The View from the L

You’ve all heard of the Radius Pivot and the PCPC Flipper in previous issues of TidBITS. Well, another monitor has arrived on the scene for those of you interested in modifying your view on the computer’s world. Sigma Designs has a new monitor called the L-View Multi-Mode, which is a 19" monochrome monitor (the monitor itself can handle grey scale, but the video card can’t). It doesn’t sound impressive, but the gimmick is that it can change resolution on the fly. The L-View boasts six different resolutions, 120, 92, 72, 60, 46, and 36 dpi. The principle is that for applications with which you want a lot of screen real estate, such as spreadsheets or some desktop publishing applications, you work at a high resolution. However, if you merely want to enter text, you can work at 60 dpi so you don’t have strain to see the letters. And if you think HyperCard 1.2.5’s window looks funny in the middle of a big screen, you can have it fill the screen in 36 dpi.

As far as the other details go, we aren’t yet sure when the monitor will really be available, but it will cost $1995 and will have refresh rates of up to 92 Hz to prevent flicker. Its resolution is a whopping 1664 by 1200 pixels. Everything is controlled by a cdev or by hot keys. It works with the Mac II line of computers, and also apparently with the SE. Dan KoGai said he tested it on an SE as well, so although we hadn’t heard about the SE or the SE/30, hopefully they will be supported as well. Evidently it has a few conflicts with applications that aren’t well-behaved about checking their QuickDraw coordinates, but on the whole it works with most everything.

Sigma Designs — 800/933-9945 — 415/770-0100

Information from:
Dan KoGai — [email protected]
Scott T. Huang — sh2u+@andrew.cmu.edu

Related articles:
MacWEEK — 22-May-90, Vol. 4 #20, pg. 9