Episode 45 - What’s Next... for Display Tech?

I’m probably about to date myself a little bit… but amongst my fondest early tech memories was shopping for my first computer. No, not the first computer I built or even the first computer in my house, but this one was going to be mine…

While standing in the “computer aisle” at a now-failed big box store, I vividly remember two things… the leap of faith it took to pony-up for a Pentium II processor when I knew full well the Pentium III was going to magically drop the day after the largest purchase of my life, and the advice the sales person gave me that has stuck with me to this day…

See, he saw me pouring over the specs of every single off-white tower they had, considering the RAM, clock speed, port selection, you name it. What he didn't see me do was pay any attention at all to the next aisle over, where they kept the monitors…

He kindly struck up a conversation (mostly because they’d seen me repeat this pattern every Friday after school for at least a month), and the advice he shared amounted to “don’t blow your whole budget on the PC itself… remember all the graphics in the world are useless if you don’t have anything to watch them on…”

From that one interaction, my near-obsession with resolution, refresh rates, and yes, brightness was born. I didn’t just want my programs to load as fast as possible, or my storage to be larger than I could ever use (and that’s never happened), I wanted to see the digital worlds in front of me come alive. 

Fast forward a "couple" decades and that equation has found its way into everything… TVs, smart phones, tablets, and yes… my trusty monitor. Now, let me bump up the brightness a bit and let’s talk some pixels…