Displays? (Or lack thereof)

If there was a letdown this year, it was in the displays. While all of the big Taiwanese manufacturers were here, usually there are entire halls filled with nothing but displays with impressive specifications. Unfortunately, hard times have fallen on LCD panel manufacturers outside of the big three ( LG.Philips, Samsung/Sony and Sharp) and the smaller companies are starting to really hurt.

AUO, famous for their low response time 6-bit LCD panels in all but the largest LCD TVs, posted losses for the second quarter in a row. The company vows to ride out the oversupply of panels on the market, but if the number four panel manufacturer is having difficulty turning a profit, the little guys don’t have a chance.

One of those little guys, Chi Mei Optoelectronics, barely had a presence at the show this year (compared to their booth last year that took up several spots). Ultimately, a consolidation of the market is probably better for end users as the LCD spot market becomes a thing of the past – hopefully, removing the opportunity for Tier 2 manufacturers to start flooding the market with low quality displays.

BenQ, Sampo and AG Neovo had booths at the show, but you can tell the attitude was more subdued than it has been in the past. No high resolution 19” displays or new single digit response time panels graced our presence this time around. CES is the better show to view new display technology, since it isn’t primarily limited to just Taiwanese manufacturers like Computex, but hopefully, we don’t have to wait until January to see innovation in a rapidly consolidating industry.

More coverage tomorrow!

Storage
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  • Doormat - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    @#17

    RAID 5 is an improvement over RAID-3 because any time you wrote to any one of the data drives, you'd have to write to the pairty drive - you're essentially write-speed bottlenecked by the write speeds of the pairty drive (unless you manage to cache the writes but that still doesnt solve the underlying architectural flaw). You could still read from the array quite fast however.

    RAID-5 gets over this by spreading out the parity so when you write data to one of the array's disks, its more or less going to write the parity out to a random drive in the array instead of one dedicated drive.
  • n7 - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    @ #20


    Nice detective skillz :)
    I hope you are right about that...would be a nice surprise if so.
  • ImJacksAmygdala - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    I think Lian Li needs to take a good hard look at the Antec P180 design and stop wasting R&D time and money on concept crap that will never sell in the market.

    The P180 design could be improved if the drive cages and feet could be reconfigured so that the case could be used up right as a tower or on its side as a HTPC case. Its a shame that Antec did not think of this when it was developing the P180. Whats worse is that the bottom of the P180 doesn't have a brushed aluminum finish and the feet are going to be difficult to move.
  • Chunkee - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    How about some improvment on the photos please.

    jC
  • yacoub - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    In case anyone is curious about the earthquake:

    http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/Quakes/usyu...
  • RyanVM - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    So you said not to expect the X550 until R520 launches. I couldn't help but notice that the placard that the X550 was on said it's launching on June 15. Does that mean what I think that means? ;-)
  • yacoub - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    "4 bay faceplates in the Enermax case, "Hey look! We got pretty lights!""

    That case starred in the upcoming movie remake of The War of the Worlds.
  • ProviaFan - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    JHutch, I remember being told that RAID 5 was an improvement over RAID 3, because having the parity distributed over all disks balances the workload more evenly over every disk. Whether this still applies, I don't know.
  • JHutch - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    Maybe someone can clarify RAID 3 vs RAID 5 for me. It looks like they are both basically striped data with a parity data block. RAID 3 seems to put all the parity on one disk, while RAID 5 spreads it around the array of disks.

    Supposing I have that much right, what are the advantages/disadvantages of one over the other?
  • Jynx980 - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    "The ATOP bundle pictured below consists of an AGP GeForce 6200 video card piggy-backed onto the ATOP adaptor."

    Below -> Above

    Bahaha! Love that sign in the HIS X550 pic "New" written in silver pen! That said, the info on the signs that hold the card are damn good.

    4 bay faceplates in the Enermax case, "Hey look! We got pretty lights!"

    The MGE prototype case looks pretty slick. Makes me think about the shrinking room in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

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