Page 120 - DCAP303_MULTIMEDIA_SYSTEMS

Multimedia Systems

notes of light must “converge” accurately on the screen. Setup, focusing, and aligning are important
to getting a clear and crisp picture. The CRT projectors are compatible with the output of most
computers as well as televisions.
The LCD panels are portable devices that fit in a briefcase. The panel is placed on the glass surface
of a standard overhead projector available in most schools, conference rooms and meeting halls.
While they overhead projectors do the projection work, the panel is connected to the computer
and provides the image, in thousands of colours and, with active-matrix technology, at speeds
that allow full-motion video and animation. Since LCD panels are small, they are popular for
on-the-road presentations, often connected to a laptop computer and using a locally available
overhead projector.
More complete LCD projection panels contain a projection lamp and lenses and do not recover
a separate overheads projector. They typically produce an image brighter and shaper than the
simple panel model, but they are somewhat large and cannot travel in a briefcase.
Light-valves complete with high-end CRT projectors and use a liquid crystal technology in which
a low-intensity colour image modulates a high-intensity light beam. These units are expensive,
but the image from a light-valve projector is very bright and colour saturated can be projected
onto screen as wide as 10 metres.

6.5.6 printers
With the advent of reasonably priced colour printers, hard-copy output has entered the multimedia
scene. From storyboards to presentation to production of collateral marketing material, colour
printers have become an important part of the multimedia development environment. Colour
helps clarify concepts, improves understanding and retention of information, and organizes
complex data. As multimedia designers already know intelligent use of colours is critical to the
success of a project. Tektronix offers both solid ink and laser options, and either Phases 560 will
print more than 10000 pages at a rate of 5 colour pages or 14 monochrome pages per minute
before requiring new toner.
Epson provides lower-cost and lower-performance solutions for home and small business users;
Hewlett Packard’s Colour LaserJet line competes with both. Most printer manufactures offer
a colour model-just as all computers once used monochrome monitors but are now colour, all
printers will become colour printers.

Customer Success Story—Fairfield Industries

n keeping with their agenda to deliver the highest quality geophysical services to their
customers, on time and within budget, Fairfield was one of the early adopters of high-
Iperformance, parallel computing. They built one of the industry’s first production-grade,
Linux clusters for seismic data processing, designing and building their cluster from scratch.
Fairfield called out the specifications, computing platforms, and microprocessors needed to
do the job. This approach gave the company a business-competitive edge over other seismic
imaging vendors because it allowed Fairfield to fine-tune processing operations to achieve
the highest I/O performance, and tailor algorithms and software applications specifically to
the requirements of its oil and gas customers.

The early Fairfield Linux cluster relied on small computer system interface (SCSI)-based,
RAID systems that were attached to workstations with NFS-supported storage. According
to Richard Rowbatham, Systems Administrator at Fairfield, “The storage was the size of a
Contd...

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