Green House Readies New 15.6-inch USB Monitor

[btarunr]

Green House Japan is introducing a new 15.6-inch monitor that draws display input from USB 2.0, making it ideal for display expansion without adding graphics cards. While not exactly optimal for graphics-intensive applications, the monitor should should serve ideal for businesses, stock trading firms, and other applications where a decent color display is all that's needed. The GH-USD16K is an LED-backlit LCD panel with just the USB input.

The GH-USD16K has a native resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, with 18-bit color depth (256K colors). It offers a static contrast ratio of 400:1, maximum brightness of 220 cd/m², 16 ms response time, and viewing angles of 80°/40°. Under normal operation, the display consumes just 5W of power. The company suggests that you can plug in up to 6 such displays on a PC for smooth display. More monitors would probably require an additional USB card/controller, even if there are free USB ports on the motherboard, since bandwidth is shared. Slated for market release in Japan next month, the Green House GH-USD16K is priced at an equivalent of US $210.

[IceCreamBarr]

Interesting concept. I'd say the brokers at my firm would probably dislike the resolution as a trading screen but maybe as a passive, research, charting monitor.

[Breathless]

personally I think they should wait till the technology gets better with these before releasing them (like the transition to USB 3.0).

[DaJMasta]

I don't think it will sell that well.... it's specs are quite a bit under a standard screen's (low contrast ratio, 6 bit per channel color, awful viewing angle), and at that price it seems like it would be a more viable option to buy a cheap multi-headed graphics card and a normal screen (or even a different USB graphics solution and a regular monitor).

[mlee49]

Nice to see the low power consumption and no need for additional vga ports.

I've looked into a smaller USB monitor, these little 10" touch screens would be great for playing music from, checking email quickly, or just keeping tabs on temps during gaming sessions:

http://www.mimomonitors.com/

Price makes me not want it.

[miks]

Interesting this will be great on my VM's

I know the use of those monitors, but personally I don't understand the price. For that amount you can even buy a LED monitor with even bigger size. WTF?

[Ripper3]

Very useful for largely multi-user systems, without having to buy additional graphics cards.
There used to be a lot of schools using one computer running as two or more terminals, with keyboard, mouse, and screen for each, allowing two or more students to use one machine at a time. Even with cheap PCI graphics cards with multiple outputs, this was a pretty expensive activity, but was cheaper per-user than having a thin-client per user, and a server for the lot.
I see this being very popular for them. Build a moderately powerful multi-core machine, with a single analogue or digital monitor output connected as a teacher's control terminal, and fill the USB ports with powered hubs, connect a mouse, keyboard, monitor and possibly sound card to each, and with correct configuration (Edubuntu works well for this purpose), you have a teacher's terminal, and 4 to 10 (depending on USB ports available) kids using the terminal at the same time, with enough power for simple activities.
Kids don't care about screen resolution, lagging of input, or usability quite as much, so a machine splitting its resources would work just fine for kids to learn on.

EDIT:
Should have added; a lot of small schools in Africa and Asia use this setup, or used to, it's now not much more expensive to buy a set of dumb-terminals based on commonly-available Atom processors, which are moderately powerful in their own right, with a cheap, low-power Atom server sharing files and a 3G connection. This also has the advantage of running off 12V power in a lot of cases, which means solar power with car batteries can be used to power the whole setup off-the-grid.