The Grand Canyon monitor wall works with a variety of off-the-shelf quad output video cards, including Appian Rushmore, Colorgraphic Xentera GT, Matrox G450 MMS, Nvidia Quadro NVS, and QID Series adapters. At $18,000 for the large Grand Canyon display, it is priced like the great outdoors.

By contrast, Seamless Display's Horizon 320 gangs together three LCD panels but cuts out the bezel between screens, creating a nearly limitless curved viewing space. In fact, rather than even a gap between rows of pixels on adjacent screens, the interface between the individual screens of the Horizon 320 bends the pixel's image path to provide as close to an unbroken image as possible today.

The Horizon 320 itself uses three 20-inch LCDs that are angled at 25 degrees to create a wrap-around display that puts the viewer in the center of the action. It can show a long narrow strip of 3,632 by 1,600 pixels. "Seamless display technology responds to the need to tile LCD screens without the annoying gaps between each screen," according to Duane Nash, CEO of Seamless Display. "The Horizon 320 revolutionizes the multi-screen computing market. It combines high-resolution screens with an angled ergonomic design to allow the user full uninterrupted use of the entire 40-inch screen area."

Even if your favorite workstation application supports multiple monitors, balancing several screens is a hassle. That's where Realtime Soft's UltraMon comes in to help adjust and synchronize the displays. Capable of working with up to 10 individual monitors, UltraMon works with various versions of Windows and can create a large image across many monitors or separate control windows.

Although there's a flexible scripting language, UltraMon automatically gets information from each monitor and lets you adjust and optimize the color-depth and resolution as well as move windows and even treat a monitor as a virtual independent display. A single user license costs $40.

If you're thinking big (really big) think Silicon Graphics' Reality Center, a projector based visualization system that is the ultimate in big screen technology. This video wall is based on an Onyx workstation and SGI's Reality 4 graphics engine to create a huge 15- by 7-foot screen and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Because it uses rear projection, it's all in your face, but you can walk around in front to point things out without creating a shadow. Reality Centers are currently being used by automakers for collaborative design, oil companies to search for new reserves and theatrical museum presentations. AstaZeneca, the European drug conglomerate uses one in its Sodertalje, Sweden's research facility to streamline the way it looks for novel new molecules that might be the next blockbuster medicines. "Reality Center technologies deliver the highest levels of realism, image quality and performance," says Mark Miller, SGI's Region Manager, based in Oslo, Norway. "Scientists, researchers and engineers around the world are finding that, with an SGI Reality Center facility, they are immersed in a virtual environment, allowing exploration, understanding and communication about their data in ways not possible in the physical world."