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Why Are We Losing Vertical Pixels?
An anonymous reader writes "Switching from 1600x1200 to wide 1680x1050 to HD 1600x900, we are losing more and more vertical space, thus it is becoming less and less simple to read a full A4 page or a web page or a function call. What's the solution for retaining the screen height we need to be productive?"
Buy a different monitor or buy two or turn one sideways.
Rotate 90 degrees.
What's happening to this website?!
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Buy a 4:3 display for a development machine?
Turn your monitor sideways. If only all problems were this easy to solve!
if you look at it another way, you can turn your laptop on it's side and you're gaining vertical pixels while losing horizontal ones, make it *better* for reading A4 ;)
My second monitor is on an arm so I can rotate it as needed. It's also handy for showing documents to clients as they can move it around themselves.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Simple solution: use an external monitor rotated 90 degrees.
This depends entirely on the monitor you buy.
I went from a 1600x1200 CRT to 1920x1200 LCD. In other words, I lost no vertical resolution.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
My second screen is tilted 90 degrees. It's great for coding.
I have two 1680x1050 monitors in portrait mode. Works great. Lets me see long blocks of code nicely.
Rotate the screen 90 degrees. I have a coworker who did this with two 5:4 LCDs. Looks funny but it seems to work for him.
Rotate your screen 90. (Most
Now you have more vertical space than ever before!
Um... rotate the screen?
I run 2 1680x1050 monitors, one sitting on it's base naturally and the other rigged onto it's stand rotated portrait. One screen is for play, one is for work.
Your screens are getting more dpi and more inches per screen. You're getting relatively fewer vertical pixels because you're simply getting more horizontal pixels. This is an improvement, especially considering most people don't need tall screens. If you're one of the few who do, do what the guy posted and rotate 90 degrees.
It's nice enough.
As you loosen the screen requirements to a less-stringent format, the vertical pixels flatten since the horizontal pixels cannot support the additional weight.
-AC
Cheapskate consumers should stop buying crappy TV panels that have 1920x1080 resolution.
Of course cheapskate consumers are, on average, idiots and all they see is "ooo Full HD!".
Manufacturers are happy to pump out cheap crap with same panels as on cheap TVs.
You can still get 1920x1200 monitors. You need to pay a premium for them, but if you have ever used both types, you will happily pay it for a far more usable screen.
Is to make sure they are fastened down properly!
Geez, get a new editor!
Starmen.net
Dual monitors. One mounted sideways.
The only real downside here is making background images that span both and line up.
I too had the same complaints when looking for monitors a couple months ago... and no, I didn't end up with a lot of vertical... 1920x1080 (and a 1080x1920).... Horizontally, said monitor is wide enough to view three entire pages in Word, side by side, without wasting space.
I thought HD (1080p) was 1920x1080?
OK, same ratio I guess. Still.
I actually don't need my 24 inch monitor to go much higher, my eyes generally occupy one, comfortable level. If I had a smaller widescreen monitor I can see the argument perhaps, but this is fine.
still heart 800 by 600.
I do see this happening in monitors. Sometimes, what you end up is a computer monitor optimized for movies, but not computer stuff as the pixels are actually wider to fit the screen, instead of being nice square pixels where a circle in the native resolution is actually round. So, it's like "fake" widescreen which is good if you're gonna watch movies but not edit text.
Of course, I'm still trying to figure out why a year after I bought my Acer 23" flatscreen with 1920x1080, I can't even buy the equivalent screen without spending markedly more than I paid for it. Methinks I got a sale that they never intended to happen -- 'cause the specs on my monitor are still hard to find again.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I use three monitors for my development work. One of these monitors is a traditional 4:3 LCD; I use this to refer to longer documents and source code. The other two monitors are my "main" monitors and are identical 1600x1050 native resolution models. I use these for my IDE/editor and debugging panels. It's the perfect setup for me.
Where did this obsession with Widescreen come from anyways? I understand for "widescreen films", but why are all monitors wide now? It's weird that it kind of slowly crept into the norm..
I think this trend has more to do with the size and shape of laptops than anything else. A keyboard and touchpad usually don't need to take up a 4:3 rectangular space, and space is at a premium for laptops.
Or, is that too complicated a solution?
Yes, a sideways monitor is clever everyone. But if you look at the submission rather than the edited entry, he's clearly complaining about laptops. Which, if you turn sideways, are kinda tricky to type on. I guess "get an additional monitor" is legitimate, but it seems like there must be some vendors who are not shrinking their vertical pixel counts.
http://www.len.ro/2010/10/why-am-i-loosing-screen-height-on-each-new-laptop/
Maybe because you haven't tightened it enough?
Living With a Nerd
I totally agree. The amount of vertical space needs to be tighter.
Along with software rotation
http://compreviews.about.com/od/multimedia/ss/Dell2005FPWTour_7.htm
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
The low-end computer monitor market is using commodity HD TV LCD's. The solution is to pony up and buy a middle tier monitor that does proper 1600 x 1200 or something aspect ratio appropriate.
You get what you pay for.
Turn that frown 90 degrees around!
The question: "What's the solution for retaining the screen height we need to be productive?"
Lose Slashdot.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
why is it suddenly so hard to find a laptop with a good screen?
it is nearly impossible to find a laptop with anything other than 1366x768.
my 4 year old 14" dell has a 1440x900 screen and at the time a fairly high end cpu/memory combo (core duo/1gb). I paid $650 for it.
today I can't get a laptop with an equivalent screen for under 850. nearly all laptops don't even offer high res screen options anymore.
just because you can market a 1366x768 screen as HD does not make it good enough. especially if we are talking 17" laptops.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Do your research for this feature and rotate your monitor 90 degrees.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
We're now a culture that prefers consuming the latest HD pulp over reading.
All the monitors are 16x9 now (1920x1080). I have the same problem - I don't want to go "up" to 1920 from 1600x1200 (20" 4:3 flat panel I have from 2002 - cost 1000$) and lose 180 vertical pixels!
I tried to find a 16x10 but there are none in the stores and hard to find even on newegg etc. I asked on some forums and it's just because they aren't making them anymore.
Bummer.
And articles like this make it a stupid site for tech.
Because that's what the people are demanding: 16x9 screens for their HD videos.
Those of us who do actual work and need room to fit a 8x11 page into the screen have become the unimportant minority.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
That's what I do, and it works great, especially if you use a tile based window manager or plugin (e.g. an IDE on the left half and a browser on the right half).
Obligatory XKCD
I too find it disturbing that displays have gone to 2MP and stopped. We were this close to being able to actually read a PDF on 100% zoom without squinting. WTF is going on?
Lord of the Rings 3D! Now in narrowscreen!
The solution is just as simple: Develop on an external monitor (optionally rotated 90 degrees).
Now figure out how to carry a portrait monitor and power supply on the bus. I thought the whole point of having a laptop was to be able to work in a vehicle or in a restaurant.
Because manual typewrites predate "potrait mode"? hahaha
Seriously, the only solution is to vote with your wallet.
I, too, was disturbed when I recently had to buy a replacement for my 1600x1200 Dell monitor (which died after only 5 years). I looked for a similar monitor, but couldn't find a decent one at a reasonable price - everyone seems to have gone gaga for widescreen monitors. I could barely even find any decent 16:10 monitors, and the ones I could find were significantly more expensive than the ubiquitous 1920x1080's.
In the end I gave up, and just went ahead and bought a cheapo 16:9. I cared, but not enough to spend an extra $100+ for those extra 120 vertical pixels. If you do care, the only thing you can do is bite the bullet and buy one of the few monitors that do offer what you want.
On a completely unrelated note; why is it that the insert cursor disappears in the right half of the comment box? It is really fricking annoying - I have to put the cursor in the middle of a line, then use the arrow keys to move it where I want to edit. Only happens on Slashdot. Is this just a Firefox thing (happens to me at work and at home, on various versions of firefox; I can't be bothered to check on IE or Chrome at the moment)?
Have you ever actually benchmarked video performance on a rotated display? Even with hardware supported rotation, the framebuffer read-out order is no longer consecutive which completely fucks video performance.
I seriously can't believe the suggestions... It's like saying "What happened to all the compact cars?" and you reply "Stop whining, just crush your car down to size." Why can't we just buy something in the form factor we want?
It's sad, but it seems everyone has fallen for the 'wider is better' idea.
Don't think of it as 1920x1080. Think of it as two 960x1080 areas.
People always say that with widescreen movies you will see more (horizontally).
But I think that widescreen movies actually show that "we" suck in producing vertically interesting content.
An other often used excuse that widescreen is better is because people naturally see in widescreen. Which is bullshit. The eyes point in the same direction and are not that far apart. So the active focal area is much more square shaped.
The manufacturers needed them for mobile devices...
http://j-walkblog.com/images/too_many_toolbars.jpg
The first thing I do is reconfigure the start menu / gnome panel to live on the side, rather than the top/bottom.
Then disable most of the toolbars / status bars in apps (Google Chrome helps a lot with this, since they have an integrated titlebar/tabbar), and a popup status bar / search bar.)
Finally, I just run more sidebar apps (like gkrellm and the Google desktop sidebar) to fill in the side space until my main app windows are more nicely proportioned. Mostly psychological, yes, but whatever, it helps.
I think the technological history has to do with CRTs being cheaper to blow glass in "square" aspect ratios, like 4:3 and ultimately 5:4. But then LCDs came out, and it became cheaper to make displays bigger by making them long and narrow, since the fab process would become more expensive based on how wide the machinery needed to be.
I rather think it depends on what you're doing. I work in publishing, and there are reasons most books are the way they are. Wide columns of text can be difficult to read. Obviously on a computer you're not just reading columns of text, but it does make a difference.
If you've got a iPad, Kindle, what not, try reading in landscape vs portrait. Not everybody likes the same thing, but in general I prefer narrow columns.
Do you read?
Books, magazines, etc print text in portrait mode.
Heck, the newspapers even print the text in several columns to avoid very long lines, as that makes text more difficult to read. (I hate programmers that create 200-character statements on one line.)
For people using computers for text (documents, programming, etc) rather than watching movies, the vertical resolution is valuable.
)9TSS
the A4 is oriented in portrait mode only to fit the roll of a manual typewriter. Landscape is more natural for our eyes.
If lines of text get much longer than 80 characters, the eye has trouble reliably finding the start of the next line without rereading or skipping.
I don't believe that it is more natural for your eyes to read the long lines created by wide displays. This is why typesetting usually has lines less than 80 characters long. Any longer and the reader might loose the line.
For everyone that suggested rotation, I have not seen very many screens that can be rotated. Especially on laptops.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
If you have a taskbar, you might try moving it to the left or right edge of the screen (rather than the top or bottom) to conserve a little vertical space. It takes some getting used to, though.
why are all monitors wide now?
So that you can put two documents side-by-side. Use "Tile Vertically" under Windows XP or Snap under Windows 7.
I have to agree with this... the sudden hype for 16:9 resolutions is retarded as hell, yet like so many other stupid as fuck things, the media moguls are behind this one... I prefer 16:10 over 16:9 anyday, seriously! 2 monitors one 1920x1080 and one 1920x1200, I tossed the x1080 one so fast it would make your head spin, that 120 pixels DOES MAKE SO MUCH MORE FUCKING DIFFERENCE!!! and you can still watch 16:9 movies JUST FINE, infact you realize when you watch a1080p movie on a x1200 monitor HOW MUCH YOU HAVE ACTUALLY LOST (vs 4:3) but humanity has lost my hope, i hope 2012 is the end, you can fight it all you want, but GREED rules this world now and humanity has no hope of recovery from it, good fucking game retards...
or a function call.
Write smaller functions.
Qxe4
Do people really need to print stuff these days?
Surely if you're doing A4 DTP then you'd get a rotatable monitor. I'm sure people would have loved such technology years ago. Being able to buy a normal screen and rotate for A4. Your only option years ago was an A4 CRT monitor which was very expensive.
"I'm sorry, the number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate 90 degrees and dial again."
30" 2560x1600. Problem solved (permanently). It also happens to have 178 degree viewing angles, which solved another big annoyance.
If you don't want that expense, HP makes the zr24w monitor, a 24" S-IPS panel with standard color gamut, 1920x1200 resolution, which can be had for around $400 online. Matte screen FTW!
Are you using RPN-like languages like machine code?
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I don't like all these "skinny" monitors. 16:10 is the sweet spot. The little black bars present when watching 16:9 movies is irrelevant.
Can anyone explain why we need shorter and wider than 16:10?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Buy a monitor with pivot function and rotate it 90 degrees when editing documents.
Prefer IPS panels when choosing a monitor as TN panels have very poor viewing angles vertically and it really shows when you rotate your monitor. For a good list of IPS panels look here.
After rotating the monitor the count of lines on monitor becomes more important so make sure you pick one with 1200 lines or your screen will be too narrow.
If screen rotate shortcuts are not already supported by drivers there's a small utility for windows called iRotate.
Most people believe that a widescreen 20" monitor gives you "more/better screen" than a "non--widescreen" 20" monitor.
The opposite is true. The 20" measurement is the diagonal of the screen. You get the largest area when the height/width is equal.
The more you increase the width (and reduce the height), the smaller area you get.
The manufacturers benefit because they can sell a 20" screen with less pixels and make it sound more desirable.
Think of a circle where the radius is the screen size...
)9TSS
less vertical pixels is fine as long as you get more pixels in general. the screen on the iphone 4 is the first screen i've seen with an acceptable resolution. it may seem expensive to get higher res and larger monitors, but if your're going to look at something for 8 hours a day, and usually those are all in a row, the premium price for a nice monitor is worth rebudgeting for.
Buy a different monitor or buy two or turn one sideways.
To elaborate, face the fact that laptops are optimized for portability and battery consumption not screen size. Your office or home office should have a large monitor and a USB keyboard/mouse waiting for your laptop.
stop upgrading to shittier technology.
check out my comic: Essential Tremors
Okay, you fixed "loosing", but that sentence is still an atrocity.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
CTRL+-
I have a bunch of perfectly good CRTs for use on the desktop, but my laptop is getting old and there is no upgrade path.
Aside from that, aspect ratios are a giant clusterf#ck these days. Everywhere I go now I see TVs showing people with fat heads or skinny heads, or black borders, or black borders within black borders. I was watching broadcast TV on my laptop recently and a commercial came on (for the cable TV company no less...) and it was a 16:9 image inside a 4:3 image inside the 16:9 broadcast inside my 4:3 display. Most of the screen area was wasted black stuff. WTF?
Marketing droids seem to look at screens in diagonal measurements. Wide screens measure more diagonal per square inch and seem more cost effective as a result.
I first noticed this when I went to buy my first LCD tv and had to buy a much larger diagonal to get the same 4:3 picture size.
Had someone that knew how to multiply insisted back in 1950 that a 8 by 6 screen be marketed as a 48 sq in, rather than a 10 inch screen, I don't think we would have the problem.
BTW the screen proportion is a great feature of the iPad. When I read the specs on other tablets, the low Hight irritates me.
This has its downsides, but as a potential solution, may I present to you an Apple iPad plus Air Display.
This of course only gives you a marginally greater 1024 vertical pixels in portrait mode, and as it runs over VLC can be a bit slow, but it's a very workable solution in some cases.
www.clarke.ca
lots of other benefits too- privacy etc....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Obligitory xkcd.
Lots of people suggest either turning the monitor vertical or say that there are larger resolution monitors still out there. Yes, there are monitors with more horizontal pixels out there, but they are not like the normal monitors I bought seven years ago that I'm trying to buy new one for, they are usually high priced professional models. I'm having a hard time replacing my 8 year old $150 CRT because nothing new has any better vertical resolution, which is what I'm looking for. I can understand that everything is going towards watching movies, but I also work on my computer. If I'm going to upgrade, I would want better. Even if I rotate the monitor, then my lack of horizontal pixels is making things even worse. In 8 years, despite the change of monitor technology, I would expect a similarly priced monitor to have a better resolution. While they arguably are better for watching movies anyway, it's hard to find one for actually doing work as the typical vertical resolution actually seems to have dropped for similar price ranges.
Apple used to have an A4 monitor: portrait and indeed the size of a sheet of A4 paper, and "paper white" CRT type. From the time that a colour monitor was not standard. It never gained much traction, but for word processing it was pretty cool (I've actually worked with one for a while).
I can imagine web browsing also works quite well on such a monitor - but well at the time the www was barely there yet.
OTOH: those modern widescreens you can consider as two portrait monitors seamlessly linked together. Even though I've an older (non-widescreen) monitor I do tend to have my windows narrower than the screen already...
Because we are paying less ... duh. Those extra pixels aren't important to the masses, so vendors are making mostly the same resolutions that retail TV users want. This isn't really very hard to understand.
If most computer users complained and ONLY PURCHASED 1200+ vert pixel monitors, the industry would get the message. Sadly, that isn't going to happen. BTW, I just picked up a 15" laptop that is 1920x1080 and I'm reasonably happy. The prior 15" laptop had 1280x800 and that was crap. I always felt like I was missing 200 vertical pixels. The laptop before that one was 1600x1024 (I think). I miss the 4:3 monitors, since I actually work on the computers and don't watch frackin' TV or movies on a $800 computer.
About 6 yrs ago, I picked up a 24" monitor - 1920x1200. It is still being used. Next to it is a 1280x1024 20" monitor used as a second monitor for surfing/email. Gotta love Linux and X11. If I wanted, I could rotate 1 of the monitors by changing a few lines in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf, but I'd lose hardware acceleration.
16:10 computer displays were great for watching 16:9 video on a computer. They had room outside the video for playback controls or status information. With a 16:9 display, you can't reasonably have any permanent status or controls without them overlapping the video.
If you have two monitors, have one horizontal (for work) and one vertical (for reading).
PHP3 prevented you to perform -any- operations in class member variable initialization. Not even string constants concatenation, so you could split lines to avoid run-on statements.
I once had to initialize a string with a very, very long (non-SQL) database request and couldn't even split that. I ended up with a single line over 2000 characters long, which ended with ";//sorry
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
What monitors do you recommend that have worthwhile vertical viewing angles? I tried rotating one of my screens but it seems the cheapo Dell displays at my office just aren't designed for above/below viewing. Makes me wonder who was on the design team that thought adding rotation to a cheap panel that has no vertical viewability was a good idea...
People want monitors cheap, so the manufacturers make cheap monitors. The most common type of panel is the Twisted Nematic (TN) - which has fairly limited viewing range and color depth. (According to Wikipedia - most TN panels are actually only 6 bit per color channel, they fake 24-bit color via flickering and dithering)
I got the HP ZR24W - it's a 24" 1920x1200 monitor that sells for around $400. It's my first LCD monitor (apart from laptops). Its panel is some variant of the In-Plane Switching technology (IPS) - which is generally said to have slower switching time than TN panels, but better viewing angles and better color.
Really, it's kind of low-end as IPS panels go. The black levels are brighter than I'd like, but in general I've really enjoyed the monitor. It's a great improvement over the two 19" CRTs I was using before (combined total resolution: 3200x1200 pixels - but the clarity wasn't nearly as good as with the LCD) I've also got it mounted to a monitor arm (E-Bay special! Dirt cheap!) so I can move it around and rotate it and stuff. I do use it sometimes in rotated mode - the main problem there is that it's such a wide monitor, when rotated it becomes a very tall monitor... Almost uncomfortably tall. I find myself longing for the old 4x3 aspect ratio. :) But I'm very happy with my purchase. Going to a better IPS monitor would have meant spending at least another two hundred dollars... And going cheaper would have probably meant a TN panel or a loss of vertical resolution, or both. (There is a 22" model, the ZR22w - which is basically the same except smaller and only 1080 pixels high instead of 1200...) Viewing angle was a big issue for me, as was vertical resolution...
Bow-ties are cool.
Why switch? You can watch HD under higher res screens. Don't understand why you would switch?
Seriously.
There are a TON of monitors that have 1920x1200 resolution. I own one. It's a 26" Samsung. MOST monitors are NOT running at 1920x1080. That's a TV resolution, not a monitor resolution.
Raleigh NC is not a tiny village. But there's only one place in town that has 1920x1200 monitors (and only a single model of that!). There are 1920x1080's out the wazoo here, however.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
It's the availability of LCD displays. With everything in the market for Entertainment going 16x9, the LCD manufacturers are going that route and away from 4x3 displays. It sucks but I won't buy anything less than 1200p vertical resolution and there *are* alternatives out there in the Laptop market. I just bought a new laptop with 1920x1200 resolution for the very reason this article states: vertical real-estate.
It's time for the LCD and PC manufacturers to get off this 1080/900p kick and start giving us some decent resolution for *real* work, not just watching "Transformers."
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Anybody else here old enough to remember the rotating Radius Monitor with full page display for the Macintosh line of computers! They were the hottest thing in Desktop Publishing there for a while! You could work on two pages side by side and then when you wanted to fine tune one page rotate the monitor to the vertical position and see one page full size and as it would be in print! A friend of mine with more money than me had one way back when and had a nice business going for a while!
The widescreen lcd's now perfecly fit 2 life-sized A4 pages side-by side.
The vertical size you get for $x isn't shrinking - it's growing, but simply the horizontal is growing even faster. Don't switch from 1600x1200 to 1680x1050 - switch to 1920x1280.
I'm no genius so I'm just spittin' into the wind here, but I would probably start off with not buying products that don't match my needs?
Try scrolling your document to see the portions above or below the screen using the handy scroll bar to the right or left of your document. It's amazing! You only work with one page at a time anyway, get over not seeing all of it, or just print it out, gammit!
Also, why can't I have a screen view that flips 180 so I can watch movies upside-down? Fix that before we "fix" not being able to scroll, I mean, "view" your +5 Tall Document of Nonsense. Don't make me come down there! Get on my lawn and subscribe to my newsletter!
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
You are not alone.
Human-factors engineering says that text is most readable in formats having 56-68 columns.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Simply put, text editors (including IDEs, etc) and document viewers (PDF readers and similar) should support two columns per page. As to webpages, layouts will move to optimize for support of 16:9/16:10 when 4:3 dies out more completely.
The "wide screen" monitors are cheaper to manufacture. A 4:3 screen has more total area that a 16:9 screen with the same diagonal measurement. Plus the 16:9 screen appears larger to the eye, because we (humans) think things appear larger when they are wide as opposed to when they are tall.
So the LCD manufactures get to make smaller screens, we think they are larger, everyone is happy.
Except those of us who really wanted more screen real estate to work with, and weren't concerned with watching movies on our computers, because we have televisions to do that.
We evolved eyes that are side-by-side, not one on top of the other. Or FSM created us that way. Take your pick, it doesn't matter.
Monitors have finally evolved to match the layout of our eyes. It started with movie screens and worked its way down. It's about damn time. Now GUIs and layout standards need to evolve. Then all will be aligned with our natural field of view.
Nothing needs to change; this is the direction things should move. We don't need vertical monitors--we need to ditch A4.
We need Edward Tufte's take on this.
I think this will lead many of us to run dual monitors (as we often do now,) but to stack them vertically instead of placing them side-by-side.
Of course, bezel-free monitors would seem to be even more important in this confguration.
The trouble with turning an LCD monitor sideways is that text looks terrible. I use a widescreen monitor rotated for code visibility purposes. The excess cruft of IDE subwindows is much less disruptive. However, text (and even code) is significantly more readable (and less painful) on the smaller, non-rotated monitor.
Windows doesn't seem to properly do sub-pixel rendering on a rotated monitor -- all of the ClearType profiles are based on the configuration of subpixels in a normally-oriented monitor. Moreover, the settings don't seem to be on a per-monitor basis, which means that I would get to choose to have one of my two monitors look terrible and one be legible. Does anyone know of a ClearType (or similar) tool for Windows which properly adjusts to rotated screens? (I'm off to Google it... maybe it's easier to find this year?)
Then there's the issue of viewing angles -- most LCDs have a wide horizontal viewing range, but a narrow vertical viewing angle range. Rotating the monitor flips that. (It's not as big of a deal as you'd think, in that I sit in generally the same place, but it makes it harder to read stuff there if someone is sitting next to me.)
Switching from 1600x1200 to wide 1680x1050 to HD 1600x900 we are losing more and more vertical space thus becoming less and less simple to read a full A4 page or a web page or a function call. What's the solution for retaining the screen height we need to be productive?
Simple solution: Don't switch. You can still get 1600x1200 ~20" monitors fairly reasonably. They are a bit more expensive than when I got mine several years ago, because 4:3 aspect ratio monitors aren't as popular with the masses, but they aren't ridiculously expensive like 2048x1532 monitors are.
Second simple solution: rotation. Most video drivers nowadays support screen rotation, and many of the bases that come with flatscreen monitors make rotation easy (and, if yours doesn't, add-on mounts that do are available.) So if you have to use a widescreen monitor but need more screen height, then rotate the screen.
Third simple solution: accept 16:9, keep it landscape, and get a bigger monitor. ~23" 16:9 2048x1152 monitors have very close to the same horizontal resolution as ~20" 4:3 1600x1200 and are generally cheaper.
Current ly I have an IBM (mid lenovo switch) X61T.
Sure I can use the tablet while I train, but that is not why I made this choice 3.5 years ago. I chose between the only 2 laptops on the market with 1400x1050 12.1 inch screens (the other was the fujitsu ).
I need light as I travel all over the US and many other countries regularly. 12.1 allows me to open the laptop on a plane, have you tried to open a 15 incher in coach? also the travel weight on this box is great.
Most of all, since I watch movies, RDP, Telnet, VM, etc on this box (not a dev, test geek and entrepeneur) 4:3 is much more natural and provides more pixels/real estate than 16:9.
I am currently replacing the hinge and bezel, at 1.6 dual core with 4 GB ram this machine still keeps up and passes many of the machines today. I replaced the battery 6 months ago so I still get 6+ hours. Also thinking of a SSD. I have looked, but nothing new serves my needs.
Long live 4:3 high res small screens
Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave. -Guy Kawasaki
I hate programmers that create 200-character statements on one line
Really? Cause I hate programmers that line break in the middle of a statement simply so it fits on their monitor. Not everyone uses the same setup. In programming you should set up your lines semantically. I'm not saying attempt to write your whole program in one line. But I am saying don't break in the middle of a single unitary line for the sake of "easy to read". That's what your IDE is for. If you don't like it, modify the options in your IDE to break after x characters.
This is just a guess, but has anyone considered that the human vision might have been "horizontally optimized"? I mean our two eyes are placed so we have greater horizontal viewing angle so perhaps horizontal scrolling of the eye causes less of a "blur" effect than vertical scrolling. If so, it could mean that the vertical model was actually the flawed one (demotivator reference here). Just a though I would like to see proofs for or against.
The premise is absurd. If I move from 1024x768 to 1600x1200 I have more vertical landscape, not less. I just happen to get even more horizontal space. I can easily display and read two A4 pages next to each other on my monitor now as a result.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I totally agree. I tried "rotated" for a while and performance and overall experience was bad. The colors looked slightly different and unbalanced. My guess is that viewing angles are optimized for using the monitor in "normal" (un-rotated) mode, and the average viewing angle may not be normal to the screen surface. So when you rotate the thing it all gets messed up. There are also more subtle issues: how to handle sub-pixel anti-aliasing (like in Windows ClearType) when one monitor is rotated and the other one is not?
The problem is just in your expectations. If you start with 1600x1200, then you'll be disappointed. If you start with a 1024x768, you'll notice how your perception of the new monitors improve. If you want more improvement, just start with a worse monitor. Don't mention it.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
duh, the 1080p TV's resolution is 1920x1080; why would you manufacture two different things when you could pretty much get the same by only doing one?
An A(n+1) page is what you get if you cut an An page in halves.
If additionally I tell you that all An pages have the same shape, and an A0 page has an area of 1 square meter, you now can calculate what A4 looks like.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I hate programmers that create 200-character statements on one line
But the written word lends itself towards a more vertical representation. While singular sentences are read lengthwise, we put in paragraphs to separate out information. The more complex the information, the more vertical space is needed. A typical setup involves a browser with title bar, menu bar, address bar, bookmark, tab bar, web page, status bar, and panel on the bottom. None of these work really well on the sides as each includes words which must be read laterally. So the easiest place to put them is on top of each other. This allows unlimited words in the word section.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Step 1 turn monitor sideways
Step 2 press and hold windows key
Step 3 press the arrow key that points the direction on the monitor you would like to have as the top of the screen.
Alternative...
Buy a monitor that doesn't have a widescreen look to it.
Manufacturing physically larger monitors (up to a point) is more expensive then making the same pixel area wider with less height. Industry thus advertised higher dpi and 'wide-screen' formats as top of the line and encourage consumers to buy 'higher definition' monitors.
Generally for portable use this sense because you get more pixels to carry with you but making the pixels smaller makes has two adverse effects:
Most software and web content still uses fixed-width elements such as bitmap graphics. As software and websites get older the resolution/monitor size they were optimized for (basically what the developed thought nice) look smaller and smaller in higher definition monitors - to a point where it begins to effect usability (text on fixed width or bitmap buttons too small to read).
Smaller but not less important are developers and graphic designers who would like work with graphics at a pixel level. For these purposes these people would like to buy lower definition screens where you can still see pixels at a relatively comfortable distance but which have lots of workspace ie. inches.
Using fully vectorized elements and graphics and allowing for smooth scaling of the user interface solves this problem but implementing such is harder because fixed width and static resolutions are easier to optimize (for example in many games 3D graphics have been overlayed with fixed width bitmap elements which accelerate real time frame rate). In web graphics because of immaturity of tools, standards and browsers not all elements scale in unison or at all causing web pages to display not as the designer intended (again depending on the size of the difference between his and your resolution preference). Also most operating systems and their window schemes are optimized for certain resolutions and width to height ratios. You can turn the monitor 90 degrees but some OS and software UI:s look bad or even get broken.
Finding large 'normal' (ie less than 100dpi or heaven forbid 72dpi DTP standard) 4:3 monitors these days is a pain. I use two 19" 4:3 monitors with 1280x1024 native resolution. this allows me to sit back at a comfortable distance while still being able to see most fixed width elements. The 4:3 remains the optimum ratio for most software UI:s in full screen. On my ultrawide laptop their UI:s get squeezed vertically and end up having redundant space in the horizontal.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
so what happens when they force 3D down our throats?
widescreen 3D tv's that you can't actually use for all. yea!!!!!!!!!
Actually, what this will mean is that higher refresh rates will become more common. Shutter-glasses 3D TVs refresh at 120Hz so they can deliver 60Hz to each eye. But you can still use the TV in non-3D mode, just don't wear the glasses and you've got a display with a 120Hz refresh rate.
The real question is what other compromises are made for the sake of getting that high refresh rate... I don't know the answer to that one. (It could be "none" for all I know.)
Bow-ties are cool.
It's not that we're getting shorter (eg, losing vertical)
We're getting fatter
You have a number of selections of 24" 1920x1200 monitors. Buy one. Or step up to 27"2560x1600. Don't buy crap, and you won't have to live with it.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
A year or so ago, I picked up a Dell 30" monitor with 2560x1600 resolution. It pretty much solves all of your monitor issues. The only concern, is that you need a video card capable of dual-link dvi output (Nearly all recent gaming cards).
using vi and make/compiler or interpreter in a few shell windows works pretty well whether vertical resolution is 800 or 1280 pixels. hadn't really noticed any productivity problems.
as to the rest of you turd-swilling tea-baggers who develop bloated buggy UI in your code-wizards, I think society is better off with your productivity crippled.
Embrace the aspect ratio. Just use vim with the "vsplit" command.
We're losing more "vertical real estate" due to more and more crap being shuttled to the top and the bottom of your screen. Why does every major website want to add a "bar" to your browser? To make you scroll 40 times before you get to the data you were looking for? Between the added "bars" and the banner ads, there's no web page to see without scrolling a lot.
And the monitors, ironically, get wider and wider, but not taller. We're going to need photoshop-like detachable palettes that we can drag to the sides of our monitors to clear up the vertical space we need to read.
Remember when monitors were made for "desktop publishing" and rotated into vertical mode, specifically for doing newspaper layouts and similar things? But that was back in the day when a company named "Aldus" had the #1 product for DTP.
(sigh)... Is this the part where I have to say 'get off my lawn' ?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
This is a legit question that deserves to be properly explored by LCD manufacturers, vendors, etc. and hopefully we'll get the right products in the marketplace.
Why are we losing vertical pixels? Because in the 1950's Hollywood broke its 4:3 standard to make itself different from television.
Five years from now when all the computer monitors are 3D, when reading PDFs you'll not only have to squint at tiny vertical text through a venetian blind porthole, you'll have to withstand 3D vertigo in the process as well.
If you've got a 1366x768 panel then you don't have a 1080P display, you have a 720P display. The fact that many 720P displays can handle 1080i/p signals doesn't make it a full HD display, and I've never seen one advertised as such.
Please provide examples of a tv claiming to be "Full HD" that doesn't have a 1920x1080 panel.
I know this is off-topic, but y'know, there's never a Slashdot OP dedicated to asking someone about their sig,
AFAIK, sigs are included during page rendering, therefore, the sig may be different next time the page is displayed and a related posts would make no more sense (unless you cite the sig, but even then it may look strange).
Same reason lenses on your glasses and the windshield on your care are all shorter than they are wide
Not enough choice? I looked at a hardware comparison site (dutch): http://nl.hardware.info/productgroep/8/monitoren#filter:q1YqTk0sSs7wzU9JVbJSMlTSgQoElxRl5qUDhYAiBYnpcMmC1OR4CzNjJatoJVNDU6CIqaGhUmwtAA
I searched for 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 and got 108 screens. That is all the screens that are still being sold today. And that is only for the shops that are connected to the site, so you might be able to get even more from other shops.
Your original monitor was $1000 and you're saying that under $300 for a new one is expensive?
As for the screen technologies, you generally want an IPS screen. They're more expensive but behave better at variable viewing angles.
How about one of those 1920x1200 screens? Two full A4 pages fit side by side on my 24'' LCD.
Am I unusual in actually liking this arrangement? It used to be irritating to have to alt-tab between 2 documents over and over, or between directories. Now I can just stick 'em side by side and work much faster.
If it were a problem I'd do like others have suggested and flip my monitor on its side. Most if not all vidcard drivers support this nowadays.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
1 : put the windows-taskbar (or linux desktop equivilent) on the side(s) of the screen - ideally the left side otherwise it slows down the time taken to hit the scroll bar or window-close buttons with the mouse. You'll have to make it a bit wider than it normally is tall and learn to live with only viewing the 1st few letters of the window titles.
2 : combine as many menus or toolbars together as possible - eg. in Firefox have the menu, back/fwd buttons and URL location all on the same line. Not all windows apps seem to allow you to put toolbar buttons on the same line as the menus, but wherever that feature exists you should use it.
3 : Remove all the other toolbars / excess status-bars - use the menus or learn keyboard shortcuts for your favourite applications (using the keyboard shortcuts is vastly more productive than hunting the toolbar buttons)
4 : Modify the window theme to make the fonts and icons for menus, window-titles, scroll-bars and min/max/close buttons as small as possible that you can still read them / click on them.
5 : (this one I have more problems with) - try using auto-hiding menus / panes / taskbar (notably in visual-studio which has many many panes of useful info). This one I'm not so keen on because it slows me down considerably, having to first move the mouse to make a pane show, then move the mouse to select the item of interest. Similarly you can try to use full-screen mode in apps that have it available and you don't need to view multiple apps concurrently.
I agree, and all solutions here proposed ("rotate your monitor", "buy a higher-end monitor") do not take into account that this post was tagged "laptop". Yay for my Thinkpad X60s @ 1024x768, but when I upgrade to X201 it'll be widescreen too...
"...fairly reasonably"? The cheapest 1600x1200 on NewEgg is $859.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
... problem. With the advent of widescreen TV's and DVD's this "movie logic" infiltrated computer monitors. 4:3 and even 5:4 (1280x1024) was a good balanced ratio. I use 1280x1024, since I can't stand anything that deviates too far away from 4:3. I really really hate widescreen for daily computer use.
Also some blame has to be placed on the consumer market full of buyers who don't understand resolution.
I can't count the number of times I've worked on someone's computer and noticed their screen set to 1024x768 when they had a sweet monitor. Yet if you "fix it" they don't like the smaller text and images on their web pages, okay fine so I'll increase the font sizes for them but then some of the buttons look funny and whatnot.
Maybe their OS can perfectly scale everything and keep things roughly looking the same at higher resolution but it seems to me that a large percentage of consumers DO NOT WANT higher res screens because they don't understand them.
Perhaps over the last 10 years they've been voting with their wallets and lower res screens are what they want. After all, if it were more profitable to make nice high res screens then everyone would be making those instead.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
All the non-widescreen monitors will go by the wayside as 16x9 drops in price continually
as tvs and computer monitors converge. Many people will buy a 1080p monitor to play blu-rays
or Xbox on. The only difference nowadays is the tv tuner and cable tv plug.
I've got a 23" widescreen monitor (the largest that will fit with my desktop setup) with 1600x1200 resolution. Compared to my old 17 inch monitor I can view two documents side by side...
I make a lot of ANSI B drawings, so my 1680x1050 is pretty close to perfect. (1.6 vs 1.5454)
Here's the problem. J. Random Consumer loves cheap LCD HDTVs. The panels for these are mass-produced since J. Random Consumer is a large slice of the market for electronics. After a while, the price of those panels dropped down to where they were less expensive than the panels we'd all been using in laptops, LCD monitors, etc. and the LCD monitor manufacturers took notice. So, to save a few bucks, they switched over to the less expensive panels, and advertised "Full 780p / 1080i / 1080p HDTV resolutionz zomg!" (numbers went up over time) to J. Random Consumer so he would get distracted and wouldn't notice the vertical resolution numbers going down. People love numbers and defend them tooth and nail, but not as much as they love the latest hot marketing words. Successful distraction! The TV manufacturers also started adding ports on their TVs to connect to J. Random Consumer's home PC, and he's not really missing that vertical resolution because he can brag about PC ON MAH HDTV to the Joneses down the road. It doesn't seem to matter that he gets about 2" of any website in between his massive WinVista/7/MacOS taskbar/dock and the 10 toolbars and menus that come preloaded on his new low end 1.7 GHz HP.
Meanwhile, those of us who actually view things like documents and code are really fed up with the incredible decrease in options for monitors that are appropriate for such tasks. It's creeping into the corporate world - company laptops are coming with 1080 or 768 line displays because that's what the manufacturer provides for the least money, and desktops are getting stupid 1080 line displays with the HDTV Compatible stickers still on them. It's insulting to get a "watch moviez on this new toy weee" sticker on your WORK computer. I'd rather miss the HDMI and miscellaneous A/V ports, and get a smartly sized monitor that fits my work.
At least we get scroll wheels on our mice.
Why no larger monitors at higher than 1920x1280 resolution? HD video is fine and all but I bought a bigger monitor for higher rez images!
We haven't lost vertical pixels so much as we've gained horizontal pixels. Stop running every program maximized by default (I've never understood why people do that), and keep your apps windowed in roughly the same ratios as before, and you'll be fine, not to mention having the extra space on the side for tool pallets or another complete window. The other problem is software development where more and more toolbars are added vertically. Who on earth thought that was a good idea? - oh, wait, thanks MS.
At least one place where I've seen a disappointing shift is the growing number of 1920x1080 screens as opposed to 1920x1200. But of course, it all depends on what you buy. If people keep buying 16:9 screens instead of 16:10 screens, then manufacturers are going to produce less and less higher res panels, and they'll be harder and harder to find. It's economies of scale and supply/demand. Most consumers and motor-heads are cheap. You buy cheap stuff, you add to the problem. Keep buying quality 1920x1200 and 1680x1050 screens instead of the cheapo 1920x1080 and 1600x900 screens and manufacturers will keep making the better panels.
And there's one more problem. Stupidity - especially among consumers, but even among a surprising large number of geek-heads who somehow can't grasp the concept of aspect ratios. The unenlightened folks say "I don't like those black bars above and below my movie". Hello, they're seeing the whole movie! It's a matter of ratios - the size the film what shot in vs the size of the display. The image is scaled to fit the correct ratio for viewing, it's not missing anything just because it doesn't fill the screen corner to corner. And with many of today's higher res screens, the computer screen people are looking at has more pixels that what is available in the actual movie, so the extra unused pixels are just turned 'off'. It's this mentality that has also been driving the change to 16:9 screens, and since HDTVs are 16:9, and the same manufacturer makes both TV screens and computer screens, they're going to want to cut costs and produce the exact same panel for both TVs and monitors - leading to more and more cheap quality computer displays.
The only way to stop the "loss of vertical pixels" is with your wallet. Don't complain if you're one of those who buys cheapo 16:9 displays.
Laptops are increasingly used by individual consumers, who will flock towards cheaper solutions (compared to business consumers). Not only lower cost, but home users have different needs, particularly in the media display department (like more TV/video/DVD watching), so 16:9 is getting more and more popular as there's no black bars needed to view their existing media. And displays like 1366x768 are extremely popular (just about the only option in in the 12"-14" market) because they're cheap and conform to the 16:9 ratio.
I'd love more vertical space (I had to settle for 768 pixels for my 13" laptop), but there's a $1,000 premium to go from a top of the line Acer to a top of the line Vaio, so forget it.
DELL UltraSharp U2211H 21.5-inch, 1920x1200 $249 DELL UltraSharp U2711 27-inch, 2560 x 1440 $949 Personally I would go with a multi-monitor setup at this point. You could have one landscape and one portrait for your full page display.
Judiciously putting in linebreaks (and properly aligning stuff after doing so) makes it easier to understand and analyze code imo, since it's easy to see what's grouped with what, instead of a giant series of chained and nested function calls on one line. Same reason, though to a lesser extent, that you use multiple lines in the first place, instead of writing your C code as:
int foo(int a, char b) { int temp = 2 * process(a); char bar = do_something(temp, b); return (b == bar) ? hmm(bar) : harumph(baz); }
I could buy that statements are often a natural place to break lines, especially in very statement-oriented languages like C, but sometimes it's useful to use additional linebreaks within a statement if it's particularly complex and has natural parts to break on.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Certain operating systems (naming no names) have a GUI developed on the assumption that you don't have a terribly high res screen
I have a feeling that operating system's name starts with "i". At least in Windows XP, you can click one window, Ctrl+right click another, and Tile Vertically. In Windows 7, you can drag a window's titlebar to the side of the screen and it'll "Snap", or maximize to half.
Consumers are not interested in doing real work, they want to watc TV on the PC.
so we get the craptastic monitors that have useless resolutions... Like 1366X768 WTF is that...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Interestingly, I spend very little time READING code. I generally scan it's structure along with loops/conditionals to find the logic segment I'm looking for, and then just read the few lines I need to change.
I've actually found widescreens to be a benefit in this regard: If you can stop artifically wrapping lines of code, and also can stop artifically un-indexing deeply nested segments, the underlying structure of the program becomes much more navigable. Multiple monitors + widescreens means much easier navigation of application logic. As with all things programming, YMMV
Wait... this person is trying to get optimum user experience while programming on a laptop? I think I see the problem here...
~D
I imagine someone will point out a technical flaw with this, but it seems to me the way to make both parties happy is to provide a form of letterboxing for 4:3 resolutions. The problem with this resolution on a wide screen monitor is the aspect ratio stretches things out (besides higher resolutions not being available).. So, simply pad the space on either side. Instead of formatting the widescreen to work on standard displays, this would be like formatting the standard display to work on widescreen.
I do my work... At work.
If you're considering a career change, you will probably have to train for the new job, build a portfolio, etc. in your spare time. For example, this might include writing a novel or a video game.
it seems to be harder and harder to find non-wide-format monitors
The list of 1920x1200 monitors is making a comeback on Newegg. 1920x1200 is now the third most popular resolution according to what Newegg sells. Maybe there is hope yet. I am about to purchase this one myself, which has enjoyed nothing but stellar reviews.
To hell with TV screens. I want a real computer monitor, for real work.
I looked up the price for a 27" IPS display from DELL - ouch, $1250CND. It's the same display that is found in the new 27" iMac. Pricey, but amazing image quality. The high price of the DELL helped validate my purchase of the iMac as an extra $750 got me an i7 based computer (and a free iPod - educational promo). The glare is annoying but only a concern if you have no control of your work environment.
So as prices and availability come down, you should be able to pick up a display that will still look good when rotated. Just make sure it is an IPS display - they really are good.
Now back to the original article, the reason why screens are getting wider is because they are getting bigger. We do not naturally look up/down as much as we look side to side. So a 4:3 ratio works great when focused in on a small screen. Expand the screen and it makes more sense to expand the width then it does the height. But you can only make a screen so wide before it is annoying due to it being flat (a 27" screen is about at that limit). Future screens might have to have a concave shape. Or possibly screens that can bend allowing them to be bent around the user or be left flat - essential if multiple people are using it for entertainment. I would like to point out that a concave 5120 x 1440 display would make for an amazing FPS experience.
You're not losing pixels, you're just throwing numbers out there without actually knowing what you're talking about. 1600x1200 is UXGA. 1650x1080 is WSXGA+, which is the widescreen variant of SXGA+ (1400x1050). If you want widescreen based on the 1600x1200 resolution, buy a WUXGA monitor(1920x1200). Pretty simple, really. You only "lose" pixels if you don't research the monitor you are purchasing.
...we are getting more horizontal pixels.
Is this supposed to be a joke?
~ $ wc
Heck, the newspapers even print the text in several columns to avoid very long lines, as that makes text more difficult to read. (I hate programmers that create 200-character statements on one line.)
1 33 200
Land ownership is a bogus concept for the individual, at least. Don't believe me? Try not paying your taxes and see how long you keep 'your' land. The government owns it.
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- L. Long
The problem is that laptop manufactures want to be able to advertise their display as "widescreen". They should really call it "shortscreen".
I've been after my bosses forever for a computer fast enough to keep up with my typing. Half of my day is spent watching the screen paint. Eventually, my bosses started complaining about not being able to see my tiny screen during code reviews. Then they got on a kick with their management to rectify the problem that had been driving them crazy. Well, I went from a 1280x1024 17" to a 1680x1050 22" and now my 90s computer can't even handle the native resolution. Guess I'm gonna have to sneak in an nVidia card tomorrow.
Do like the newspapers, display your text on several columns on your widescreen. You can do that by aligning window side by side. And if you prefere using terms, vim and screen can do that as well.
The simple reason is marketing. The advanced reason is laptops. The initial reason is...Apple. When Apple started the whole "Watch movies on our new laptop in native widescreen!" trend, that was the start of this whole problem. Then marketing researchers noticed that people were buying widescreen laptops over non widscreen...and were paying a premium while using a smaller monitor. Thus, all laptop makers switched to widescreens. It saves them cash, and they could charge the same or more to consumers. All in all, it sucks bad.
we are losing more and more vertical space
Pixel resolution keeps increasing, as does physical display size, so it's more correct to say you're gaining horizontal space.
That's a whole other debate I'd rather not get into, but... There are some things we live with to maintain a civil society and I'd hate if someone could rob a bank and go out and buy vast chunks of land that could not be repossessed to pay their debt.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Just lose the landscape mode, and go with all narrowscreen, like word etc.
If vertical pixel resolution is the same, the font size will typically be much smaller. This is a real problem for those who are visually handicapped.
Turning the monitor sideways can work, but I have found very few monitors that are supported with "sideways" drivers.
I think Planar had some models with "sideways" support.
What monitors are you using for "sideways" viewing?
Don't be wedded to opening everything full screen.
I do just fine by sizing my apps so they fill about half the screen horizontally. Added bonus that it leaves me half my display for another app.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
...there are fields that would prefer wide screen monitors (and I'm not talking about video).
Audio recording is one, especially if you use a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW - fancy acronym for a recording environment). It mimics the layout of your traditional recording console, which is oriented horizontal. For this field, widescreen is a godsend.
You went from a 1200-high pixel monitor to a 900-high pixel monitor and want to know the solution to getting more? Ok: buy a bigger monitor.
I get by with a tiny monochrome screen and just print everything out. I don't even have a printer.
I save a ton of money on monitors, print cartridges, printers, etc.
Here is how you do it like me:
1. turn on internet
2. print to PDF
3. email PDF to Kinkos
3. have courier deliver freshly printed stack of custom internet.
I don't likes to see through my papers so I use 90# Bond stock. Real heavy duty.
Easy to read, no glare, uses no power. If I gets a power out, I can read the internet
Well I'm in my 50's, and I remember the 1980's, when the average computer was over $3000, and the computer you really wanted was $5000. Today, the average is under a thou. and the good ones are between two and three thou. Unless you're an Apple user (like me), then add another thou to those numbers. It's hard for me to have sympathy for all this bellyaching over the cost of a computer, when they are year-after-year getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, even without adjusting for inflation, and never mind the incredible increases in power and usability.
The point is, if pixels are important to you, and you need them, then get the 30" 2560x1600 monitor. Both Dell and Apple sell good ones. Hell, I have two of them side by side. And please spare me the "it's too expensive" whine. Adjust your priorities and get in the game. Life ain't easy you know.
How many times must this trite crap get repeated. "Think you own your body ? Try not eating for 3 months and see what happens. Its the agriculture corps that own your body". How long do you think you would be able to keep your land if there was no government ?
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Where did this obsession with Widescreen come from anyways? I understand for "widescreen films", but why are all monitors wide now? It's weird that it kind of slowly crept into the norm..
The screen diagonal has always been the primary qualifier for a screen, especially for laptops.
That's a linear increase.
Production cost of a screen increases with the screen area.
A 4:3 aspect ratio implies an almost quadratic cost increase.
The more a screen's aspect ratio deviates from the square,
the more the cost increase lowers to a linear increase.
Beware of the 40" 4000x100 pixel screens in 2017!
change is inevitable
I love my 1920x1200 24" monitors. I've got a layout at home with three of them side by side on a corner desk. Recently, one died and I noticed it was not possible to find 1920x1200 or any 16:10 ratio monitor at any local retailers. I had to look around a bit, and I had to spend a bit more for it than back in the day when 16:10 was the norm, but I was able to get a replacement right away.
One of the things that sold me on my MacBook Pro was the 1920x1200 screen.
The Digital Sorceress
> You get what you pay for.
Excellent. I've got some real estate to sell you...
Screen real estate?
My old Dell XPS Gen2 laptop with 1920x1200 on a 17inch screen is excellent. That machine just runs and runs 7/24/365. I bought a new Core i7 Dell with 17inch touch screen and the thing has only 1600x900 pixels! Then it crashes frequently, runs hotter than hell and I doubt will have the longevity as it uses a flexible plastic case compared to the XPS Gen2 cast metal frame. I could not find a laptop with the features I wanted without losing the screen resolution. Fortunately it has displayport and I connect it to a Dell WFP3008 30inch 2560x1600 monitor that cost nearly as much as the machine. I hope there is a resurgence of taller screens at least 16x10 aspect ratio on laptops as not everyone is using the damn things as DVD players...
No really, adjust your designs to fit with modern technology and stop trying to convert print sizes (A4) to web (pixels not inches)
I saw a report earlier this year online that said, 70% of screens are still rocking 1280x1024 resolutions, though I expect that when the numbers come out for 2010 I imagine it'll be more like 60% with the bulk of the remaining viewers using wide-cinema style resolutions given the popularity of 16-17" laptops and wide screens.
Ave Molech Setting
stop creating sites that are resolution-dependent!
800 x 600 should be enough for anybody...
It seems like the article is Slashdotted so I don't really know what the guy has to say, but it seems like the complaint is something like, "I keep buying laptops with progressively smaller screens. Why do the screens keep getting smaller?!" The answer: because you're choosing to buy laptops with smaller screens.
Manufacturers have settled on creating either 16:10 or 16:9 monitors because that's what's in demand. They're in demand because lots of people are using their monitors to watch movies; even in cases where the primary use of the monitors is not entertainment, people often want the option to watch movies in a wide aspect ratio. Wide displays are also reasonable because our fields of vision are wider than they are tall, and also small laptops often need to be somewhat wide to accommodate a keyboard.
So you can look at it as them taking pixels from the height or adding pixels on the sides. The real question in my mind is, as monitors get wider, does it make sense for UI designers to continue to use valuable height for common static elements. For example, Apple puts the menu bar along the top of the screen and (by default) the dock along the bottom. Gnome, KDE, and Windows all have similar elements which (by default) take up vertical space. It may be time to reevaluate that choice.
And stop designing web pages with floating horizontal toolbars. Why can't they just put it in a sidebar? No, I don't want to follow your lousy web site on Facebook. I don't have a Twitter account. Go Away!
I've found that switching for C/C++/Java to SML with its wide-ish pattern matching constructs works fairly well on a wider-screen desktop. I don't think anyone with a `normal' display can read any of the code I write like that (my EMACS can display 314 characters horizontally now), but I'm in CS research, so chances are that nobody ever will.
More seriously, I second and third your complaint. There are laptops with rotatable displays out there, but those generally don't allow you to use the keyboard after rotation due to physical limitations (plus, they have crappy resolutions because they also try to be touchscreens for some reason). Lenovo's concept system with a detachable display plus keyboard sounds the most promising to me as far as future technologies go that might resolve this issue.
They solved the problem with wide newspapers by organizing text into columns. Now we have a similar problem with wide screens.
What we need in HTML is proper support for columns that set their height to the browser window height. Then instead of scrolling down, the reader would scroll to the right, just as if they were reading a newspaper or a book.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Some broadcasters (or their advertising partners) suffer from next-level stupidity. They're starting to shoot commercials (or other material) in HD, but they can't bear the idea of the potential that a few of the stupid people (the folks who foolishly spend money on anything) with old-fart 4:3 TVs might not see the commercial properly, so they embed the HD (16:9) commercial into a standard 4:3 container to be compatible with old TVs. But then the broadcast flag thinks it's SD content, and when sent to your HDTV, the tuner will 'mask' the left and right sides to fit the 4:3 signal onto the 16:9 screen so it will theoretically appear properly (not squished or stretched). So the widescreen HD content has been 'masked' once, vertically, by the producer, then 'masked' again, horizontally by the broadcast/TV tuner, leaving you with the original widescreen content, but half the size - but hey, it's compatible with the few remaining CRT TVs still out there - I don't know anyone using an old 4:3 TV, but someone (advertisers) thinks they still exist. Broadcasters/advertisers would be better off just leaving commercials and other content they're worried about in SD (4:3) for a few more years so it will be palatable on HDTVs and compatible with old 4:3 TVs, or just bite the bullet and go full HD 16:9 and just let the sides be cut off on old 4:3 TVs... It might get the few stragglers to finally upgrade... ...If you're using a TV tuner card on your computer to view this material on a 4:3 screen, it's going to get masked again to fit your screen... you're going to be viewing a postage stamp.
Sony GDM fw900
Max resolution @ 2304 x 1440 @ 80 hz
ideal @ 1920 x 1200 @ 85 hz
Great for side by side pages because of its 16:10 nature.
Too bad you cant find it cheap anymore.
This is a simple marketing rip off.
Modifying the screen height increases the distance between the upper and lower corners of a monitor, measured diagonally. This allows manufactures to say they are giving you a 15 inch screen when you are getting something that is much smaller. This is how you measure the size of a monitor.
My Sony WEGA 36 inch TV from 4 years ago is noticably larger than the 40 inch version of the Bravia. They are doing the same thing there.
...is why do we need to buy a new screen for each laptop?
Shouldn't there be a generic way to switch out the screens?
I call CONSPIRACY!
Over and under dual widescreen displays?
Computers are not really needed by the masses, they want entertainment devices. That means HD format screens are made in huge numbers.
There is not a large enough market for LCD manufacturers to make inexpensive devices optimized for displaying text. Would you pay even 25% more for a screen of the same area and pixel count, but different aspect ration? I didn't think so...
Do what I and many others do: get multiple screens and rotate one or more 90 degrees. Continue whining (like me too), but no one is listening...
You're not losing vertical space, you're gaining horizontal space.
Just don't tell that to your wife.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
You should try 16:10 screens, which are hard to get but in retail stores, but are readily available online. The rectangle is more square, making a 16:10 screen feel more like two 4:3 screens glued together. I have used 16:9 on my HDTV and laptops and totally agree with the poster of this article. I feel like I am staring at a narrow slit, like living in meatspace with a welders mask.
I have two Samsung 1920x1200 flat panels, side-by-side, wall-mounted. I am very happy with essentially 3840x1200. I considered turning one sideways, but found it too distracting. The 1200 vertical is good enough. I am able to have 4 app windows visible across the horizontal space, with a little overlap.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
The low end computer monitor market is using otherwise scrap pieces cut from large screen HDTV glass.
I am thinner, or dead, but it's still mine.
There is no significant difference in latency or duration for vertical vs. horizontal saccades (eg: see ), and you're dead wrong about reading speed: In English, the optimal column width for fast reading is somewhere between 50 and 100 characters per line, depending on exact circumstances.
However, there are two other relevant facts: 1) The lower visual hemifield has a larger cortical representation than the upper visual hemifield, and shows modest improvements in visual performance (this is unsurprising, since our hands/tools/ground near us is usually in our lower hemifield) and 2) We can move our head side-to-side more rapidly, and with a larger range of motion than we can up and down, which changes some saccade distributions.
Irregardless of the mechanics of the situation, reading is a highly trained activity, and direction of reading is not universal. Chinese, for instance, can be read top-to-bottom, or with either horizontal possibility as the initial direction, with the reader cued by slightly differing strokes and punctuation . I'm not aware of any bottom-to-top sequential reading in any culture, which is probably due to the above mentioned processing differences. However, there are also mixed reading sequences that use multiple horizontal and vertical elements in a single block, like Mayan hieroglyphs (2x2 blocks LR->TB within block, blocks are read TB->LR ) or the Korean Hangul system (variety of block sizes, read TB->RL). Arguably, the latter systems are most efficient in terms of leveraging the early geometry of the visual system (log-polar, with resolution dropping exponentially with distance from the fovea.
Maybe it's so we'll be able to enjoy future Steven Seagal flicks?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d82j_Qfp_VA
i
hate
that
you
just
typed
an
entire
sentence
on
one
line
P.S. if
you're
having
problems
reading
this,
turn
your
monitor
sideways
Get people off their asses watching TV/movies in front of their stupid computers and get them on their asses in the living room watching TV/movies on their stupid HDTV.
We're all elite Libertopian warriors here on slashdot.
The power of the Invisible Hand will sweep away those evil commie-pinko-socialist-fascist-hippy invaders the moment they set foot on your paid for with non-fiat currency land.
Install a document converter from A4 to A2.6 and it should fit on your scrunchie screen just fine!
I always make sure to add whitespace as needed to make it at least 201 characters for just that reason.
It might get the few stragglers to finally upgrade..
Yep. #1 reason to upgrade to a new television: to watch the commercials properly.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sadly, most people just want to watch tee vee on their boxes.
I use a 30 inch monitor, 2560x1600
Love it!
Enjoy your new JPG-fractured television and complete audio dropouts. Enjoy your reduced vertical height. Enjoy the swaths of bandwidth handed over to private cell phone companies. Enjoy your DRM-crippled HDMI outputs. Enjoy!
Phase 1: Reduce vertical screen resolution.
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: Profit!
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
Their panels are usually crap too (low-end consumer stuff). Buy a decent 24" display with 1920x1200 and IPS panel and you'll be fine ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
The loss of vertical pixels is irritating, but it is only one aspect of the fact that so many monitors are formatted for watching movies. Surely computers are used mostly as computers and only sometimes as televisions - why do they all have to have this stupid, inefficient wide format?
Anyway, the other aspect of this problem is the overall loss of resolution. Twenty years ago, as a grad student, I bought a CRT monitor (24", iirc) that let me work comfortably at 2560x2048. This was great for programming, or indeed any sort of technical work!
That monitor was a standard, if somewhat expensive, Viewsonic product. Try finding an equivalent monitor today. If you are willing to shell out for a 30" monitor, you still won't find anything better than 2560x1600.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
GP mentions
P mentions iPad as an option.
Laptops are a compromise: reduce a full-blown computer by sacrificing whatever doesn't fit in a ~4lb clamshell.
Of late I've been pushing the notion that the iPad model restores the viability of the desktop computer by separating what must be portable from what must be parked. Those posters whining about being unable to rotate their laptop displays perhaps should consider that what they need is a big/multi-screen configuration at their workstation (I've got dual 1280x1024 monitors set sideways to form a 2048x1280 screen - great for editing A4-format documents) and opt for an iPad or other tablet for lightweight high-mobility needs.
Honest question: how many coders really need to program anywhere anytime? how about leaving the multi-screen multi-core multi-terabyte behemoth and run about with an ultimate thin client where you do most work, instead of compromising everything down to fitting into a notebook?
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The people who produce software keep adding menu bars at the top and bottom. Right now, this firefox window with the slashdot page in it has THREE INCHES of menu bars at the top! Worse, this editing port is only TWO INCHES TALL.
A page of text on normal paper (in the US) is 11 inches tall by 8.5 wide. I want the actual text-port in my editors to be at least that tall. We can bitch about the hardware all we want, and be limited to the capability of the hardware that we buy.
But, for Pete's sake, why do we have to put so many of those horizontal friggin menu bars on every port?
I would like to see VERTICAL menu bars on the SIDES of the windows, and leave the top and bottom alone.
I think this will change in a near future, like what happened with CPUs, years ago we have Hz race and now we have the n-cores race, what changed? cost and profit. the R&D and manufacturing cost in Hz race has become a problem, the solution? change the direction to another, less costly race, the n-cores race. Years ago the monitor resolutions are scaling well (H 480 -> 600 -> 768 -> 800 -> 900 -> 1024 -> 1200 ->...) and then this stoped, what happen? again cost and profit.
...) and multiple options? this become a problem to industry, so the solution? concentrate in one tech and multiply the functions (one tech to rule all), how many computer monitors today have build-in speakers and tv reception? and how many tv's today have computer inputs? so the tech are the same, the guts are the same, whats the diference? only size.
Why have the cost of having multiple plants (CRT, LCD, Plasma, TV, Monitors,
Now we have a 20'' computer monitor with 1080p and and 40'' tv with 1080p, they are almost the same ( http://xkcd.com/732/ ), and this will change? i hope yes (as i hope that this 3D wave in industry disapear), but not because our opinion matter, but simple because our cellphones are catching up with our monitors and it will surpas our current resolutions in the next years, like: "look, this photo/video is beautiful in my Retina v2 cellphone display, but is +- on my 20'' computer monitor and is a crap in my 50'' tv, why?", its all about dpi.
The profits are droping in LCD ( http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/Samsung-Elec-profits-seen-rsg-1592719785.html?x=0 ), so the industry have few options, try to stick with the 3D wave (God no!) or go in another direction (more dpi please!), i hope it choses the right direction: stop making monitors that are tvs, they are a nich not the norm, we need more horizontal AND vertical resolution, we need 20''-24'' monitors with resolutions higher than 2500px (H) and 1600px (V) and we dont need 3D ("hey look i'm writing in MS Word with 3D enabled in my monitor!").
Don't upgrade until a monitor fits your minimum specs. I held off from buying a new pair of monitors until I could find some within my price range that would add width (moving to widescreen) while keeping my height or increasing it. I went from two 1280x1024 to two 1920x1080 for ~$190 on black Friday.
You have the right to any land you can take and hold by force. That's the way the US government did it, and still does it, and that's the only way that works. Since you can't hold your land against the USG (you have absolutely no chance of overcoming the force they can and will bring to bear), and since they can, and will, and do, take and land at all, whenever they want to take it, guess who ultimately has the right your land? Clue: it's not you.
If you don't like it -- too bad. That's the way it is.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Just don't buy the x1080 ones and sooner or later the market will correct the problem.
Interestingly, the "pad" form factor machines are higher than they're wide. (They may work rotated, but their "native" mode is usually vertical.) So are all the "e-readers". One can see why for the small-screen readers, but it's interesting that the "pad" machines, which are somewhat larger, are vertical.
The original Xerox Alto was designed to display a standard printed page in full size. (I feel really old. I've used, and programmed, a Xerox Alto.)
Ok, I searched again and . Only $9000, what a deal! /sarcasm
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
If the majority of computer buyers - not you or me - are in fact using those computers significantly to watch YouTube videos and Hulu and TV via some USB dongle, then we aren't likely to ever get those vertical pixels back. What we see now is the so-called Free Market responding to what focus groups tell it the majority desires.
It sucks if you're not in that majority.
I'd pay double for adequate vertical resolution in one screen, but it's not possible. To get it, we're talking about multiple thousands of dollars.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Scrrens that usually have good "vertical" viewing angles are the ones found in tablet PCs. Both my old Acer c300's 14" screen and muy current Dell Latitude XT have good viewing angles when used in tablet mode (768x1024 and 800x1280). Well, these ones where designed for that, in fact in the Acer the angles are noticeably better in the larger dimension.
When your function calls don't fit in 1080 vertical pixels, monitor size is not your real problem. :)
.I think UI design should have an option to put menus on the side now, to handle the wider formats.
You at least need the Tree Style Tabs (and BarTab) extensions for Firefox.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You want height? Turn the screen. It probably came with a stand that will let you turn it ninety degrees; if it didn't, you can get tons of monitor mounts that will as long as it's got a VESA mount. (Is anyone making decently-sized flat panels that aren't VESA mounts?)
Maybe your monitor can detect it's been turned and tell the computer; maybe it doesn't. Mine doesn't, so I kludged together a little bit of Applescript to tell the OS about the rotation, and to change the settings on my Wacom tablet and swap out the background while I was at it, then bound it to a hotkey.
egypt urnash minimal art.
I don't have that problem in either Mac OS X or Ubuntu. I don't know what you're talking about. Who puts words in their menu's anyway.
Oh no, I can't even find my menu's anyway.
...who started putting those crappy 1366x768 screens in all laptops as standard - just 2-3 years ago the standard resolution you would get on most laptops I looked at was 1680x1050, with upgrades to 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 not far off... nowadays to get anything more than 768 vertically on a laptop I need to fork out 200-300 GBP extra. As a programmer who values lots of vertical space for the IDEs that I use and all the little extra output windows and suchlike, it really is a pain.
Kudos to subby! I've noticed this too. Any horizontal taskbar (i.e. WIndows or KDE taskbar) gets chucked vertically on the side if I can. Then browsers keep adding horizontal toolbars that take up all your space. Does a bookmark bar or URL bar need to be 1900 px long? No.
Every toolbar should be vertical - this is ridiculous. Thanks!
1920x1200
I personally am more concerned about why paste doesn't work.
Thank you. I thought it was just me.
Not true. Books that are bound using a landscape orientation for their pages are clumsy and unwieldy. If the typewriter had been the origin of that orientation, personal letters and correspondence prior to the 19th century would all be landscape. You will find they are not.
Yeah, it's really annoying. I upgraded from 1920x1080 to 1920x1200. It's quite a lot nicer. But to be able to get something affordable I went second hand from already owning a new monitor. That said, I upgraded from 24 to 27" at the same time, and I find it a lot nicer.
Curiously enough my 32" LCD TV that does 1080p isn't a lot bigger than the 27" monitor. I was using that as a monitor for a while, but I wanted more resolution.
Still, I'd like a bit more than 1200 pixels. But to go above that is EXTREMELY expensive.
1. Stop whining.
2. Open an 80x25 terminal window.
3. Increase font size until it fills screen vertically.
4. Use remaining screen real estate to manage mp3 play list and to order pizzas.
5. Run screen.
6. Run vi.
7. Code.
My last CRT monitor had a maximum resolution of 1600x1200. It was launched in 2001. 10 years latter, it seems that the screen manufacturers think that "HD" (1920x1080) is a "good enough" resolution.
I don't know much about TFT/LCD low-level tech, but I have the feeling that we are getting lower resolutions that we should have, like if we were having crappy TVs instead of high-end monitors. Oh yeah, "HD resolutions" alows us to view media in a "cinematic aspect ratio" or something. Guess what: I use my monitor for more than "consume media". Try to work with big spreadsheets with a "cinematic aspect ratio". It's a monitor, not a TV, for heaven's sake!
I think that manufacturers finally "merged" the TV and monitor product. But in the process, they downgraded the experience for the computer user. The laptop and low-end monitors are a great example, having shoddy resolutions and unnecessary aspect ratios... Why would I want a "cinema" ratio for a supposedly "professional", business monitor or laptop? Not everyone is a video-editor or an "artist" or needs to "consume" media to do it's work...
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
you are online right now... you can buy anything online
How do I try the product? If I buy something that I haven't tried, I'm out return shipping plus 15 percent of the subtotal for restocking.
and save local sales taxes
And still have to declare use tax on a state tax return.
[two ThinkGeek links]
Resolution of both devices: 480x800 pixels, which isn't much of an improvement over 1366x768. Operating system: Linux is listed as unsupported.
I really don't understand this. We have wider monitors, greater resolutions and everybody has to break longer function calls? If I have more space on the screen I use it. If somebody else has less space, then he can activate the automatic line break.
What I don't understand is why so few software supports making everything bigger on 1920x1080/1920x1200. It gets hard to see everything for me.
In windows 7 if you change the DPI settings higher then some dialogs don't work properly. And MacOS doesn't even seem to have a nice way to make things large.
Then in Linux all the fonts look terrible at higher text sizes..
That's one of the reasons I upgraded from a 24" 1920x1080 monitor to a 27" 1920x1200 monitor. It seems you actually want about 30" or so for 1920x1080 to be usable nicely though.
That was an awesome monitor. Could rotate it on the fly and it work wonderfully. very expensive.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Personally, I'm very pleased with my 1680x1050 screens. I've got two identical 22" Acers which sit on my desks - one at home, one at work.
They're perfect for multiple terminals - I can essentially fit 4 tiled 80x60 terminals on the screen and still have them all usable and readable from some distance away.
They're also good for media viewing and gaming.
Now, 900 horizonal pixels is bullshit. OK, it's great if you're going to be doing nothing but watch movies, I suppose (or maybe not - seems a little shallow to me). But that's not even enough for flipping the monitor and using it to read documents: it's crap. 800 pixels was barely wide enough 10 years ago for such tasks, and now it's almost impossible given all the 'software borders' we've got in most software.
I think we can chalk it up to the "stupid media consumer" culture. People want those wide screens, damn it - and in order to manufacture increasingly cheap monitors at larger sizes, they drop the pixel count, and widen the screen (lowering the DPI).
I don't see a path back until the 'hottest craze consumer crap' surpasses current desktop LCD resolutions. They'll probably converge at one point, and desktop LCD prices will go up on account of technology consolidation ("it's the same as a TV, so we'll charge just as much"). It's somewhat disheartening, particularly when you consider that CRTs from 10 years ago could do 2-4x the resolution of a current LCD, at a higher DPI/at the same size.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
You need to take some more vacation time, so they can lay flat and rest.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Last year I bought 3 refurbished NEC 1990Fxp 1280x1024 monitors for about $150 each. I use 2 in portrait mode and one in landscape mode. 1024x1280 is perfect for almost all web browsing and PDF reading. I use the third (landscape) one for programs that work better in landscape like iTunes, Evernote, etc
NEC still says 1990 series monitors and bigger 21" 1600x1200 monitors that are all matte screen. The NEC 90 series monitors are top of the line. Though I'm sure they will phasing out 4x3 and 16:10 format eventually like everyone else.
It really bugs the hell out of me the way manufacturers like sony and asus have the cheek to put out a laptop with a 1440x900 screen or a 1600x900 screen and call it "Full HD". As far as I'm concerned Full HD is 1080 pixels vertical and 1920 pixels horizontal, since when does 900 = 1080 and 1440 = 1920????? :) If anyone is interested I used a panel designed for a sony and fitted it to an asus g70. It cost me about 160ukp for the panel and about an hour to fit. I was able to try my g70 on a 1920x1200 panel first to see if it would drive it. Most LVDS LCD panels are interchangeable provided that they use the same backlighting technology.
Unsatisfied with the screen res on my laptop I decided to upgrade it myself.
Luckily after a long phone call to a supplier, I was able to convince them to send me a 1920x1200 LCD panel that was a direct replacement for the 1440x900 panel, They told me it was unlikely to work, but it works great
Size and aspect ratio can be an issue too. I'm sure that case modders could make even a screen of totally the wrong aspect look ok. I guess it boils down to having the bottle to mod your brand new laptop. Yeah yeah I know someone is going to reply telling me the g70 is 2 years old, well simplyasus were selling off old stock cheaply, so I got a bargain.
I said it was work time. I didn't say it was billable time.
www.clarke.ca
Personally, I prefer wide columns (to a point), because it breaks the paragraphs up more, allowing me to more easily identify where I am if I lose my place. It's much harder to lose your place in a paragraph (skipping over lines, for instance) when there are only 2-3 lines per paragraph. Skipping paragraphs might be a problem then, but I've yet to see it - they're spaced far enough apart that this does not tend to happen.
If the font is really small or poorly spaced (clustered together/poor line spacing), such as it is in some books, I could see it being a problem.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
My two last laptops (dell 8500 & D830) have both had 15.4" WUXGA (1920x1200).
The 8500 came out in early 2003.
You cannot find WUXGA displays on laptops smaller than 17" any more.
This is crazy. What is the world coming to?
When my D830 finally breaks beyond repair (I've already replaced the motherboard), I'm going to go live in a cave...
I upgraded to a 30" monitor from my ancient 1600x1200 CRT because "upgrading" to 1920x1200 felt just plain dumb. I doubt monitors will get better until they start pushing a 2160p double HD format.
So let me get this straight. People are customizing their more advanced technology to conform to the standards of their less advanced technology? I know old habits die hard, but this still seems backwards to me.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Ajust your resolution. Problem fixed
Keeping the diagonal measurement constant, the farther you get away from a square the fewer square inches you have. Less area, less cost, wah lah!
I love the 4:3 ratio, 16:9 is a pain. It's why I've hung on to my 12" Apple G4 Powerbook forever.
Unfortunately, that's because of sales volumes. If they'll sell 2500x as many "super-mega ultra beyond HD W I D E" screens as they will usable shaped ones, the usable shaped ones will cost a fortune.
Unfortunately, most LCD screens have a very narrow vertical viewing angle compared the the horizontal viewing angle (because eyes are horizontally spaced). On many monitors, you get a slight color shift just from the angular difference between your left and right eye. I can't stand this on any monitor I've tried to rotate.
One solution is rotating the screen (portrait mode).
But I hear another solution is buying an iPad... then nothing else will matter.
About 5 years ago I got a 20" 4:3 1600x1200 LCD and have been searching for a new IPS LCD for the past 2 years, but either they are too bright for a dark room (even with the minimum brightness) or resolution can't match the 1200lines I'm aleready using :(
Or the few (16:10) that match those requirements are like 10x more expensive :(
Is it so hard to make backlight dimable below 100cd/m2 !?! I've aleready bought one and sent it back beacause diming down the brightness only adjusted the palete and not the backlight (gray instead of blacks)
stupid manufacturers.
This way I might end up buying an OLED in a few years time... (but again I suspect vertical resolution will be the lower 1080 lines :(
All the widescreen monitors list their widescreen-ness as one of their bullet-point bonus features.
Yet a non-widescreen monitor of the same size costs quite a bit more these days.
The answer to "why" is simple: manufacturers believe all that users want to do is watch wide-screen video.
My old screen was 16:9, but now I have a 16:10 screen, so I seem to be getting more vertical pixels. If you really want vertical space, just turn your screen 90 degrees and use it that way, but then you'll be complaining that it's getting narrower, won't you?
Switch to a language where text reads vertically instead of horizontally.
No comment.
This sample text proves how crappy texts can look on a widescreen monitor.
Look at it on full-width on a wide monitor and it's just an OT rant.
Now look at it at a setup where no line is wider than 50 characters. Wow! Succinct
- See now, why the government wants us to change to widescreen?!
Write smaller functions. Your code will be better for it :-)
A monitor with a 4:3 aspect ratio has a 12.33% larger area than a 16:9 monitor with the same diagonal. We are not only losing vertical pixels, we are losing screen area! Therefore, the wider monitors are probably cheaper to manufacture, as they can make more monitors out of the same LCD substrate. Because they can still advertise the same diagonal, consumers don't notice...
Until you open windows in two different programs that use that retarded window-in-a-window scheme that MS won't kill.
You mean apps using MDI? Try maximizing the inner window and half-maximizing the outer window. Then your MDI becomes very similar to tabbed interface.
I went from 1600x1200 to 1920x1200. Only question is whether we're losing vertical resolution per dollar.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I went over to dell's web site and without even trying, they are selling 6 screens that do 1920x1200 at 24" or larger:
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?k=1920x1200&_nks=true&category_id=4009&p=1&x=0&y=0
Ok, so none of them are below $400 or less than 24" but why should they be?
If you want a piece of quality hardware, you should be prepared to pay for it.
If you're only going to spend $200 on a monitor then you should be prepared to buy and accept rubbish.
An idiot is defined as someone with profound mental retardation, or a mental age below five years. I doubt that someone with the mind of an average preschooler would be typing anything on Slashdot. Morons I can believe, because their mild mental retardation is comparable to someone in middle school. But not idiots.
I am still waiting for a square monitor!
If the individual had a monitor at his place of work and home, he could use such a system
For someone who uses a laptop only while docked to an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor, it might be just as good to have two desktop PCs, one for each location, and use the Internet or a USB flash drive to move the project around. Or get an ION nettop or a Mac mini depending on your choice of operating system.
I always cringe when I see someone talk about how stupid it is to buying a gaming laptop cause playing a game without a power supply would deplete the power supply in minutes.
I play homebrew games in FCE Ultra on a netbook. It's not that much more of a drain than an IDE or a web browser.
That's irrelevant because the allure of such a laptop isn't to play on a bus, but to be a portable gaming solution that you can take to other places with an outlet (Hotel, friends house, place of work, etc etc)
Which brings me to something else I want to rant about: Why Are We Losing Spawn Installations? But it'll have to wait for another day.
Why is this better than 1920x1200, or two 960x1200 areas?
Because 1080 is that much cheaper than 1200 due to economies of scale.
Why would losing 120 pixels ever be a good thing?
Most people aren't willing to pay twice as much for an uncommon screen size.
Because it is cheaper for the manufacturers to standardize, no matter what the real needs/wants of the consumer are. Laptops will not give you any better vertical resolution than 1200. The Apple 30 inch Cinema display is your only choice for the desktop. Assuming you want higher than "HD" resolutions. Last year Samsung had a 24" 2048×1536 LCD screen. It is no longer made.
Use two monitors: one horizontal, one vertical. Then put the right app on the right window. 'Nuff said.
And BTW, the reason that many LCD monitors look like crap when rotated is... it's a cheap monitor. Twisted Nematic (TN) TFT LCD displays are the standard in low-to-mid-range laptops. They undergo drastic acromaticity when the viewing angle shifts more than a few degrees.
So if you want to rotate your monitor, buy one that uses a better LCD technology (like IPS, AFFS, MVA, PVA, etc).
Yeah, parent is correct. Pet peeve of mine also.
i'd like to see documents start trending towards landscape format, with two ore more columns per page. if MS word defaulted this way out-of-the-box, it would become the defacto standard since a lot of users wouldn't change it. or couldn't.
Because horizontal space is more useful than vertical space, you don't read vertically, you read a line or maybe a few lines at a time, displaying an entire page on screen is pretty much useless most of the time, better to widen the screen and bump up the text size to match so it's easier to read and you won't lose your place on the page because all the superfluous crap above and below that you aren't *actually* reading isn't displayed not to mention our eyes field of view is wider than it is high and movies are wide screen and video games are better played widesceen and and and... do I really need to list all the reasons WIDESCREEN IS BETTER /rant.
Papa Johns or Pizza Hut?
Me, it's Pizza Hut, only because this hicktown has no Papa Johns.
An A(n+1) page is what you get if you cut an An page in halves.
If additionally I tell you that all An pages have the same shape, and an A0 page has an area of 1 square meter, you now can calculate what A4 looks like.
<pedatic>No I can't. You did not specify the aspect ratio.
I love the creative edit of the headline.
Now peeps, who didn't read the article, are talking about monitors, when it's actually about laptops screen size.
Be seeing you...
Rotating I never tried.
Yes I heard it was very expensive (never seen a price tag of it); that was the main problem with that monitor, and is what killed it off. Too expensive for its advantages.
Everyone I know went to UP to 1920x1200 from 1600x1200, not down.
1680x1050 is mostly for laptops now and I don't know what 1680x900 is for, cell phones?
Almost all computer monitors I see now are 16:10, while HDTVs are 16:9.
This is similar to how regular "square" LCDs were 5:4, while normal TVs where 4:3.
What I don't get is why refresh rates are still relatively low with computer monitors, other than 3D stuff.
We have 2ms or less response times, but the actual refresh rates just aren't matching it.
HDTVs are up to like 240Hz or something crazy high now, but CRTs had 200Hz way back, with a lower resolution of course.
I would read the article but the web page won't even load. I think Slashdot killed it.
PC monitor resolutions should be going up soon with 1440p and later 1600p, all with 3D to match no less.
I believe those will be in the HDMI 1.4 standard.
A little bit of maths will show you that a (say) 20 inch (wide) screen has less surface area than a 20 inch "more square" screen. Thus presumably it is cheeper to produce. Screwed again.
It's simple - they want to market the displays as "Full HD" which in marketing speak means 1080p.. They can't stick that sticker on a 1920x1200 display and call it "Full HD", but they can on a 1920x1080 display..
I'm annoyed by this to no end.
Function call taking up 900 big ones? Function *definition* maybe...
fun
You young schmucks should listen up! When you hit 40-50 years old your eyes will seize up and you'll be able to focus at exactly one distance. You get glasses, then you have a choice of distance (TV or driving) and reading (books or monitors) as well as whatever your eyes can do by themselves. One thing you'll notice is that at the closer distances, the focal depth is very small - it makes a big difference if the monitor is 40cm away or 50cm - at one you can focus. At the other you can't. Brutal as that. Now sit down at a 75cm (30") widescreen monitor and WTF - if you can focus at the centre, you can't focus at the edge. Unless, of course you sit 2m away or more. That's why I'm sitting exactly 45cm from my good old 43cm (17") diagonal 1920x1440 Philips 107P4 CRT monitor. It beats the crap out of the Dell 2001FP 51cm (20") 1600x1200 monitor at work both in the quality of the image, the number of vertical lines of code in emacs and my ability to focus on it. When they offered me an upgrade to a rootin tootin 27" wide-screen, I tried it and sent it back - just couldn't focus all the way to the edges. If any monitor manufacturers are listening here, WE WANT VERTICAL PIXELS _AND_ A NICE COMPACT FORMFACTOR - around 43cm, thank you very much!! I'm not talking a small demographic here - it's the baby boomers!!
The hardware manufacturers think we choose to have laptops so that we can watch movies in cafe shops, and buy a external display in case we also have to work?
Isn't it more natural to work on 15'' laptops and watch movies on huge external display or video projectors?
I really hate those code names. They convey less information than the simple numeric pixel sizes.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Media is more important then anything else, like law.
I agree wholeheartedly with your "WTF". My 5 year old laptop (luggable) has 1920x1200 resolution. I though 5 years and going from a laptop to a desktop screen should give me a serious boot in resolution. Nope, nothing (unless I go all the way to 30").
The only comfort I have is that maybe the iPhone "retina" hype can switch the focus back to higher resolutions.
I too find it disturbing that displays have gone to 2MP and stopped. We were this close to being able to actually read a PDF on 100% zoom without squinting. WTF is going on?
- Full HD
- "Good enough"
- 3D graphics
- Fonts not scaling to higher resolution
Instead of pixels, most consumers just relate to the words "Full HD". For a lot of people "better than Full HD" makes no more sense than "it goes to 11". And sadly, it's good enough for most (even if it is not enough for you and me).
3D graphics performance is also increasingly critical. Increasing the number of pixels eats a LOT of 3D performance, but makes little difference unless your eyes can clearly see each pixel.
Not all fonts scale properly. On a lot of systems / programs, using higher than FullHD resolution on the average 20-some monitor will make it really hard to read the text in a lot of programs. A lot of people are unable to adjust/fix this.
I lost my sig.
It's time designers start thinking about horizontal layouts for presentation (at least on pc/laptop monitors)
An A(n+1) page is what you get if you cut an An page in halves.
If additionally I tell you that all An pages have the same shape, and an A0 page has an area of 1 square meter, you now can calculate what A4 looks like.
<pedatic>No I can't. You did not specify the aspect ratio.
Yes, I did. In the first sentence and the first part of the second sentence there's everything you need to calculate the aspect ratio. Of course it's still possible that you can't do it.
OK, strictly speaking I omitted one detail: An pages are, of course, rectangular.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
They used to come with 1920x1200 and 1680x1050. Now, most have decided that the 16:10 aspect ratio is bunk. Now you're looking at 1920x1200 and 1680x1050 is being replaced more often than not by 1600x900 (a loss of pixels on both the horizontal and vertical fronts.)
I discovered the same problem in Jul when my laptop died and I went to buy a new one.
my previous laptop was a dell 1920 x 1200.
Lo and behold I found it's practically impossible to buy a laptop with a vertical resolution above 1080.
unfortunately I gave up one day too soon, and bought a toshiba qosmio with
1920x1080. it was the only laptop out of about 100 (or more) that I looked at that had more than 768 vertical.
the next day i was bitching about it at work and a guy magically found an asus which still had 1920x1200.
the problem is even with that laptop, you're sacrificing something else.
in my opinion, the laptop manufacturers deserve to be put out of business by someone with a brain.
the problem I think is that they are marketing to the 99% market of thick home users who see HD and think 'ooh'. well HD tv is x1080.
anyway a few weeks later, my work had an auction, and I bought a 4.5 yr old hp laptop with a 1600x1200 screen for $95 AU (about $90 US?) which is more pleasant to use than this high-end toshiba with crappy screen.
it's just f* pathetic.
to put this all in context too, there WAS one lenovo laptop I found with a 1920x1200 screen. it cost $11000 AU, with the same specs (aside from the screen) as my toshiba qosmio laptop which cost $2200 (but has x1080 screen).
and my dell laptop 3 years ago cost $5500 and had good specs at the time but nothing compared to even this qosmio laptop - for example my hard disk size for that $5500 was
about 120 GB, 3 yrs slower cpu, half the ram. 1 disk instead of 2.
BUT A CRAPPY SCREEN RESOLUTION!
bleagh! talk about going back to the dark ages!
btw lenovo is a joke - they sell the same $11000 laptop for only about $3500 US from their US site. that's a n $8000 markup for aus customers for the sake of saving 2 weeks shipping. I'm not kidding either. So I decided I'm not even getting that from the US site cos I'm not giving that company even 1 cent when they show such contempt to aus customers. (especially since it's a chinese company, us and aus orders are probably coming from the same place).
what a waste of 10 minutes typing this. as it's anonymous I doubt anyone wil read it.
I did some more testing with Cleartype enabled and disabled yesterday, and with different fonts. It appears that Cleartype actually helps the legibility. (As one would hope.) I wish I could edit my original post, in fact.
That said, some fonts seem easier to read than others. On my normal monitor, Consolas looks fantastic. On the rotated one, not so much. Courier New looks slightly better but still annoying (but MUCH more legible with ClearType on!). I found the best looking font, for me, was Lucida Sans Typewriter (or Lucida Console). Lucida Console fits more text on my screen, but it is denser... I'm not sure which of the two I prefer. My only regret is that the ^ character is less distinctive from the other letters, but perhaps I am just not used to it.
It definitely looks enough better with Cleartype ON that when I turned it off I nearly exclaimed "gah! turn it back on!".
I moved from 1600x1200 to 1920x1200 because I did not want to loose vertical pixels. I am very productive that way. My next monitor will be 2560x1600. That way I gain 400 vertical pixel.
Martin
yo.
cmdr taco. I have a lot of respect for you based on your previous submissions, but this (laptop or desktop) is something you should have specified in your original post.
because I have suffered from the same lack of decent options for laptop screens, I knew what you were talking about (laptop screens).
cos there's no probs buying a decent standalone screen, but you just can't get a decent laptop with a decent screen these days (whereas you could get better screens on laptops 4 years ago).
>It's been 28 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
f sake. even 28 minutes is too much for Anonymous?
wot? are spammers sending 2 posts per hour now?
from the last reports I saw, they're posting *tloads per minute, not 2 per hour.
We have lots of programmers here who just get 21" 1920x1200 monitors and tilt them 90*. Get 4 of those suckers and you can see a lot.
Even my little Atom Ion Netbook that I just picked up for $350 sports a 1280x800 screen which isn't too bad for most tasks.
What model? Is that a 10" or 12" screen?
I wish there were a simple way of searching for netbooks with higher than 1024x600 resolution, especially the 10" models.
Is that someone associates computer monitors to printed paper. "I cannot read an A4 sheet on a monitor anymore". Heard of the scroll wheel? Have we reached a point in society where we are so lazy we can't scroll a screen down to view more content and assume that a computer monitor must display a sheet of paper. Most content I read and write was never originally printed on paper OR intended to be printed on paper.
To me it sounds like someone is in the print publishing industry and so requires a screen with more vertical resolution. They solved that issue by creating monitors that rotate 90 degrees. If your whining that laptops don't have vertical resolution, don't claim to be a professional print publisher if you work off a laptop.
My biggest annoyance is that most "print" publishers have become "web" publishers (honestly, who prints or reads off paper these days), so they format the web with a fixed width size. I paid for a nice 2560 wide resolution, don't show me a website with a fixed width of 800 pixels. That is the real crime in all this.
I think the answer here is that there are more people out there that don't associate computer monitors = printed page. There are more people that play games and watch video content then those people that produce printed content. The reason for "wider" is that our eyes are horizontal so it fits our natural field of vision.
Sorry, I missed that. I guess I should not post when I am tired.
Consumers want width for the peripheral vision on their first person shooter games and MMO games.
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."
Just buy a real monitor. And buy smart. If you need a certain vertical pixel count, buy that monitor. I went from 1600x1200 19" CRTs to 1920x1200 24" LCDs. That was a win-win... wide-screen is a good thing, as long as I don't have to compromise.
The problem is that people want it all. The cheaper monitors at 1920x1080 are using HDTV panels, not LCD panels intended for monitors. They're made in larger volumes, so sure, you can get 'em cheaper. They're also cheap TN displays, rather than the superior IPS or MVA type. This is because you want a 24" screen for $200, not because you can't get a better screen.
The PC industry fought with the film industry over the aspect ratio for HDTV... 16:9 was actually the compromise; the PC industry wanted 16:10, the film industry wanted 2:1 (16:8). Naturally, the PC industry went right ahead and made everything 16:10 anyway, at least at first. It's kind of ironic so many are moving to 16:9 now anyway, just 'cause it's been made cheaper by the massive power of TV.
-Dave Haynie
programming using 4:3 is the worst thing ever. 16:9 is about perfect for programming