I like mine.
It definitely seems to be the way things are going. For some of the applications I use that where you might want to open up a side-panel, they’re obviously more effective (like Borland Builder).
It just gives more room for you to space your apps out if you always have multiple things going on.
I have two Samsungs in my house. I love my 206BW. It is lightning fast has finer pixels than most other monitors. Coupled with a good video card, it looks like you can dive into it. It was about $230 from Tiger Direct, also. Major deal. Very happy with it. I found the 22 to be too wide, however, and gave it to my son, who games with it almost constantly and is very pleased with it. In my opinion, they are great monitors and great value.
I use two widescreens, and it’s been pretty handy, not only for movies. As mentioned above, webpages are still designed more-or-less for 4:3 monitors (and anyway, it can be kind of hard to read lines when they’re a foot long). So on the main onem, I size Safari to about 4:3, and have Adium and some desktop icons visible to the right. On the other one, I’ll usually have iTunes taking up about 2/3rd and leave the rest for my Movies folder plus my media player, and there’s room for Bittorrent windows and other random stuff.
It looks like the one I’m considering is the same basic monitor, only 19" instead of 21". What do you mean by “finer pixels”?
Also - the pictures I’ve seen of the monitors make it look like they’re tilted up 10 or 20 degrees. I know they have adjustable tilt, but can you make it perfectly vertical, or is it always tilted like that?
I have dual Planar monitors that are widescreen and they rotate 90 degrees and auto switch into tall mode so you can go back and forth between tall and standard viewing modes. It really is the best of both worlds.
I’m no expert, but from what I gather, as soon as the pixel turns dark again the “countdown” on persistance of vision starts - it begins fading away. That way when a new pixel appears in the same spot, it’s more likely that your brain sees it as a seperate image.
Whereas with LCDs, the previous pixel persists on the screen until it changes. The “countdown” on the old pixel begins at the same moment the new pixel appears, making the stronger visual persistance image of the last pixel blend more with the new one.
I’ve observed this in practice - I used my friend’s LCD to game with and there was definitely a sluggishness of the image - and he had a nice 2ms monitor. It’s not something so obvious as the ghosting that appeared on early LCDs, but it’s noticible to my veteran gamer eyes.
My macbook is 1280x800, and I wish I had just a little more horizontal real-estate. I got used to just having everything maximized on my regular aspect ratio monitor, but now that I’m thisclose to being able to have two windows comfortably open, I feel shortchanged.
Oh well, they’ll just have to overlap a bit.
Yeah, it is an interesting notion. I’ve been trying to throw together a GQ OP if I can pull enough cites together. I’ll leave it that the notion that “persistance of vision” is real or even measurable as an interval is controversial.
Widescreen monitors are great if you’re into image editing, software development, music editing or other activities where the applications typically have lots of windows and tools. With a widescreen monitor you can have a normal aspect ratio image open and still have the toolbars visible on either side.
The article made sense to me, and matches my experience, so I think it’s probably true. If you end up putting up a GQ about it, though, feel free to link it here.
Me too. I don’t know how people got this notion that every application must be fullscreen all the time. There’s a reason why the most-used OS in the world is called ‘Windows’. If something doesn’t naturally fit the 16:10 aspect, leave it at whatever it prefers.
Definitely. I found working on my dissertation massively more straightforward when I could have a full-height Word doc open as well as a full page of PDF to cite from, right next to each other.
I’ve always been a devotee of bigger is better when it comes to display real estate. I think for widescreen there is an extra element to consider - it’s a lot easier to switch if you get a monitor big enough that the vertical dimension is at least as tall as whatever you have used before. That way you don’t feel the loss of anything vertically, and you gain a lot horizontally.
With regard to motion blur/speed - irrelevant unless you play a lot of fast-paced shooters, IMO. Even then I never noticed a problem with COD4 or similar. In terms of big text - just run at very high rez and crank the font size up. Then you get the best of both worlds.