I tend to use a multi monitor setup, with some horizontal, some vertical. I have an ageing Apple 30" LCD and am in the market for a new, large monitor. Samsung do a pretty good 32" now that I have used, but I notice there are a lot of very large curved monitors around now.
I am sceptical - are they really better to use than two flat monitors, correctly positioned? Anyone out there with a curved setup?
There's no bezel gap in the middle, so you can use the desktop space in a more flexible way. For example, a Photoshop user can have the image in the middle of their giant monitor with space at either side for palettes. The curvature of the monitor is slightly more comfortable if the monitor fills an extremely large portion of your field of view.
The downside is that most curved ultrawide monitors aren't particularly high resolution - for example, the Dell P3418HW is only 2560x1080, a long way short of the 3840x2160 of a standard UHD display. High-end curved ultrawide monitors are available with 3440x1440 resolution, but you're still paying more money for fewer pixels than an equivalent flat monitor.
Right now, I think the best option for most power users is a ~40" UHD display. You effectively get four 20" 1080p monitors bolted together, but you can use the display area more flexibly because of the lack of bezels. It looks absolutely ridiculous, but it works very well. It's like turning the entire area behind your desk into an infinitely flexible multi-monitor setup. For programmers who use a text editor, a three-way vertical split at 1280x2160 seems to be very productive. A two-way split gives you a 2560x2160 window for an IDE, plus a 1280x2160 window for documentation. For video editing, you can fit two 1080p preview windows on the top half and use the bottom half for an ultrawide 3840x1080 timeline. Audio engineers can see 24 channels of their mixer, with enough space left for a very large timeline at the top. A program like WinSplit Revolution makes it very easy to manage these tiled layouts, or of course a tiling window manager in Linux.
>>26333 This. I've got a 37" TV with hefty bezels, so probably about the same size as a 40" display with thin bezels. I honestly couldn't imagine sitting that on my desk. Unless you're running a full-blown monitoring operation, the height is seriously excessive. The top of your monitor really shouldn't be too far above your eyeline.
For me personally, yeah. I actually much prefer two or three 24" monitors. More useful if you have multiple things going on, or a couple of different machines running. Not to mention them being cheap, and I'm tight as fuck.
>>26335 I (>>26334) think it's certainly possible to have too tall a monitor. A 40" 16:9 monitor mounted on a stand is going to be almost two foot tall.
>>26340 There are a lot of ergonomics at work here - I think desk and chair height is also very important. As is the type of chair and posture. I am typing this today on my kitchen table, the chair is about an inch too short (or the desk an inch too high) but if I sit UP its about right. A disaster if I was trying to work here all day/night on some code.
It really depends on what you're doing and how you normally use your screen real estate. If you're used to having two screens with the bezels meeting in the centre, a large curved screen eliminates that bezel. This is great if you find yourself stretching window across the bezel currently, but if you value the physical separation two screens provide you may want to rethink.
At home I have a large curved screen (Acer X34A) combined with a vertical Dell U2414H. The curved screen is great for games and video content and is marvelous for doing graphical work (I use GIMP, but I imagine Photoshop similarly benefits) while the vertical screen takes care of reference material, chat, what have you. For anything else, including casual browsing, it's not so great. Websites stretch too far, reading text that wide is a pain and generally things are happier when I pretend it's two screens and have two windows occupying half of the screen each. Still, I like the setup.
By contrast, at work I use two screens (27" Apple Thunderbolt), one facing me directly and one off at an angle. I do "IT" so I spend most of my time in a text editor, having that front and centre physically separated from the rest of what I occasionally need to pay attention to (email, internal chat, etc) works nicely. I wouldn't want to replace that with a single screen even if I had the option to.
That's pretty urrghh, for sure. I had a friend who bought one of those 'ultrawide' LGs and we just hated it. Too wide for games, knackered up sites like this, didn't even look good running something like i3 window manager, at least not as good as a couple of seperate monitors.
It just 'feels right' to me to have physical separation.
>>26363 Would you mind mentioning why you didn't like it for games? It's slightly annoying since some games letter box as they don't support this wide a resolution (and this particular screen has a noticeable amount of backlight bleeding) but for games that do I find it quite nice. As long as your setup doesn't choke rendering the resolution and, for FPS games, there's an FoV slider you can just plain see more; I don't see the down side.
>>26364 > generally things are happier when I pretend it's two screens and have two windows occupying half of the screen each. Still, I like the setup.
It was a very subjective thing for games - I actually don't like a massive FoV - if you do, it's no problem, but it makes me feel a bit queasy. Having ultrawide just makes everything visually seem a bit 'off'. Perhaps I could have gotten used to it. If you like it you like it, I suppose, but I could never get my head around it, no pun intended.
The only thing we ever found it useful for was showing a big long ableton or Logic project.
