Seventeen years ago:
These low-resolution (1280×768) displays were tweaked during coronapanic by adding touch sensitvity (a mixed blessing in a machine that is subject to turbulence), but essentially Garmin has been offering the same system for 17 years… until today. The web site for Garmin AXIS doesn’t offer any resolution spec in pixels, which is disturbing, and it continues to mention panning and zooming (not the best activity for a pilot trying to control aircraft attitude!). Maybe Garmin actually hasn’t caught up to 1080p, a place that HTC managed to get for its Android phones in 2012.
Why does an airplane need box after box of avionics given that a modern smartphone has an AHRS, a GPS, multiple radios, a high-res display, a massive database of charts, and nearly everything else that anyone would want in an aircraft panel? I haven’t made it all the way through the 23-minute launch video, but I don’t think resolution is mentioned:
For those of us limping along with late-1990s Garmin 430s, the beauty of this new Garmin system is that the capabilities of the insanely expensive and absurdly low-res GTN750Xi nav/com (about $25,000 installed; offers to show approach plates, but they’re unreadable) are folded into the back of the display. It looks as though the financial savings could be significant. The PFD with all of the features of the GTN750Xi is priced at roughly the same cost as the GTN750Xi. From Sarasota:
Presumably two of these “fattened displays” would be required for a Cirrus or similar “real IFR” aircraft so as to have a backup GPS, 2nd COM, etc.
This is, of course, ugly news for Brand A. Avidyne only a year ago got its retrofit reasonably-modern larger-but-low-res PFD/MFD certified. The Avidyne system needs high-cost high-bulk connector-rich separate nav/coms, which Garmin has now folded into the backs of their PFD/MFD.
Update: I found the resolution in pixels in the manual. It is 1080p, 1920×1080 pixels, a huge upgrade from the G500TXi and also much higher resolution than Avidyne’s Vantage. If 1080p has arrived in $60,000 aircraft panels 21 years after arriving in consumer living rooms and 14 years after arriving in consumers’ pockets (HTC Android phone), does that mean the dawn of 8K TVs is near? It’s tough to imagine that aviation isn’t at least two generations behind what consumers can buy for $500.
Amazon will deliver an 8K TV right now for $2300:
If we consider $1,000 to be the post-Bidenflation equivalent of $500, maybe it will be 2027 before 8K TVs, two generations ahead of these $20,000 Garmin displays, have come down enough to create a conventional split in price. (How much more general and video-related computing power do we think an 8K TV has compared to all of the computers in a glass panel aircraft put together?)