robin@ccb.ucsf.edu (Robin Colgrove) (04/13/89)
i'm a biochem grad student in charge of my lab's computers and we've gone mac in a big way cuz we live and die by our figures for talks papers etc. anyway, 90% of the zillions of figures we make are of autoradiograms with a surrounding mac-figure pointing out what's going on where. It's a big deal for us to get the figure to line up with the autorad and we rapidly discovered that the most efficient way to do this was to hold the film right up to the screen and draw underneath it. we were delighted to hear about the advent of full page monitors since all our figures are on regular size paper. We figured this would be ideal for us. In reality, the specs are all wrong. how come: 1 full page displays are not quite full page? would it have been really hard to make them a 1/2 inch wider so you could really see the physical page edge? 2 you can't easily rotate the displays from portrait to landscape. I realize this would require a little extra hardware but i've heard so many people ask for this that it certainly seems worth it 3 the pixels are not 72 dpi!? 77 dpi totally screws us up and does not noticeably improve clarity. We could probably live with 75 dpi and it's nice to evenly divide the 300 dpi laser output but why can't we just put it on the screen the size it will be in real life? 4 nobody makes grey-scale anti-aliasing standard to imitate the laser writer output wwith the lower resolution screen? wish list: 9"x12", 72 and/or 75 dpi, rotateable, 8-bit greyscale auto anti-alias Apple, Radius, are you listening? robin disclaimer: i'm just a gene-jockey. what do i know?