sheet at full size on a monitor (seeing the whole sheet at once) you would need 3600 pixels vertically. This from 150dpi (half of a generally accepted professional print resolution, which I've been told is acceptable for a lot of printing which doesn't have to appear somwhere like a magazine). We've used 150 dpi for PDF versions of our drawings and it seems fine, so I'm using that as a lowest acceptable print resolution to bring it more in line with reasonable hardware requirements (which may actually be extraordinary hardware requirements).

Does anybody know of LCDs and video card combinations which could handle this and if they'd cost 10s of thousands of dollars?

Is anyone doing this now? or anything close?

Do you think that seeing the whole drawing at final size would help cut down on the kinds of errors that you get by looking at the drawing in "snapshots" like most AutoCAD users are now using normal sized monitors and normal video cards? You know how it's easier to spot errors on the printed set than throug ACAD? That's what I'm getting at here.

Interested in your thoughts.

Thanks for responding.

pailhead

Why not simply print the sheet and take a look at it in paper form?

You could probably get 4 30" and hang them on a wall to get one really big screen. I'm not exactly sure how to output to 4 screens, but its definitely possible, two quadro cards should probably do the trick. That's definitely something you need.

3dway

I like trees.

And I should correct myself here. Spotting errors isn't my end goal. It's one result. I'm a technogeek, and I have some undying need to explore the bleeding edge of technology, software versions etc... My current office doesn't spend money to upgrade much of anything, so I'm here getting a fix.

pailhead

I think you need to combine a few different screens in that case...

The highest resolution that i know of is in fact the one on the 30" screen - 2560x1600.