Winmonitors are here

Yesterday, I was checking monitors in a store. One was really standing out. It had a nice kinda Mac perl finish and the picture quality was really somptuous. It tilted back and forward until the screen laid flat and could even be rotated 270 degrees. And, for a 19", it was really cheap: $300 ! I certainly would have bought it if it hadn't been for a little detail: it had only an on-off switch, no other adjustment.

So I asked a salesman to explain what was this strange monitor with only an on-off switch. He looked at me in disbelief and, soon as he was near the monitor, began running his hands behind it and on the stand and everywhere: nothing!

I noted the model and, soon as I was home, I checked on Samsung site:

It's a winmonitor! The adjustments are much more precise than on an ordinary monitor. Some can even be made on only part of the picture!

I had often wondered why monitor manufacturers hadn't built this kind of monitor before. Why pay for switches that can break when all the switches you need are on a mouse. And adjusting a monitor once in a while doesn't require much processing power...

In the present struggle to bring the prices down, I can't see how other manufacturers could not follow suite. Samsung's new monitors all seem to run this software...

So, if Linux wants to make it on the desktop, it better make it fast, so that deals can be made with monitors manufacturers. It's getting late. For the time being, the instruction manual explains that the monitor may be used with Linux: all there is to do is modify the XF86Config file. Then you get the good refresh rate... but you can't change anything else, not even brightness, contrast or gamma.