Today I went to an Electronic Display trade show in Tokyo that my Dad told me about since the display he's working on was there. I saw about 4 jaw dropping displays there.

I put some pictures here.

1) My dad's display, eMagin. It's about the size of my thumbnail and yet it's 1280x1024 pixels. They are using it in goggles but I guess they are going to license the technology to other companies for non−goggle displays.

2) Sharp probably had the most desirable display. 28.3 inches, 2560x2048. It KICKED ASS!!! Great contrast too.

3) Samsung had a few cool displays like 2048x1536 (wide) but it was only 19 inches.

4) The most jaw dropping display though was from Toshiba. It was 3200x2400!!!! in only 20 inches so it was SUPER HIGH RES. They were displaying maps on it and they had a real (not virtual) magnifying glass you could hold up to the screen and YOU COULD NOT SEE THE PIXELS!!! I'm assuming if you drew non anti−aliased stuff you could see the dots.

It was running under Win2K. Toshiba does not make any Mac software. He showed Excel to show how small things were. In the default settings it showed from A to AR columns and from 1 to 122 rows. He had lots of examples of just how useful so much screen real estate is. Think about it, that's 4 1600x1200 monitors. It was 192 dpi. He showed some 2 page magazine layouts in some DTP software and held up the actual magazine next to it. No difference. Well, that's not entirely true. All the text there was no difference. The images though were generally lower res on the screen only because the DTP software uses lower res images for speed.

Other than that there were lots of cell phone displays and pda displays, tv's (including a 61 inch NEC flat panel TV) but most of them were about refresh rate, cost, energy consumption. I didn't seen any hi−res PDA or Cell phone displays although I did see lots of cell phone displays showing video as demos and many with cool prototype interaces.

I did see one watch from Epson with a color LCD display. It was kind of neat to see.