Autah-gr.389 net.games utzoo!decvax!harpo!utah-cs!utah-gr!thomas Wed May 5 10:26:21 1982 Re: color displays 1. Evans and Sutherland manufacture the Picture System 2 color display, which uses a standard color tv display, but which is a vector drawing device. This is then a 'full range, 3 color' vector display. 2. If a display does not flicker with a low complexity image, but does flicker with a more comples image, then it is almost certainly a vector display. The rate of raster refresh does not change with image complexity. 3. Assuming sufficient resolution in the display tube, a vector display will always look better than a raster display (without anti-aliasing), at least at current display resolutions. Once we get up to 4k x 4k or so, this may not be true because the display resolution will exceed that of the eye at normal viewing distances, but theoretically, lines drawn on a raster display (again, without anti-aliasing) will always look 'jaggy', as opposed to the smooth lines obtainable on a vector display. The TEMPEST game which started this whole discussion has a fairly coarse resolution color tube, the stripes of color in the trinitron tube make it look like a raster display. This fooled me at first. 4. A vector display always has an upper limit on the number of vectors it can display without flicker. A raster display is limited only by the number of vectors which can be resolved (i.e., you put too many vectors on a raster display and you just get an indistinguishable blob). =Spencer (harpo!utah-cs!thomas thomas@utah-20) ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.