Stories about: Video Display

Videoconferencing can be used to slash business travel -- an important consideration as the economy sours and travel costs soar, customers said at Interop this week.

The world of laptops is riven by pulls in two opposite directions. At one pole is the group of users that greatly favors portability. They see in the Apple MacBook Air a thing of beauty, because it's so light and thin; the limitations of an 80GB hard drive, a single USB port, and unchangeable batteries do not disturb them. At the opposite pole are users who favor functionality and don't mind lugging additional weight if it gives them the equivalent of a true desktop environment. Users in the latter group will find much to like in the Dell Precision M6300, which bills itself as a workstation in the form factor of a laptop.

The familiar CRT monitors or backlit LCD screens on our desks continuously consume power in order to hold an image. Electronic paper (e-paper) is different: power is only needed to change the image. Just like paper, e-paper is able to hold the image permanently without consuming any power. Displays using CRT, backlit LCD, plasma and OLED technologies are all emissive, meaning that they have to produce the photons that reach the eye. This implies that they have to compete in brightness with ambient lighting, which can result in eye strain. E-paper is the opposite: it is reflective, which makes it possible to read the display using ambient light even in the brightness of a hot sunny day.

Cisco Systems has announced a system for digital signage that would enable stores to display and update product marketing at checkout lines with the use of digital video display terminals.

In its first foray into the videoconferencing market, Cisco Systems on Monday announced two so-called telepresence systems that it said are capable of supporting conference-room-size areas.

To handle high computing loads in multimedia handsets and smartphones, Texas Instruments plans to build a faster, more efficient family of processors by 2008, the company announced Monday.

IT staffers in the past week have been working to fend off attacks related to the recently disclosed Windows Metafile (WMF) vulnerability. With third-party patches already available, Microsoft released the official patch last Thursday, ahead of its original plan of issuing it on Tuesday of this week, which is when it will release its monthly set of security patches and updates. Computerworld Security channel editor Angela Gunn has put together an extensive FAQ on the vulnerability, how it works, what systems are affected and what you can do about it.

Wyse Technology has released a new version of Linux for its thin client terminals, and a new terminal to run it.

While best known as the sultan of software, Microsoft has teamed up with its interactive television subsidiary WebTV Networks Inc. to develop a chip -- Solo2 -- targeted for improved graphics and video display, according to a Microsoft spokesman. The chip should be available in WebTV's Ultimate TV service by November or December this year, he added.

The Sun Ray thin client harkens back to the old days of mainframe/terminal computing, in which the client is merely an entry point to the applications that run on the server. Indeed, the Sun Ray includes only a video card and a network interface in the terminal. The software on the host Unix system handles all of the processing for the user session, and only pixel changes are sent over the wire to the Sun Ray.

Lugging around a heavy pro-jector for a mobile presentation is nobody's idea of fun. Is a lightweight projector a better option? Macworld Lab looked at seven projectors, each weighing under 10 pounds, and we were pleasantly surprised. All of the projectors offer either outstanding or acceptable image contrast, color, and brightness. Unfortunately, although the projectors are small in size, they're not small in price: they start at $4,999 and climb from there. And it's important to remember that you're paying for weight (or lack of it); these projectors' features can't match those of heavier models.