SIGGRAPH 2005

By David Em, Alex Pournelle

August 22, 2005

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SIGGRAPH is the world's biggest digital imaging conference. This year the annual show drew over 29,000 scientists, programmers, artists, and filmmakers from all over the world.

Every SIGGRAPH presents a smorgasbord of papers and panels that range from the ultra-geeky ("Out-of-core tensor approximation of multi-dimensional matrices of visual data") to the mundane ("Designing Computer Graphics Courses for Distance Learning"). At night, SIGGRAPH morphs into a nonstop round of parties in nearby hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, and special venues.

In years past, SIGGRAPH was the place to see what literally had never been seen before by human eyes, such as fully articulated computer-animated characters, or convincing virtual fur on a digital teddy bear. Most of the advances we saw at SIGGRAPH 2005 were more incremental than revolutionary, more like a Comdex of a few years back than anything else. But there's still a dance in the old dame yet—a few developments took us into new territory.

An Eye Popping Display

The most impressive thing we saw this year wasn't a radical new animation technique or photorealistic rendering algorithm. It was an LCD panel, NEC's new 21-inch SpectraView LCD2180WG LED—rolls trippingly off the tongue, doesn't it? As its name implies, the 2180WG uses an LED backlight instead of a fluorescent one, and the results are spectacular.

The 2180WG sets a new standard for image clarity, producing brilliant detailed images that surpass any CRT or flat panel we've ever seen. More important is its ultra-wide color gamut that encompasses more than 100 percent of the Adobe RGB and NTSC color spaces. This is what all digital artists, designers, filmmakers, and other creative imaging pros have been demanding for years.

Now when you take a picture with a digital camera, for example, you'll be able to see exactly what the camera captured on your screen, not a truncated representation that's missing twenty-five percent or more of the color information.

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