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The Matrox Parhelia HR256 board
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Although we pride ourselves on bringing you reviews of the latest consumer products, every now and again something arrives at our door that is a little special. In this case, it’s an LCD monitor that quite frankly puts everything we’ve seen so far to shame.

At first glance you might be mistaken in thinking that the VP2290b is just a chunky widescreen 22.2in TFT display but at the centre of the dark grey chassis is a 9.2 megapixel LCD manufactured by IDTech.

Yes, I did say 9.2 megapixel, which gives you four times the pixel density that you’d expect from a 1,920 x 1,200 display. In other words, the VP2290b is capable of running a maximum resolution of 3,840 x 2,400 otherwise known as QUXGA-Wide.

Now, in my book, that is a dream resolution to work with especially when image manipulation is the focus of your work. For me, I would love to edit and correct my photographs on this display purely because there is so much desktop space. For instance, I could easily display, at full resolution, the RAW images captured with my camera’s 6.29 million pixel CMOS sensor. No need to use the zoom tool here - just the complete picture in all its glory at my finger tips!

Obviously the VP2290b is a specialist display that’s not really aimed at your average consumer. The £4,641.25 price tag is enough to tell you that. However, it is aimed at the professional imaging market where analysis of high-resolution imagery is key. You know the stuff. Satellite reconnaissance, space exploration, CAD, GIS, medical/science imaging, and so on.

Of course, for text work you might as well forget it. The font size is simply too small to comfortably work with, although I have to say it is still pin sharp. To get around this you can run a second lower resolution display alongside the VP2290b that can display your imaging software and thereby carry all the programs’ toolbars, while at the same time viewing the full resolution image you’re working with on the VP2290b. Alternatively, you can increase the size of the screen fonts or use the DPI setting in Windows to scale up the screen items to a larger size. However, this will not always work smoothly with some applications.

In the said dual display arrangement, though, you will typically require two graphics cards, which is why Matrox, one of the few companies that offer a card (the PCI-enabled Matrox Parhelia HR256) capable of running this display, can also offer a second standard AGP-enabled Parhelia for exactly this purpose. You may be able to run another manufacturer's card for the second display but using a second Matrox card ensures full driver compatibility.

However, for the purpose of this review, ViewSonic kindly popped over to our offices with the VP2290b hooked up to a single Parhelia HR256 in order to demonstrate the display.

Right, before I go onto the VP2290b’s performance you may want know how this display actually works. Well without getting too bogged down in the details, let’s begin with saying it’s not your typical “plug in one cable and you’re off” display. In fact, around the back behind a couple of removeable panels are a pair of dual TMDS DVI-D ports which have to be connected in the correct order using the two DVI cables provided by Matrox. These cables both come with 60-pin LFH-60 connectors at each end which support two DVI cannels, the reason for which will become clear later. Once these are in place, it’s just a question of installing the driver CD and running the setup program.

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