EEVblog #1215 - $18,000 4K Monitor Teardown From 2001!

The IBM T221 was the world's first 4k monitor. Released in 2001, it was 12 years ahead of the first consumer 4k monitors,
It innovated dual domain IPS LCD display technology.
Teardown time!

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[alchmyau]

"viewer that donated it" .. uh yeah, two old bits of hardware in a row... and no flux capacitor in sight no more...

Daves done it!

[JasonW.]

Biggest way back moment for me in this video:
Back when IBM made things

[ICANanimations]

IBM: We made a monitor that holds up to standards for 20 years.
Youtube: tear it down!

[eav]

OMG you and the community always find the way to blow me away. Thnx to whoever donated it and of course to Dave. Man, so glad that such content exists : ) I don't see that anyone would ever make such videos. History should not be forgotten.

[ramosel]

I worked in IT support for the engineering dept of a fortune 20 company in 2001... we had hundreds of NEC 21" CRT monitors. Then when these came out we got a boat load of Silicon Graphics workstations with custom made video cards (onyx?) and 60 some of the T221s. The SGIs went away quick but the T221s hung around for years. Amazing for their time. designers were taking hi-res pictures out the windows then setting a monitor in the window and adjusting the cameras to get the display to match the outside world.

[vincei]

Thanks for posting this in 4K. It nice to be able to read all the part numbers with such clarity. For someone whose first computer was a ZX81 it's amazing how far we've come.

[snufflebear]

We actually had the IBM and the Viewsonic version in our test lab. The first version was driven by a 4-port Matrox G100, and it actually saw it as 4 different monitors, so it was a little weird when you maximized a window, and it only took up 1/4 of the screen. There were not many video cards that could drive this monitor in it's native resolution. I think it had a refresh rate of like 20Hz.

[NickMurray]

Back in 2003, I had the Viewsonic twin to this, called the VP2290B, it was nothing at all like today's 4K monitors. For a start back when they were released they came with the best multi monitor card of the day the Matrox G400 x 2 (the video card shown here was for much later versions) which was a purely 2D card and it draw the screen by combining 4 panels together (MS Windows thought that 4x monitors connected) which actually worked fine HOWEVER it was a hopeless monitor for anything other editing still photos etc. The refresh rate was so terrible that you could have no movement.

[SilentGamer-jtdl]

Like the clever thumbnail title name " 2001 a 4k odyssey " hahaha great!

[apl]

I remember IBM displayed it at trade shows - and there was a magnifying glass usually tethered to the display case to show the high resolution

[CC-vvne]

Damn, cant imagine driving it.

I got lucky as a teen in early 2000's by getting 1600x1200 100hz crt monitor. used it till 2010 when it died for good

[Nuklen]

I had a crt until like 2006-7, then I got a 1680x1050 LCD. I had no idea insane tech like this was even around back then. The construction of this thing is just insane.

[emmettturner]

That video card says 2009 right on the sticker and it’s obviously not from 2001 or earlier because it’s PCIe. It wasn’t “old-hat” when this monitor was released... it was from the future!

[teuton]

11:12 on the silk screen they even included where they wanted to place the hot snot, brilliant :-)

[kemi]

At the time when this was released I still used an 800x600 CRT display. You sure needed high-end workstation class hardware, and a ton of video memory to drive that.

[aguitarmaker]

Thanks for the memories, Dave! If left the electronics industry in 2001. For most of my career I worked on pro video equipment for broadcast and post-production, so boards like these bring back a feeling of familiarity. For those "bodge wires", we used to call them "kludges", I would use green insulated wire-wrap wire and route them carefully so they were electrically correct but so neat that they looked a lot like another trace. There were times when traces didn't work and we had to hack in some shielded cable to get signals from one place to another on large boards. That monitor is a beautiful piece of gear.

[jimmymifsud]

I’ve seen one of these, well at least a IBM screen used at an Air Force Base for air traffic control, I was told it cost close to $30k for the high resolution

[VisibleReality]

6:03 Dell's 8K monitor takes 2 displayport inputs, if you have 1 it runs at 30hz and if you have 2 it runs at 60hz

[Shamino]

Regarding the need for four DVI cables, that makes perfect sense to me. A single-link DVI cable (which those connectors are) tops out at 165MHz. After subtracting the 8/10b overhead, that means a data rate of about 4Gbit/s.


This is enough to deliver 1920x1200 at 60Hz. but if you want to go to 4K (4x the pixels), you need four links. Had they used dual-link DVI cables (an additional 6 pins between the two groups of 9 seen on a single-link cable), then they could've gotten away with only two cables instead of 4. But it is quite possible that video cards with dual-link connectors on the output side weren't available at the time.


It's also interesting to note that this display was using only 42 Hz refresh (I think that's what you said) with four cables. With four links, DVI can produce 4K at 60Hz, but maybe that was too much for the technology of the day, either in the display or in the video card. And there was probably quite a bit of overhead from needing to sync two video cards together in order to produce four synchronized links.


Great video and thanks for the info. I had no idea such a display even existed until now. Back in 2001, I was still using 17" and 19" CRT monitors, usually driven at 1280x1024 (or a tweaked 1360x1024 in order to get square pixels) over a VGA cable. Occasionally deciding to overdrive the display to 1600x1200 (and putting up with poor image quality because VGA can't really run that fast).

[martinweizenacker]

I was expecting it to be a CRT until the microscope close up revealed it's an LCD.