ideas for > 15 monitors?

[minsc_tdp]

I'm looking for a way to output something around 6600x5100 resolution from a single PC, spread out across many monitors (maybe 20 displays.)

An important requirement is that there be a single desktop for the entire resolution, so that a window can be resized to fit the entire screen.

The reason is that we have a printer emulator and we want to show that it's truly rendering 600x600 at 8.5x11 by showing every pixel, instead of having to show it at 15% zoom all the time (or showing 15% of the page at 100% zoom).

I've tried many virtual desktop applications to start and they are all very, very flawed in this regard. It's been a while since I've tried so I don't remember all the ones I used. I did find one obscure app that successfully resized my desktop to this size, with panning, but individual windows could not be resized any larger than the monitor's actual resolution of 1280x1024. The author knew about this, a Windows limitation.

Other OSs are fine as our simulation is pretty easy to port.

[pissboy]

I'm not sure if you're looking for a hardware solution or software. Ultramon is a great multihead app: http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/

If you're looking for a hardware solution, I'd suggest the Matrox MMS line. I'm not sure about the limitations now, but with the G200 MMS the drivers were natively scalable up to 16 heads, with hardware overlay availible across the entire array. The analog outputs on that particular card are availible up to 1920x1200, or up to 1280x1024 on the DVI. For an array of 4x4 screens you would have 16 screens and a usable resolution of 7680x4800 or 5120x4096. I do know they have newer solutions availible, but 4 of the G200MMS should run you about $300-400 on ebay.

With their G450MMS series the resolution jumped up to 2048x1536 per analog head, also with support for 4 adapters per system. On the DVI side, the limitation is again 1280x1024 (5120x4096). With analog this card would give you a total of *gulp* 8192x6144 usable. The G450MMS cards are a bit pricier.

[BlueBiker]

Nobody would put together a whole wall of monitors to do this. If your purpose is pixel-level verification, that's obliterated by all of the bezels between the individual displays, and it's extremely cumbersome where much simpler solutions exist.

Just get one or a pair of 3840x2400 IBM T210 or Viewsonic VP2290 LCD panels off eBay with appropriate video card and call it a day. Linux/Xorg has very flexible multi-monitor support, but be aware that the nVidia Xorg driver has some 4k window size limitations which might(?) also apply to Windows.

Besides, the way to do output verification isn't by visual inspection anyway, it's by programmatically comparing the printer emulator's generated bitmaps to known good images accumulated in a series of regression tests.

IMHO, you're going way off in the wrong direction to solve the problem you stated. Just my $0.02.