A serious proportion of the computer users I know these days have gone multi-monitor. While I strongly recommend the 30" monitor (Dell 3007WFP and cousins or Apple) which I have to everybody, at $1000 it's not the most cost effective way to get a lot of screen real estate. Today 24" 1080p monitors are down to $200, and flat panels don't take so much space, so it makes a lot of sense to have two monitors or more.

Except there's a big gap between them. And while there are a few monitors that advertise being thin bezel, even these have at least half an inch, so two monitors together will still have an inch of (usually black) between them.

I'm quite interested in building a panoramic photo wall with this new generation of cheap panels, but the 1" bars will be annoying, though tolerable from a distance. But does it have to be?

There are 1/4" bezel monitors made for the video wall industry, but it's all very high end, and in fact it's hard to find these monitors for sale on the regular market from what I have seen. If they are, they no doubt cost 2-3x as much as "specialty" market monitors. I really think it's time to push multi-monitor as more than a specialty market.

I accept that you need to have something strong supporting and protecting the edge of your delicate LCD panel. But we all know from laptops it doesn't have to be that wide. So what might we see?

• Design the edges of the monitor to interlock, and have the supporting substrate further back on the left and further forward on the right. Thus let the two panels get closer together. Alternately let one monitor go behind the other and try to keep the distance to a minimum.
• Design monitors that can be connected together by removing the bezel and protection/mounting hardware and carefully inserting a joiner unit which protects the edges of both panels but gets them as close together as it can, and firmly joins the two backs for strength. May not work as well for 2x2 grids without special joiners.
• Just sell a monitor that has 2, 3 or 4 panels in it, mounted as close as possible. I think people would buy these, allowing them to be priced even better than two monitors. Offer rows of 1, 2 or 3 and a 2x2 grid. I will admit that a row of 4, which is what I want, is not likely to be as big a market.
• Sell components to let VARs easily build such multi-panel monitors.

When it comes to multi-panel, I don't know how close you could get the panels but I suspect it could be quite close. So what do you put in the gap? Well, it could be a black strip or a neutral strip. It could also be a translucent one that deliberately covers one or two pixels on each side, and thus shines and blends their colours. It might be interesting to see how much you could reduce visual effect of the gap. The eye has no problem looking through grid windows at a scene and not seeing the bars, so it may be that bars remain the right answer.

It might even be possible to cover the gap with a small thin LCD display strip. Such a strip, designed to have a very sharp edge, would probably go slightly in front of the panels, and appear as a bump in the screen -- but a bump with pixels. From a distance this might look like a video wall with very obscured seams.

For big video walls, projection is still a popular choice, other than the fact that such walls must be very deep. With projection, you barely need the bezel at all, and in fact you can overlap projectors and use special software to blend them for a completely seamless display. However, projectors need expensive bulbs that burn out fairly quickly in constant use, so they have a number of downsides. LCD panel walls have enough upsides that people would tolerate the gaps if they can be made small using techniques above.

Anybody know how the Barco wall at the Comcast center is done? Even in the video from people's camcorders, it looks very impressive.

If you see LCD panels larger than 24" with thin bezels (3/8 inch or less) at a good price (under $250) and with a good quality panel (doesn't change colour as you move your head up and down) let me know. The Samsung 2443 looked good until I learned that it, and many others in this size, have serious view angle problems.