Opinions On How Long Till Widescreen Fully Rugged?

As I have been reading I see alot of pressure is being put upon Panny for widescrren use in thier Semi, Business rugged models. I am curious as too what your thoughts are on when they will have developed a widescreen for the Fully Rugged. There are not very many manufactors out there that build the 4.3 aspect, or easier to say, the type of screen in the 30, 29 30 models. Screens are the one of few parts that Panny sources out. Thank God.

There has too be a price to where Panny will have to decide that it does not make business sense anymore. I am sure the manufactures are tired of keeping this technology around just for 1 manufacture, hence raising the price.

 

Well this is one instance that I wish the 13" screens WOULD become obsolete and force panasonic to move to something bigger. Heck I'm not being picky, I'd take a regular square 15" screen, doesn't necessarily have to be widescreen..

 

Well Seems motorola has one of its rugged notebooks with a widescreen now. I wonder how long until panasonic does the same.

-James

 

You are starting to see some of their models go to wide screen with the CF-52 which replaced the hard to find 4:3 15" screen and the new F8. It will not be any time before 2010 until the possibility of a fully rugged wide screen. Some many of their customers use the CF-30/CF-29/CF-28 in vehicle port replicators and all those would need to be replaced if they went with a wide screen and a larger foot print.

 

For me, the larger footprint is a concern. It would be akin to mounting my 15" Macbook Pro in the car which, width-wise is over an inch wider than the CF-29. In a car, an inch is a big deal.

I tried using my Fujitsu 5032D Tablet in the car. "Ruggedized" with the Otterbox 4600 it became much too top-heavy (for mounts designed for it) for vehicle use. Its added width also had problems with adequate space for the wiper control (or column shifters for some) as well as passenger airbag deployment zone.

 

My $2/100ths, the wide screens distort charts, maps, and CAD images in a very disconcerting way. I'm happy with the current format until the software I use can distinguish the difference and self correct.
Cap

 

How does it distort? It's not like stretching a 4:3 picture to fit a widescreen TV?

... I guess the software just doesn't know what widescreen "1440x900" means? wierd, I've never heard of that before.

 

The problem is when you run land mapping or marine charts at full screen.
They are distorted as they were originally designed to run on 4:3 aspect ratio screens
You can eliminate the distortion by resizing the window
But overall picture hight is the most important consideration for charts or maps
The reason is that you have more area on the top of the display in comparison to 16:9
Then you can see more of the chart or map, you don’t need the extra view on the side as usually the maps don’t scroll sideways, you usually scroll up





Alex

 

Canuckcam,
Actually, the maps and charts are stretched horizontally. It is disconcerting as the distortion is great enough to be obvious and when you have been looking at maps and charts as long as I have it just don't seem right. Think of looking at a map of Utah where the state is half again as wide as it is tall and you might see what I mean.
Cap

 

Hi,
This is an interesting discussion. My Maptech mapping software seems to handle both normal and widescreen formats properly. This means there is no distortion in either case.

I was afraid I would have this problem when I installed my dual wide screen monitors on my desktop machine recently. But, the software can utilize the dual screen mode thus doubling the size of the viewable map area without changing the scale. I can change the size of the view by dragging the edges to view any size.

Additionally, the 3D view works with which I have had troubles in the past. All in all, I have gained a very neat capability with the dual wide screens.

On my CF-29, with the exteranl Garmin GPS interfaced, the Maptech's tracking feature keeps the proper map on screen to show the current vehicle location at all times. A wider screen would be nice but it is not essential. Since my Jeep is very space limited, I really prefer the smaller footprint.

Sparky

 

Interesting. It's as if the software doesn't know how to resize windows properly? It's like us getting annoyed when people stretch non-widescreen video to fill up a widescreen TV. heh.

I always thought that resizing a window wouldn't stretch things. Like putting full-screen on your browser - it would just have a lot of blank space on the sides. wierd.