[As I’m writing this post, the news comes in that Skype HD videoconferencing will be built into TV sets starting this year. This is exactly what I’m talking about in this post as opening up all sorts of new possibilities.]
Let’s compare some prices for flat-panel displays (from Dell, cheapest available alternative chosen):
| August 2004 | January 2010 | |
|---|---|---|
| 20 inch | $719 | $149 |
That means prices have dropped by about 33% a year. This trend may not continue all the way to 2020, but it’s clear that high-resolution screens will continue to be in abundant supply at ever-lower prices. There is a separate trend to ever-large living room TV sets, but in this post, I’m focusing on ever-cheaper screens at about that 20-in size.
We have about two dozen picture frames in our house, of the wood-and-cardboard variety, most of which show enlarged photographs that I shot at some time or other. Most of the pictures are years old, as I’m just too lazy and cheap to get newer pictures enlarged and hung up. More than half of those picture frames are about the size of that 20-inch screen. I just checked, a comparable-size picture frame that looks half-reasonable costs about $30, plus $15 for the picture to be printed at that format.
It appears to me that once 20-inch screens are available at less than $100 (and networking has been sorted out, a subject for a separate post), a gigantic new market opens up for display manufacturers: replace all the picture frames in all houses with digital versions.
That potential market is something like a dozen time larger than the market for PC monitors or even TV sets, so you can bet that screen manufacturers will go after it with force, and certainly before 2020.
Note what I have in mind here is a different thing than the cute little digital picture frame thingies that also want to be your MP3 player and only take SD Cards so you never know what they will show when you put one in. I’m talking about real displays with multi-megapixel resolution that you would not mind sitting in front of for a whole day. That can display fast-moving graphics. And, most of all, that are networked.
Imagine your house or apartment with all your pictures frames replaced with high-resolution monitors in the same place and with the same form factor. Initially, they show the exact same pictures. But they can and will change … some fast, some slow:
- the picture at the breakfast table automatically shows you financial news at breakfast time, but that gorgeous shot from top of Half Dome the rest of the day
- the picture frame over the fireplace in your family room has always-on videoconferencing (per Skype’s announcement today) with your kids’ grandparents
- a picture frame in your office switches between the breaking news affecting your company and the snow forecast for skiing on the weekend
- the picture frame in the hallway is pulling new pictures off the internet of the grand square in Marrakech that you would love to visit on an upcoming vacation
- of course, so many picture frames show stills that you took, automatically taken from wherever your store your pictures, like the AppleTV does, or Roku (side note: the screen saver on our AppleTV has done probably more than anything else to convince me that you want your photographis to be around you at all times, not just when you open the album or run the software)
- another picture frame slowly cycles through the pictures taking by your closest friends and family
- the small picture frame on your way out to the garage shows you, in the morning, today’s schedule
- the one in your bedroom shows new acquisitions from the local museum, a different one every week, with a focus on Fresh impressionists, say
- if you are so inclined, the one in the kitchen one shows you today’s specials at Fry’s (or your local butcher).
Of course, all of this can be done technically today on your PC’s screen, and perhaps on your TV’s screen, and so this is a very easy prediction. But things change very fundamentally once it moves off your highly contested PC monitor real estate or main TV real estate, to a dozen or more locations around your house that are just made for showing pictures. (We can be sure of that, you hung pictures up in that very spot!) It totally changes your house. It totally changes your relationship to things outside of the house. It would be like you have new windows in your house, each of which tunnels a view to a totally different neighborhood, in real-time if you so like. Who needs the PC to interact with the world? The world is coming to your house.
This kind of environment will pose some rather interesting challenges for hardware and software architecture, as well as for usability, and I’ll post about those some other day. But it also opens up a lot of possibilities, technically and commercially.
P.S. I would not be surprised if Apple made the first baby steps towards those with the rumored Apple tablet. Tablet == portable networked picture frame with touch screen? Would not be a bad market entry product for this kind of vision…
Update 2010-01-06: LG today announced a screen only 7 mm thick. That’s better than my picture frames!
Comments
3 responses to “High-Resolution Screens Everywhere”
A few thoughts, worth what you paid for ’em, and I am not a market sample:
A good portion of the stuff on my wall is printed from large format photography, or oil paintings. Even of the snapshots printed off 35mm, though, photo frames have a long way to go to match that image quality (72 or 96DPI doesn’t come close to an image that’ll still have interesting detail when viewed with a loupe, though once they hit 300 DPI or so I’ll probably get one), and then have the problem of needing cords, constant power, and lighting up the room when we go to bed (we’ve got a Chumby that does a slideshow while it’s serving as our music source, in the living room).
On the other hand, we’re also the sort of people who don’t watch much TV and for whom hiding the TV and big displays is worth some effort.
I wonder if the 3d thing is a fad, or whether after we get sick of wearing goggles, the lenticular displays will hit the market and become affordable. I’d guess the latter. I don’t know what 3d, at least from some views, will mean for video.
Finally, we’re actually, I think, going the other way: We have a TV, though on my list is to build a set of doors to hide it, and my office has a few fixed displays, which are usually turned off, but we mostly interact with laptops. However, temper that with the fact that we’re consistently shocked when we go to other people’s houses and see that they have the TV on as background noise.
My examples are just meant to be examples that get people to start thinking about what this could mean … a spark for thought, not the ultimate answer. So yes, there will be many better uses, most of which none of us will guess correctly at this time.
And yes, I will get to mobile devices some time down the road … one of my points will be interaction between a mobile device and the world around it, which is why I’m talking about “fewer PCs” and “more displays” first, which are part of the world around it …
I don’t think specific interactions you describe will be typically triggered in that way. I think we’ll still initiate such tasks on a whim, wherever we happen to be, using whatever mobile device is at hand.
I don’t doubt that we’ll have lots more digital displays on the walls of our homes, offices, cars, wherever. And they’ll do smarter stuff than just rotate through canned photos. And they’ll change their behavior based on context, like time of day, who is walking by, and whether there’s a tornado warning in effect.
But the examples you chose are too specific, I think. Most specific tasks will still be done in the hand.
Now, let’s talk about what that mobile device will look like! I sure don’t think it’ll cost $500 to manufacture or be tied to an individual or a “carrier” (ptui!). Rather, the devices will be cheap and plentiful. We’ll leave them lying around in whatever state they were in when we were distracted. When we remember the task we left, we’ll pick up another nearly identical device, speak a few words, and the whole context of our task will jump right over to the “new” device so we can carry on!
There will still be mobile devices optimized to particular tasks (e-paper for e-books, hi-rez color for entertainment), but if the optimized device isn’t handy, we’ll just use a less ideal device to carry on until it is.
James Fallows recently wrote a bit about the question of all-in-one vs. optimized devices:
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/11/all-in-one_finale.php