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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?"
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.
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That's my solution too: I have one "real" panel (a 20" 1600x1200 4x3 panel) and one "short screen" panel (22" 1680x1050 16x9) that is rotated 90 degrees. Word processing docs and web pages work great on the short screen (wide screen) when rotated. In fact, I am typing this post on the rotated screen right now.
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.
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...
+1 Disagree
It's harder to design menus for left or right positioning because our languages flows horizontal, not vertical.
For example if I drag the Windows tab bar to the left ("zip"), it creates a mess. It's taking up FAR more room on the left than it did on the bottom. The same would be true if you moved the Web browser or Word processor menu to the left or right.
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not really - right now i'm using a 17in 4:3 with 1280x1024 res.. show me anything under 20in with more than 1k vertical? we are losing vertical - they might be gained on the horizontal.. but actually most of the new ones have overall less pixes for the same quoted screen size in inches..
also note the last time you saw a monitor quote it's dot pitch? LCD's don't apply to the prior way of measuring it because they don't have separate sub pixels but what dot pitch did enable was easy way of comparing pixel density from one monitor to another..
considering that higher density screens are more expensive to make and are more likely to have defects in large runs - there no doubt in my mind that monitor makers where happy to stop using dot pitch and not replace it.
the fact that when you go to buy a laptop you can get a 15in screen with a 1367x768 which which would be equivalent to a .278mm dot pitch - keep in mind you could get CRT's with dot pitch ~.2mm around 10 years ago. where is my LCD with that option?
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I have two monitors; one is portrait, and one is landscape. When I turned the portrait one (an HP 2207, it came in landscape configuration), OS X knew it had been turned, rotated the portion of the desktop accordingly, and the only thing left for me to do was choose how I wanted the portrait space to sit adjoining the landscape space.
If I need to work on a page, I usually use the portrait space. If I need to work in landscape (I'm a photographer, it's common), I use the landscape space.
I think this problem has been solved, and solved very well, for quite some time. You can use one monitor like my HP that is aware of its orientation, or you can use more than one and have one or more of each. Of course, this does assume that the OS is competent to deal with it, but I know that at least, OS X is.
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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.