What's the deal with 30" cinema displays?

I always thought you needed dual DVis to support the 30" display. I've just read the Macbook Pro will support it from one. Is this right? What about the Mac Pro? Can you have one 30" per graphics card?

You need a dual-link DVI port, which the MacBook Pro has. It has more holes than a basic DVI. The Mac Pro has various video cards. IIRC, the base card has one dual-link and one single-link, and the upgrade cards have two dual-links.

With the Mac Pro you can add as many 30" displays as you can dual link graphics cards.

that equals a lot of monitors

i wonder when it it just smarter to hook it up to an lcd tv

Ah so a MBP can do a 30" then.

Is it possible to split the DVI on a MBP and have say dual 23" cinema displays?

You could use something like this, but it's only VGA at the moment:

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/gxm/products/dh2go/home.php

Would this work?

http://www.homestead.co.uk/productcategorydetail.aspx?categoryid=53802

That would probably work, but you would only have the same picture on both monitors.. which is probably not the point.