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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.
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
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.
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.
Yea, I tried that but my desk isn't long enough for my legs.
But then my neck hurts at the end of the day from turning my head....
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?
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.
Have you ever tried to use a 16:9 monitor turned sideways? It's ridiculous. The viewing angle on the vertical (now, the horizontal) part of the monitor is terrible so you have to be sitting exactly in front of it or you can't see it. This is no good if you have 2 monitors. The monitor is so tall that your focus on the top and bottom parts of the monitor are different.
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.)
In modern America one is not limited to purchasing things in the town you live in. Try the internet sometime. It has all the stuff you could ever want to buy for sale. Even monitors.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
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?