Intuos4 XL (x2) 40" 4K or 27" Apple Display

[hames]

Hello! I'm brand new here, having finally found a community of people doing this stuff, I'm ready to start a build. I'm a former Apple employee and have a variety of iMac and Thunderbolt displays laying around my house with intact LED panels and power supplies.

I also have 2 Intuos4 XL tablets and was very intrigued by woodguy32's Philips 40" solution.

I'm looking for advice around how to either build into a 27" Thunderbolt display with one of the Intuos4 XL's or use both of them as woodguy32 indicated he had for the 40".

I want to lean toward the 40" but would love some guidance as to how to accomplish it as effectively as possible.

Is there anyone who has attempted a build on that scale outside of woodguy32?

I'd really appreciate some guidance!

[Aerendraca]

Things are a little slow on the forum these days, so bare with us.

I've ticked the 40" 4K option mostly for selfish reasons; I want to see it done. There may be factors that mean that you might not be able to do either though, I'll explain a bit later.

The only other person that has tackled a bigger build is DaBotz, who is still active on the forum - possibly more so than most actually. The one thing I would say though is that I think a large 4K might be a pioneering step for the DIY Cintiq community, so expect the unexpected and we will try and give advice where we can. Also, expect to break things. At the level that these screens get stripped back to things get fragile.

Whether or not you can use a screen for a build depends mostly on how the screen was manufactured. If the screen panel has important wires that run across the back of it (which cannot be extended), that's game over from the off. Other factors include the mysterious jitters, this is where the screen circuitry interferes with the tablet and causes the mouse cursor to bounce around and sometimes randomly click. Some screens are worse than others, there are no lists of which work and which don't (there's too many and the community is too small), so you undertake the project at some risk. That said, you can get a good idea of how good things are likely to be by stripping the panel back and placing it on the tablet directly - you are likely to see some jitters since there will be little to no shielding, but with any luck the movement will be small and with no random clicks. Following on from this, the thickness of the panel with the backlight may simply be too large for the tablet signal to penetrate, testing at this stage will let you know (but don't forget to include a protective layer over the panel in your calculations). From memory I think there is about 10 - 14mm depending on the tablet.

Oh, the other thing about the screen panel is that you have to remove any metal backing that might be present; for some screens this is straight forward, for others not so much. Any metal behind the screen blocks the radio signals from the tablet in that region, simple as that.

I'm sure you're probably getting the idea at this point that you will need to be a patient person with some decent experience of building stuff. Don't let any of this put you off, go for it and good luck!

 

[Ertew]

First, chose slim display. Second, chose single tablet.

1. Chose thin display with backlight hidden on the edges - standard for tablets and smaller screens.
There are also thick displays with light source are hidden on the back of LCD. Some of these models have "local dimming" - backlight are divided into sestions and controlled independently. That type of backlight makes display impossible to modify because thickness of backlight module.

2. You cannot connect two tablets to make one bigger. You can place two tablets close but there bust be small gap between. If no, interferences between tablets will occurs.
If You want to draw on half of display and have images, toolbars, settings, etc on second half - OK. If You want to draw in the middle - forget about it.

[DaBotz]

I would counsel going with the 27...

Builds with screen much bigger than the tablet active area (on all sides) tend to be remarkably jitter-free, as the T-Con board and the discontinuity added by the LCD borders can be kept out of the way.

http://forum.bongofish.co.uk/index.php?topic=2218.0 (this uses an Intuos 4)

http://forum.bongofish.co.uk/index.php?topic=2458.0 (this uses an Intuos 2)

On the other hand, as Ertew notes, the best cover for a 40" 4k is using the two digitizer placed verticals, with a "respect band" between their active areas (even in the best case scenario, you can't go below the width of one "digitizer border" of distance between the two, by overlapping a pcb to the other, with in the middle a grounded metal strip to intercept the mutual interferences; in the worse case, the "side band" interferences are strong enough that not only no overlap of the PCBs is possible, but rather the boards must be kept completely separated).

In this configuration, the screen is only slightly taller than the boards active areas ( by half an inch), which means that the T-Con board would lay directly above some the digitizer antennas, who would pick up its em fields (and RF-Cage would be needed almost for sure) and -thus - add jitter.

The "dead area" in the middle is not avoidable, and means that one must chose one of the two sides as "drawing area", and leave the other for palettes and auxiliary windows.

Now, I use two builds in a similar way -  a slightly jittery 21.5" as main drawing board, and a pretty precise 9.7" on its right side as palette screen.

The two screens are separated by about 6 cm of distance  (2,5") -  and it is already a bit of a bother.

More importantly, even if I sometimes desire to place them together in a single case, the truth is that I still rather have the small one able to be tilt in my direction, and so reduce perspective aberration and parallax when my head is above the drawing screen, rather than a more elegant, flusher (but, actually, less functional) solution.

- Truth is, it already is a bit distant from my drawing station as it is.

In a 40" with digitizers as near as possible, the situation would be similar but there also would be no way to tilt half of the screen in the user's direction.    

As for placing the two digitizers near the LCD borders, with only one big "dead area" in centre...

if 2" are already a bother, 10" would be unbearable.

In conclusion, while the 40" would look amazing, I am not sure that drawing on it would be all that fun.

Note: edited for slight orthography and language fixes.