I. Monitors - A televisionlike display for soft-copy output in a computer system.

(soft-copy - Temporary output that can be interpreted visually, as on a montior.

hard-copy - A readable printed copy of computer output)

A. Ways we define monitors

1. Graphics Adapter
a. Analog signal (define)

b. VRAM

2. Size - diagonal dimensions, just like TV's

3. Resolution - quality of output

a. Pixels (picture elements) - addressable points on the computer screen.

b. Graphics and text modes

c. dot pitch - The distance between the center of a pixel with the center of an adjacent pixel.

4. Color (Monochrome or Color)
a. RGB index - RED, BLUE, and GREEN - The basic colors for all computer graphics.
1. EGA

2. VGA

3. Super VGA

5. Display quality
a. refresh rate (repaint the phosphor)

b. interlaced (repaint partially, cheaper) - repaints every other line when refreshing the monitor colors.

c. Non-interlaced - repaints every line when refreshing.

B. Flat-Panel Monitors (space Touch1. LCD (not to be confused with a psychedelic drug of the 60's)
2. gas plasma

3. EL

C. Touch Screen Monitors - Video Poker, Hastings

II PRINTERS - A device used to prepare hard-copy (see above) output.

A. Choices - Oh so many.
1. price, color, volume, quality, bells and whistles, and network capabilities.

2 Landscape vs Portrait

3. Dot Matrix - Best for companies that have to do carbon copies because it actually impacts the paper.

4. Laser - The fastest, best quality printers. Judged on pages per minute

5. Bubble jet - The type found connected to most home computers today. Judged by resolution, or dpi (dots per inch).

6. Color

7. Hydra

8. Mainframe based

9. Plotters 

III. Graphics - An output of of the future

1. Virtual Reality (3D worlds>
2. Animation Graphics
3. Toy Story, Bug's Life, Toy Story II, Ants,

b. Jurrasic Park

IV. Voice-Response Systems

1. voice response

2. speech synthesis

 
 


Other monitors

Today there are a lot of other monitors that are on the market besides the stanard CRT that is on your desktop. There are flat screens, displays for laptops, projectors, little PDA screens, etc. etc.
 
• Flat Panel screens
• LCD displays - used for laptops and other small flat displays such as a digital watch. These monitors can display colors, but on smaller displays like a watch the color eats up the battery life too quickly.
• LCD displays are making a big push in the regular monitor market. Flat panel displays have become a large part of the monitor market, partly because the price has dropped considerably over the last year, plus the resolution and overall picture quality has become much better in the last year or so. The fact that LCD display takes up about a third of the room as a traditional monitor is a huge push in the popularity.
  • LCD stands for liquid crystal display and that is how the data is displayed. Liquid crystals between two sheets of glass. Electricity is used to energize the crystals so they allow more or less light through.
• Gas Plasma screens - These are usually larger screens, they use gas instead of the liquid crystals, but the technology is similar.
• HDTV - (High definition television) this is a new technology that some televison and cable companies (not many) are now broadcasting their programs on. It's digital. As the cost comes down look for HDTV's to be a televison set and a computer monitor.

Video Cards

The quality of the output for your computer is dependent on the quality of your video card as it is of your monitor.

A video card is enhancement card that usually plugs straight into one of the enhancement slots on the Motherboard.

• The monitor plugs directly into the video card.
• The video card takes the digital signal and changes it to an analog signal for the monitor.
• Today most video cards are equipped with their own memory, called VRAM or video ram. A good video card can have up to 64MBs of memory dedicated just to displaying graphics or 3D material.
• Some video cards have their own chipset and memory. Some fancy games will say ":this game is optimized for 3Dfx" What that means is some video cards have a built-in processor called 3Dfx that allows many of the math intensive 3D caculations to be done in the hardware of the video card instead of the main CPU.
•  A good 3D display card with memory and it's own chipset is about $120.00 to $350.00
• Video cards can plug into the regular PCI enhancement slot or some are called AGP graphics cards. Most motherboards now have a dedicated enhancement slot for graphic cards called a AGP (Accellerated Graphics Port).

Other Output devices

• Data Projectors - these are take the computer screen image and display them on a wall or big screen of some kind. We have two in the CS department. They have the capability to hook a monitor off of them so while the crowd is watching your presentation on the big screen you can be sitting at a normal monitor working the mouse. They usually don't have a real high resolution capability. You can also hook up television or VCR's to them. In the summer I take our's home and have a drive-in movie party in my backyard, I shine it on the back of my house.
• Fax machines -  many computers have the capability to receive faxes and print them out over the printer. Some newspapers can now deliver the newspaper this way.

Terminals

• A terminal is a device that performs both input and ouput because it consists of a monitor, keyboard and video card.
• Dumb Terminal -  has no processing power, and thus, cannont function as an independent device, it sends data to a host computer somewhere.
• Smart Terminal - has memory and processing power, although usually limited. They are usually programmed to do some limited tasks locally and then the data after being slightly manipulated locally gets sent to the host computer.
• POS - Point of Sale - These are used to record sales at the terminal, they will read the bar code, act as a cash register.
• ATM (Automatic Teller Machines) - The college students best friend is considered a terminal (smart terminal).