Widescreen Gaming Forum

Something that bugs me is the lack of any movement in the monitor industry to solve the problem of bezel width in the midst of the growing push from video card manufactures to go multi-screen.

The problem though with bezels is that they are unavoidable given how lcd's are designed. There is always a dead zone around the edge of the lcd that is occupied by PCBs, either rigid of flexible.

The options facing mutli-screen gamers are either live with bezels (which don't seem to be shrinking), or switch to projectors.

The problem I have with projectors are three-fold. 1st, they are expensive to buy or build. 2nd they require extensive and often very inflexible setups and rigs to work correctly. 3rd, they bulbs are expensive short lived consumables that are as expensive as a monitor them selves.

My concept merges the best of both worlds, the setup ease and lifespan of an LCD monitor and the visual appearance of a rear projected image on a bezel-less screen.

The goal of micro-projection is not to blow up the image of an lcd to a 50" or 100" screen size, but instead increase the appearance of the screen only by about 1cm in each direction, just enough to hide the bezel. Or if properly modded down to the stock lcd, only about 2-3mm in each direction.

The components for discussion are the magnification type, lighting strength, housing, and projection screen setup.

I'm currently hypothesizing on using a fresnel magnifier, similar to what you would see the visually impaired using to shroud over their monitors to increase the image size of what is seen. Couple this with a frame constructed to sit atop 3 screens in a surround setup.

I'm hoping to try it out with just the fresnels with the shroud, but might move to a rear screen projection material if it's showing any signs of bezels.

Thoughts?

Very interesting idea.

My first thought is that a LOT of money would need to be invested to get this functional. Then seems like it would be "non-standard" tech that would have to be supported. I may have read wrong, but it almost sounds like you'd be running 5 monitors. Left, center, and right. And then the little projection thingie between left and center, and then another between center and right. That probably gonna to need buy in from graphics card people as well as software people. I certainly think it's doable, I'm just not positive it would be worth it or that you'd get the buy-in from the community that you'd need to support it.

Finally, there is a non-bezel solution already out there... kinda. I don't think they are producing them yet for mainstream use, but Seamless Display does have a virtually zero seem on "three monitors" with 4800x1200 resolution.

Here's a youtube of it in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWivZEtH6-c

If they ever do start selling them I'm sure the price won't be cheap, but the tech does exist for near-zero seem without having to invent anything new and without need to alter how the computer software, gpu, and monitors interact.

Nah, this is simply a hardware modification using a magnification lens, possibly an upgraded light source to increase the projection power, and a reverse projection screen. No more plugs, no more cards, just a little tweaking to hide the bezels.

Nah, this is simply a hardware modification using a magnification lens, possibly an upgraded light source to increase the projection power, and a reverse projection screen. No more plugs, no more cards, just a little tweaking to hide the bezels.

Oh, okay... I misunderstood. You're just talking about tweaking a monitor so that it would appear to be bezel-less. You idea would like like this:

Tweaked Monitor | Tweaked Monitor | Tweaked Monitor

I was thinking you were talking a setup like this:

Normal Monitor | Bezel Hiding device | Normal Monitor | Bezel Hiding device | normal monitor

You are essentially after what Roland van Roy did in his modular simpit.
YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrhGiVl1RNs
Roland's website: http://www.simprojects.nl/

Yea, I was thinking what Jimmy posted or maybe what they do for homemade multi-touch screen (stripping the monitors, putting them in a mount, and having a back light for them).