As you’ve probably noticed, the Photoshopping skills around here aren’t what you’d call top-notch, so we’re thinking that maybe attaching Logitec’s upcoming USB touchscreen to our monitor might help us give you the realistic product mock-ups and goofy photo-illustrations that you deserve. Coming in 15-inch or 17-inch varieties, respectively, the LTP-15UBK and LTP-17UBK (or LTP-17U, in white) simply attach to your existing LCD with velcro strips, and let you manipulate your pointer with either a finger, a la an ATM machine, or the included pen, as with a graphics tablet. Both models will go on sale in late June for an undisclosed sum of money, but we’re not sure if these will even be available outside of Japan, so you may have to put up with our crappy Photoshops for just a little while longer.

[Via Everything USB]

Researchers at Japan's Sanyo Epson Imaging Devices Corporation have just developed a series of small LCDs that, unlike most traditional displays, are almost perfectly viewable even at extreme 90-degree angles. Available in sizes ranging from 2.4-inches to 10.1-inches, the displays will be employed in any number of portable devices, from cellphones to PDAs to PMPs, although the best use we can think of is to put them on cameras, which should make it a lot easier to see what you're shooting when you need to take pictures over a crowd. As for the use of this so-called "Photo Fine Vistarich" technology in devices that we're viewing personal/secure information on, well, we're not necessarily sure we want to make it easier for everyone on the subway to peep our Treo screen. Sanyo Epson says production of these displays will begin this fall, which mean we should probably see corresponding products on the market before the end of the year.

It’s been a bad year for the Miami Dolphins: first they lost Heisman Trophy-winning running back Ricky Williams for the upcoming season, and soon their “biggest HD display in the world” may have to play second fiddle to a new scoreboard being installed this summer for the University of Texas Longhorns. At 7,370 square feet, the 134-foot by 55-foot ‘board being built for the school by Daktronics (who also manufactured the Miami display) has a slightly larger screen area than the current 7000-sqaure-foot title-holder, but nitpickers may argue that since the UT model will be almost a foot shorter diagonally, that it doesn’t qualify as the “world’s biggest.” The argument may turn out to be moot, though, as a horse track in Tokyo is supposedly planning to install a ridiculous 197-foot-wide monster of a screen later this year that will overshadow all who came before it. UT’s project comes as part of a multi-million dollar overhaul of their stadium, which will also include several other large displays, a new sound system, and a $150 million renovation of the north end zone meant to enable a 90,000 person capacity.

[Thanks, Brian]

src="http://www.engadget.com/media/2006/05/displayport.jpg" alt="" />Ruh roh, just when you knew for a fact you
were all settled in with the latest generation of video interconnects for your laptops and peripherals, then VESA comes
along and gets three of the most influential companies in the PC business, href="http://www.engadget.com/search/?q=dell">Dell, HP, and href="http://www.engadget.com/search/?q=lenovo">Lenovo, to rally behind its new video interface: DisplayPort. Ok,
so it’s not that new (we wrote about it last
year), but it looks like it’s finally ready to rumble starting May 8th. We called up VESA to get the skinny on the
port, and they were kind enough to hit us up with that graphic and the following deets: it’ll not be backward
compatible with with DVI / VGA (ouch), it’ll have wire-line encryption developed by Philips — that’s not compatible
with HDCP (double ouch), but has a very small plug and scales well
(eh). So why create DisplayPort when we’ve all already settled into DVI / HDMI with or without HDCP for plugging in our
plasma or LCD TVs or monitors? Well, because VESA wanted the market to have a unified, license-free video interconnect
standard that did a few things current systems don’t do, like have a standard low power, low pin count, low profile
connector for use on portable device internals and external monitors alike, or scale indefinitely to resolutions, color
depths, and refresh rates possibly yet unthought of by systems integrators. Ok, fair enough, but where were these guys
in 2001, huh? You know how we feel about nascent standards trying to butt in once we’ve all finally gotten settled on
something decent.

A bunch of venture capitalists have been poking around Philips' R&D labs lately, and it seems that they like what they see. New Venture Partners has joined with the Dutch electronics giant to spin off several companies based on technology first developed by Philips Research, with the first collaboration, Liquavista, being announced today. Based on a thin-display technology called Electrowetting, Liquavista will attempt to integrate its products into DAPs, cellphones, watches, and other portable devices where high brightness and rapid refresh rates are valued (which is like, all of them). Electrowetting supposedly provides better brightness and response time than competing reflective display technologies while using essentially the same manufacturing techniques, and according to a handy comparison chart on MobileRead, is just about the best thing ever. Skeptics will be able to peep the displays for themselves in early June, however, when Liquavista will present some prototypes at the Society for Information Display's 2006 exhibition in San Francisco. [Warning: PDF link]

[Via MobileRead]

We rarely take
the time to highlight someone’s rig — and when we do, it’s usually not their rig, per se, but their heads. Well, step
aside, oh masterful 24 display
Virginia Tech workstation, you’re old news with your 31,457,280 pixel array of twenty four 1280 x 1024 displays. No,
the new crown goes to a man known only to us as Crazy Jon (trust us, that’s no misnomer). Dude cobbled six NVIDIA
GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB video cards and three 1,000-watt power supplies to take on a wall o’ what appears to be Dell
30-inch 3007WFPs. Twelve, to be exact. By our math that’s
49,152,000 pixels — and about $26,400 just for the displays alone. Oh, and did we mention that Crazy Jon already had
five Apple 30-inchers on his desk? We love you, Jon. Seriously though, can we come over sometime?

[Via href="http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/04/12_30inch_flatscreens_mount.html">Make]

It's hard feel sorry for a reviewer who had to spend a few hours seated at a three monitor setup trying to gauge how "immersed" he felt in his favorite FPS titles, but we've gotta give the intrepid Wil Harris some props for pulling himself away from F.E.A.R. long enough to write up a review of the Matrox Triplehead2Go. Sounds like the device does work as advertised. Meaning, it splits a VGA connection into three VGA connections and tells your computer it's hooked up to one big 3840 x 1024 display. All the software seems to work fine for the various desktop configurations, and while there aren't too many games that can handle 3840 x 1024 out of the box, the included software can help get most common games up and running, and can even be extended by users to cover other titles. As for gaming, the setup comes highly recommended if you've got the graphics power to handle the added resolution. For productivity, the analog connections and further signal degradation due to three-way splitting makes the Triplehead2Go not be such a hot choice. So hold out for DVI if you must, or throw down your $300 (plus a few LCDs), jump in and get fragging.

Seems that Sony just can't help themselves: Every time we take another look, the company beefs up its Bravia S and V lines with new models, sometimes in smaller sizes, sometimes in larger ones (not that we're complaining). This time, Sony's added a nice range to the LCD line, with models from 32 to 46 inches. All models have a 1300:1 contrast ratio, 1366x768 resolution, a 178-degree viewing angle and an 8ms response time. The V series also includes Sony's "live color" enhancement technology. All models are due out next month, with pricing in Japan expected to run from about ¥250,000 ($2,113) for the 32-inch S2000 to ¥490,000 ($4,143) for the 46-inch V2000 model.

Dude, screw the transparent OLEDs, it's all about transparent circuits, which some Oregon State University scientists seem to have created. The significance, of course, is clear (ahem): you save a lot of space in devices -- especially portables -- when your circuit board is your screen, not mounted on a wafter in a package on a board behind it. Apparently the scientists even expect clear, glass-mounted indium gallium oxide circuitry to ultimately be cheaper to produce than silicon. The military's in on the gig too, the Army Research Office is a project sponsor (as is HP and the National Science Foundation), probably for the project's obvious heads-up display uses. Will we, um, not see this gear any time in the near future? Hard to say, they're only up to 26 transistors in a single array as of yet (compared to the hundreds of millions in chips nowadays), but we'll be waiting.

[Thanks, James F]

Looks like Fraunhofer's researchers aren't the only Germans able to get in on the transparent OLED thing. It appears some researchers at the Technical University of Braunschweig are claiming to have developed a technique for embedding OLED pixels on layers of transparent TFTs, creating see-through displays that could be manufactured cheaply with flexible plastics capable of withstanding extreme temperatures. Apparently the transparent displays, which were up to (and over) twice the brightness of today's displays, should be ready to rock in two years -- just in time for us to renovate the Department Of Precrime set we use act out Minority Report in during our lunch hour. Is it now?