Video Monitor Hardware

This chapter discusses some of the characteristics of video monitors such as screen sizes, resolution, raster graphics and vector graphics. Flat panel displays are rapidly catching up to cathode ray tubes in their acceptance in the control room. A liquid crystal display technique in which the pixels on a screen are controlled by voltage signals applied in rows and columns. Reflective visual readout of alphanumeric characters are generally of two types: passive-matrix displays and active-matrix displays, which refer to how pixels in display are controlled. MultiMedia eXtension (MMX) involves a processing trick known as “single instruction, multiple data,” that enables the MMX chip to package and process many pieces of information as one value rather than in a one-at-a-time sequence that could cause bottlenecks. Random access memory with parallel-to-serial conversion is used for generating video display signals.