Glad to see some experimentation in the more-square direction. I used a 1280x1024 (5:4) monitor for several years at work and found it to be a decent aspect ratio for a lot of use cases.
I think that IDEs really should adopt to utilize the horizontal space better... I mean a lot of the utility bars on the top could be on the left, and I already use the sides for directory trees, etc... it really depends on your workflow... usually my IDE is 2/3 of monitor 1, and the other third is actual directory windows... monitor 2 is split with command prompts and browser windows.
A wider monitor will encourage developers to write more function on a single line. When I develop in VS or Studio Code, scrolling up and down is a hassle. I recently rotated my two 1920x1080 monitors. This makes a huge difference in coding. I also develop in ladder logic. Horizontal monitors are good for that because logic is written from left to right. I also use cad packages. When I stretch cad across two monitors in portrait view, I have a square workspace. The high number of pixels really helps to avoid so much panning and zooming. I came to this article because I realize how much better the square format is, if there are enough pixels.1920x1920 seems to be good enough. 2560x2560 would be better.
I'm currently using a 1440x900 and a 1280x1024 monitor at work, I find the 1280x1024 to be superior for more vertically oriented spreadsheets and e-mails where the extra pixels make a difference in being able to see a few more rows
Yeah, portrait mode for coding is a no brainer... Been using it since 2005. Actually, the portrait mode is better for anything other than video. Just look at this webpage layout - 2/3 of the screen real estate is wasted when it's viewed on a 27" landscape monitor. And 4/5 of the page content is hidden at any given time.
>Yeah, portrait mode for coding is a no brainer...
Only if you're coding in a text editor. If you're using an IDE, landscape is much better to allow room for both your code in the middle and tools on the left and right.
In refrance to older monitors, 1280x1024 WAS the standard and BEST resolution for doing work on documents and spreadsheets. People loved that resolution a few years back, and when I started replacing the old monitors with the new 1366x768 monitors......oh man was there chaos. People hate the new default of 1366x768.....especially to do any work on. Immediately it felt like people lost 1/3 of their work screen view. and it was true.
So anyways, I am glad somebody is moving back towards a square design.
Nope, budget was the problem, we bought the cheap entry level 'dell' 20' monitors. They looked nice, and had good refresh rates, but the 1366x768 resolution was horrible on those monitors. Where you could see a full document, or almost full document on a 1280x1024, on 1366x768 it showed up on only half. Same with web pages, or excel spreadsheets. Horrible ideas.
Yeah, exactly. One dimension increased by a handful of pixels, the other dimension shrunk by a lot of pixels. And it's that shrinkage that's the problem, and makes a 1366x768 monitor seem cramped.
When we were upgrading monitors at work from 17" 1280x1024, we spent a lot of time looking for monitors with at least 1024 vertical pixels. Anything with less than that was excluded automatically from the list. Took awhile to find decent monitors, and ended up with 27" 1080p monitors.
There's nothing inherently wrong with widescreen monitors. But they aren't an upgrade if one of the dimensions loses pixels compared to what it's replacing.
Mostly coding and web design. Of course this was in roughly 2004, so LCD prices were still pretty expensive, and the 17" 1280x1024 was about the biggest / highest res LCD screen you could get at an affordable price. "The more pixels, the better" was always true, but almost all content was then targeted at 1024x768 screens, so I could work on a 1024x768 layout in Photoshop and still have sufficient room for palettes on the edges. 1024x768 (the resolution of a 15" LCD at the time) would have killed me.
I still refuse to buy a 16:9 screen as a computer monitor... 16:10 is so much more manageable (I have a couple of Dell 24" screens at 1920x1200, and a 2011 MBP at 1680x1050). And yes I would find a 1280x1024 monitor much more useful than 1440x900 despite there being roughly the same number of pixels in both. Vertical pixels are more useful for general work tasks.... at least up to a certain point. I'm not sure if that holds true all the way to 1:1, or only up to 1200 vertical pixels, or what.... but I would take a 1280x1024 monitor any day over 1440x900, unless my only use case was watching movies.
This is right, and it's made doubly so by Microsoft Office's move to the ribbon. That sucks up a ridiculous amount of vertical pixels, which were already at a premium for any work situation.
Nice to see I'm not alone in this sentiment. It's also not the resolution of most 16:9 monitors, but the aspect ratio itself. I simply don't like a screen that wide. Looks weird. Takes up too much desk space, moves my speakers too far apart, and yes, trades precious vertical resolution for wasted horizontal resolution. Clearly 16:9 was a marketing move, not a technical one. It's stupid to have the PC industry follow the HDTV industry. The need to watch full screen movies on a computer monitor is such a small percentage compared to their primary purpose.
I think one of these would be interested. Currently I use a pair of Samsung 24 inch 1920x1200 monitors rotating to portrait instead of landscape at work and find it very handy. 1200 is plenty wide for most things and for looking at Java/Java Script/HTML code etc and SQL queries/results the extra height can be very handy. I hate working on cheep laptop monitors that don't have much height.
It works well for office applications. At work I had two 5:4 19" 1280x1024 screens and stuck with them since they where buying nothing but 1440x900 screens. When 1920x1080 screens finally started making their way in this year, I tried replacing a 5:4 with one. It was maddening how many things just didn't use the extra horizontal space. It's 2014 and websites all seem to be hardcoded for 1280x1024 or 1024x768 and desktop programs don't seem to take 16:9 into account either. Programmers either have to target old 5:4 screens like webmasters, or they assume you want two small windows side by side per monitor. In the end I just went back to the two 5:4s, since the underutilized 16:9 was just eating up desk space.
I don't think he was suggesting that there were others. 1280x1024 is the only 5:4 I've ever seen and it was very common in the pre-widescreen era of displays - both CRT and LCD.
1280x1024 was once a popular resolution, but most of the monitors in that era were physically 4:3. When displaying resolutions with different aspect ratios, the pixels weren't square.
I still use a 1280x1024. Its super old from back when LCDs were uncommon, but its a PVA panel and buying a TN now seems like spending money for a downgrade...
My monitor stands can pivot, allowing me to switch to 1080x1920 when I want, which is something I do when I'm working with a lot of text (reading/writing long documents, writing code, etc.) or editing a rather vertical image. When I do so, I usually maximize the window in the portrait monitor and, if it has dragable sidebars, I usually take them and put them over on the landscape monitor.
I think the problem is the width more than the height. Content flows down, so for non-gaming/video tasks, more height is always better, until it starts making your neck hurt.
For width, though, 1920 isn't quite big enough for two tasks side by side, IMO. I prefer about 1200 pixels for a browser, document, spreadsheet, etc.
That's why I really liked my old 30" 2560x1600 display. Sure, not quite as tall as this, but the width meant I could have two tasks comfortably side by side.
I'm currently using three 24" 1920x1200 displays at work, and a single 39" 3840x2160 at home.
Well, as an EIZO it won't be cheap, but it should be good quality.
This should be excellent for photography, which is one of their target markets anyway. Now you don't need to worry about whether the photo is portrait or landscape, you can edit the same-sized image either way.
I'm always about ready to rip my eyes out when I go to a family portrait store--which is supposed to have professional equipment. After the photo shoot, they sit there on a frickin 1920x1080 monitor and try to show us the photos using thumbnails so we can select them. Can't see a ding dong thing on those. So then she has to double click each one and it takes an extra hour of her time and our time and she can't remember where she was once she double-clicks the photo to enlarge it and meanwhile the kids are going berserk. Can you tell I'm frustrated about this? Yeah. Frustrated about coding on those frickin pieces of garbage too.
This monitor and 4k and the other vertical improvements can't come fast enough.
Cue the babies about how games and videos don't need this higher res and we're all forced to pay for something we don't need in 3...2...1...
Still use a 1280x1024 as my primary monitor for all work, web surfing, document work, picture editing etc. I have a hi-def 16:10 for gaming movies etc. Keep them both connected all the time but use my 4:3 monitor many more hours. Noticed my wife will use mine rather than her laptop in a heartbeat. She says she can just see more and do more while using it. She wishes her laptop was 4:3. I may be old school but I personally prefer 4:3 and will try to replace this monitor with a the one here in the article if it ever comes to market.
I don't think you're really looking for 4:3. If you simply take your 1280x1024 screen and attach some more horizontal pixels (make it more wide-screen), it doesn't become any worse. But if you go wide-screen and lower the amount of vertical pixels, that's a clear drawback and pretty much the reason people don't like wide screen.
Think of this: plenty of people like 2 monitors side-by-side, but they don't like wide-screen? That doesn't make much sense.
Exactly. A lot of people have 1280x1024 monitors (as that was "the standard" for 15-19" monitors back in the day). A 16:9 screen tends to have fewer vertical pixels (768 or 900), but not always. So long as you are picky about the minimum vertical pixels, a widescreen monitor can be an upgrade.
1680x1050, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, etc are all upgrades to a 1280x1024 monitor.
Kutark, square-aspect displays are common in medical imaging, defense imaging, photogrammatry, GIS and other industrial imaging applications. In many cases, images can be more than 50GB in file size, more than 100K pixels across, with hardware used to accelerate pan, roam, zoom and image processing ops (edge detect, sharpness, contrast, noise reduction, brightness, etc.) Defense imaging has been doing this sort of thing for almost 20 years (Google the, "Group Station", circa late 1990s), in the past with high- end UNIX systems and propretory gfx, nowadays more likely with custom-built versions of pro GPUs, though the details are not publicised anymore (eg. multi-GPU board, 10X more RAM than mormal, etc. Lockheed used to make SGI-based stuff like this in the 1990s; I bet they make NVIDIA-based designs now).
I would certainly buy one (actually two - one for work, one for home, for reasonable price per pixel and if my laptop docking station could support its full resolution).
There is very strong division between creators (who would love 1:1 option) vs. consumers (who would mostly stick to 16:9). Explaining opposite position is a futile exercise.
My main use case is to have no need to turn 1920x1200 display between portrait and landscape, and have enough space for toolbars and secondary windows.
I just wish the wider public was more aware of how industry, govt. & commerce operate, what they do, the equipment involved, etc. People are staggeringly ignorant of what makes a nation tick. As tech evolves, everything seems to become increasingly black-box. As you say, there's often a vast gulf between consumer & industrial tech. Now if only we had a medium which could be used to explain how stuff works... oh wait. we do, but it's full of chat shows, soaps & reality junk. I've visited a moderately broad range of industrial & commercial companies (from power stations to movie companies), always amazes me the kit they use, how they work, etc.
Btw, I meant to add before, a lot of industrial imaging is greyscale, often with very high bit depth (eg. 16-bit luminance with 16-bit alpha, ie. instead of 256 shades for each colour + alpha as in normal 32bit RGBA, it's 65K shades of grey with 65K alpha levels too). Particularly true for defense, medical & GIS. Today it's done in a different way though, typically with 10 or 12bits per channel that are then converted through RGB lookups to a final greyscale output to relevant monitors. NVIDIA has a couple of relevant PDFs:
used a 5:4 for a long time (1280*1024) and currently have a 4:3 (1600*1200). Not a fan of increasingly wide screens, but this one does manage to look pretty damn weird even to me. Would be awesome to take to LANs, just for the looks
I never liked the 16:9, and wish 4:3 was available. It was marketing and cost cutting that pushed the consumer to embrace 16:9--good for watching videos, but not for practical/serious work.
I still have my Eizo Nanao 17 inch 4:3 CRT--it is still working perfect, but I need to take it to the dump, no space for it.
I got 2 Samsung 20" 4:3's at 1600 x 1200. When they were discontinued, I bought a Dell 20" 1600 x 1200 to keep as a spare.
When I went on a consulting assignment, I requested that they get me a 20" Dell 1600 x 1200 or I would bring my own, because I wanted the vertical pixels. They said they would get me one, but then said they would get me a Dell 24" 1920 x 1200, rather than the 20" because it was cheaper (with their discount). I did not want one, but they said why not, you get the 1600 x 1200, plus 230 pixels more, so I agreed. I liked the Dell UH2410 1920 x 1200--it was great, after I left the assignment, I bought two of them for myself. And they are what I use now. I keep the three 20" 1600 x 1200 as spares, and don't use them because except for Eizo, no vendor sells such resolution anymore.
I hope the 4:3's and 16:10's make a comeback. The more square screens are more naturally, and suitable. The 16:9 was such a bad idea.
Also would like to see the same in TV's. I am still using my 27 inch Sony TV of 24 year vintage. It is on the blink, and that worries me--no where to obtain a replacement, and difficult to fix. The 4:3 27 inch is much better than a widescreen.
I really really wish they would make a 34 inch or larger square monitor. I use a 34 inch Benq right now but hate the narrowness of the wide screen profile. A square one negates portrait and landscape and merges them into one. Much better!
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slashbinslashbash - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Glad to see some experimentation in the more-square direction. I used a 1280x1024 (5:4) monitor for several years at work and found it to be a decent aspect ratio for a lot of use cases.secretmanofagent - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
What were your use cases? I'm curious.dragonsqrrl - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Could work well for document or portrait views, scripting and coding.psychobriggsy - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
This would definitely be wonderful for coding. IDEs often end up cluttered because of the lack of vertical space due to the 1080p scourge.But now I find myself wanting a 2560x2560 version of this monitor...
tracker1 - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I think that IDEs really should adopt to utilize the horizontal space better... I mean a lot of the utility bars on the top could be on the left, and I already use the sides for directory trees, etc... it really depends on your workflow... usually my IDE is 2/3 of monitor 1, and the other third is actual directory windows... monitor 2 is split with command prompts and browser windows.Hrel - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
VS 2013 is pretty good about this.microdesigns2000 - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link
A wider monitor will encourage developers to write more function on a single line. When I develop in VS or Studio Code, scrolling up and down is a hassle. I recently rotated my two 1920x1080 monitors. This makes a huge difference in coding. I also develop in ladder logic. Horizontal monitors are good for that because logic is written from left to right. I also use cad packages. When I stretch cad across two monitors in portrait view, I have a square workspace. The high number of pixels really helps to avoid so much panning and zooming. I came to this article because I realize how much better the square format is, if there are enough pixels.1920x1920 seems to be good enough. 2560x2560 would be better.owan - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I'm currently using a 1440x900 and a 1280x1024 monitor at work, I find the 1280x1024 to be superior for more vertically oriented spreadsheets and e-mails where the extra pixels make a difference in being able to see a few more rowsSmoken - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I use 2 1920x1200 monitors, one is in landscape mode and one is in portrait mode. Works great for coding.p1esk - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Yeah, portrait mode for coding is a no brainer... Been using it since 2005. Actually, the portrait mode is better for anything other than video. Just look at this webpage layout - 2/3 of the screen real estate is wasted when it's viewed on a 27" landscape monitor. And 4/5 of the page content is hidden at any given time.JeffFlanagan - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
>Yeah, portrait mode for coding is a no brainer...Only if you're coding in a text editor. If you're using an IDE, landscape is much better to allow room for both your code in the middle and tools on the left and right.
ecuador - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Eh, you're doing it wrong. Text window for coding on the portrait mode monitor, tools etc on the second (landscape mode) monitor.p1esk - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I'm coding in iPython and Visual Studio. Code on one monitor, output on another.Walkeer - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
true, but the taller the screen is, the more code you can see...so square is idealmickulty - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
Conversely, snapped to one side of a 27" 1440p monitor I can confirm it works brilliantly.dsraa - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
In refrance to older monitors, 1280x1024 WAS the standard and BEST resolution for doing work on documents and spreadsheets. People loved that resolution a few years back, and when I started replacing the old monitors with the new 1366x768 monitors......oh man was there chaos. People hate the new default of 1366x768.....especially to do any work on. Immediately it felt like people lost 1/3 of their work screen view. and it was true.So anyways, I am glad somebody is moving back towards a square design.
MrSpadge - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
The problem is not that 1366x768 is not square, it's that you gave them 1366x768 screens rather than at least 1680x1050 to replace 1280x1024 screens.magreen - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Correct.dsraa - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Nope, budget was the problem, we bought the cheap entry level 'dell' 20' monitors. They looked nice, and had good refresh rates, but the 1366x768 resolution was horrible on those monitors. Where you could see a full document, or almost full document on a 1280x1024, on 1366x768 it showed up on only half. Same with web pages, or excel spreadsheets. Horrible ideas.phoenix_rizzen - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
Yeah, exactly. One dimension increased by a handful of pixels, the other dimension shrunk by a lot of pixels. And it's that shrinkage that's the problem, and makes a 1366x768 monitor seem cramped.When we were upgrading monitors at work from 17" 1280x1024, we spent a lot of time looking for monitors with at least 1024 vertical pixels. Anything with less than that was excluded automatically from the list. Took awhile to find decent monitors, and ended up with 27" 1080p monitors.
There's nothing inherently wrong with widescreen monitors. But they aren't an upgrade if one of the dimensions loses pixels compared to what it's replacing.
slashbinslashbash - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Mostly coding and web design. Of course this was in roughly 2004, so LCD prices were still pretty expensive, and the 17" 1280x1024 was about the biggest / highest res LCD screen you could get at an affordable price. "The more pixels, the better" was always true, but almost all content was then targeted at 1024x768 screens, so I could work on a 1024x768 layout in Photoshop and still have sufficient room for palettes on the edges. 1024x768 (the resolution of a 15" LCD at the time) would have killed me.I still refuse to buy a 16:9 screen as a computer monitor... 16:10 is so much more manageable (I have a couple of Dell 24" screens at 1920x1200, and a 2011 MBP at 1680x1050). And yes I would find a 1280x1024 monitor much more useful than 1440x900 despite there being roughly the same number of pixels in both. Vertical pixels are more useful for general work tasks.... at least up to a certain point. I'm not sure if that holds true all the way to 1:1, or only up to 1200 vertical pixels, or what.... but I would take a 1280x1024 monitor any day over 1440x900, unless my only use case was watching movies.
secretmanofagent - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Thanks for following up. I myself use a 16:10 as one of my monitors, but I was wondering what advantage a square monitor would have over it.magreen - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
This is right, and it's made doubly so by Microsoft Office's move to the ribbon. That sucks up a ridiculous amount of vertical pixels, which were already at a premium for any work situation.valnar - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Nice to see I'm not alone in this sentiment. It's also not the resolution of most 16:9 monitors, but the aspect ratio itself. I simply don't like a screen that wide. Looks weird. Takes up too much desk space, moves my speakers too far apart, and yes, trades precious vertical resolution for wasted horizontal resolution. Clearly 16:9 was a marketing move, not a technical one. It's stupid to have the PC industry follow the HDTV industry. The need to watch full screen movies on a computer monitor is such a small percentage compared to their primary purpose.kpb321 - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I think one of these would be interested. Currently I use a pair of Samsung 24 inch 1920x1200 monitors rotating to portrait instead of landscape at work and find it very handy. 1200 is plenty wide for most things and for looking at Java/Java Script/HTML code etc and SQL queries/results the extra height can be very handy. I hate working on cheep laptop monitors that don't have much height.Mr Perfect - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
It works well for office applications. At work I had two 5:4 19" 1280x1024 screens and stuck with them since they where buying nothing but 1440x900 screens. When 1920x1080 screens finally started making their way in this year, I tried replacing a 5:4 with one. It was maddening how many things just didn't use the extra horizontal space. It's 2014 and websites all seem to be hardcoded for 1280x1024 or 1024x768 and desktop programs don't seem to take 16:9 into account either. Programmers either have to target old 5:4 screens like webmasters, or they assume you want two small windows side by side per monitor. In the end I just went back to the two 5:4s, since the underutilized 16:9 was just eating up desk space.EzioAs - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
5:4 is quite normal. I've used it for a couple years in the past. That said, I'm really interested in seeing a 1:1 monitor in person.jaydee - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
What resolutions have you seen 5:4 other than 1280x1024?nathanddrews - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I don't think he was suggesting that there were others. 1280x1024 is the only 5:4 I've ever seen and it was very common in the pre-widescreen era of displays - both CRT and LCD.deathwombat - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
1280x1024 was once a popular resolution, but most of the monitors in that era were physically 4:3. When displaying resolutions with different aspect ratios, the pixels weren't square.dj christian - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
The pixels weren't square?squngy - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I still use a 1280x1024. Its super old from back when LCDs were uncommon, but its a PVA panel and buying a TN now seems like spending money for a downgrade...MrSpadge - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Buying TN now would be a downgrade. Choose any of the plenty IPS or *VA monitors available today.Freyaday - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
My monitor stands can pivot, allowing me to switch to 1080x1920 when I want, which is something I do when I'm working with a lot of text (reading/writing long documents, writing code, etc.) or editing a rather vertical image. When I do so, I usually maximize the window in the portrait monitor and, if it has dragable sidebars, I usually take them and put them over on the landscape monitor.nunomoreira10 - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Surround should work quire nicely, no more problem of too wide or too tall setupicrf - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I think the problem is the width more than the height. Content flows down, so for non-gaming/video tasks, more height is always better, until it starts making your neck hurt.For width, though, 1920 isn't quite big enough for two tasks side by side, IMO. I prefer about 1200 pixels for a browser, document, spreadsheet, etc.
That's why I really liked my old 30" 2560x1600 display. Sure, not quite as tall as this, but the width meant I could have two tasks comfortably side by side.
I'm currently using three 24" 1920x1200 displays at work, and a single 39" 3840x2160 at home.
vdidenko - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Wow, can't wait for it's availability. Been asking vendors about it since 2010:http://blog.didenko.com/2010/03/square-display.htm...
More argumentation in the article linked there:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+VladDidenko/posts/6xW...
savagemike - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
But - I'd have to make all my own wallpaper.Bob Todd - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
LOL, you'll be using a lot of the "Solid Color" options in Windows. This thing actually looks pretty cool.Murloc - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
just take any high resolution picture and crop it.LauRoman - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Now you can fullscreen those crappy Vine videos without black bars...Kevin G - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I wonder if this monitor supports rotation.....phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I hope so. Two of these in portrait orientation would be awesome for multiple ssh sessions!p1esk - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I'm not sure if you got the joke :-)phoenix_rizzen - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Whoosh! :Dpixelstuff - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Diamond mode would be awesome!nunomoreira10 - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
That would be amazing!DCide - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Well, as an EIZO it won't be cheap, but it should be good quality.This should be excellent for photography, which is one of their target markets anyway. Now you don't need to worry about whether the photo is portrait or landscape, you can edit the same-sized image either way.
magreen - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
I'm always about ready to rip my eyes out when I go to a family portrait store--which is supposed to have professional equipment. After the photo shoot, they sit there on a frickin 1920x1080 monitor and try to show us the photos using thumbnails so we can select them. Can't see a ding dong thing on those. So then she has to double click each one and it takes an extra hour of her time and our time and she can't remember where she was once she double-clicks the photo to enlarge it and meanwhile the kids are going berserk. Can you tell I'm frustrated about this? Yeah. Frustrated about coding on those frickin pieces of garbage too.This monitor and 4k and the other vertical improvements can't come fast enough.
Cue the babies about how games and videos don't need this higher res and we're all forced to pay for something we don't need in 3...2...1...
TWolfe - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Still use a 1280x1024 as my primary monitor for all work, web surfing, document work, picture editing etc. I have a hi-def 16:10 for gaming movies etc. Keep them both connected all the time but use my 4:3 monitor many more hours. Noticed my wife will use mine rather than her laptop in a heartbeat. She says she can just see more and do more while using it. She wishes her laptop was 4:3. I may be old school but I personally prefer 4:3 and will try to replace this monitor with a the one here in the article if it ever comes to market.MrSpadge - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I don't think you're really looking for 4:3. If you simply take your 1280x1024 screen and attach some more horizontal pixels (make it more wide-screen), it doesn't become any worse. But if you go wide-screen and lower the amount of vertical pixels, that's a clear drawback and pretty much the reason people don't like wide screen.Think of this: plenty of people like 2 monitors side-by-side, but they don't like wide-screen? That doesn't make much sense.
phoenix_rizzen - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
Exactly. A lot of people have 1280x1024 monitors (as that was "the standard" for 15-19" monitors back in the day). A 16:9 screen tends to have fewer vertical pixels (768 or 900), but not always. So long as you are picky about the minimum vertical pixels, a widescreen monitor can be an upgrade.1680x1050, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, etc are all upgrades to a 1280x1024 monitor.
Kutark - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Seriously, who would buy this? I can't think of a single situation where a square monitor would be ideal.p1esk - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I'd buy it today if it had better resolution. 1920 belongs on a phone.MrSpadge - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Ever thought of moving farther than 10 cm away from your desktop monitor?creed3020 - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Don't think like a consumer, think like a professional or prosumer.The use cases are there otherwise they wouldn't be bringing this to market.
Pigumon - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
Arcade emulator. You no longer have to have a shrunken screen when switching from a portrait game to a landscape game.efficacyman - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link
Multi-Screen Setups. 3x3 for 9 displays would work amazing on this or just 3x1mapesdhs - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Kutark, square-aspect displays are common in medical imaging, defense imaging,
photogrammatry, GIS and other industrial imaging applications. In many cases,
images can be more than 50GB in file size, more than 100K pixels across, with
hardware used to accelerate pan, roam, zoom and image processing ops (edge
detect, sharpness, contrast, noise reduction, brightness, etc.) Defense imaging
has been doing this sort of thing for almost 20 years (Google the, "Group Station",
circa late 1990s), in the past with high- end UNIX systems and propretory gfx, nowadays
more likely with custom-built versions of pro GPUs, though the details are not publicised
anymore (eg. multi-GPU board, 10X more RAM than mormal, etc. Lockheed used to
make SGI-based stuff like this in the 1990s; I bet they make NVIDIA-based designs now).
Ian.
iva2k - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I would certainly buy one (actually two - one for work, one for home, for reasonable price per pixel and if my laptop docking station could support its full resolution).There is very strong division between creators (who would love 1:1 option) vs. consumers (who would mostly stick to 16:9). Explaining opposite position is a futile exercise.
My main use case is to have no need to turn 1920x1200 display between portrait and landscape, and have enough space for toolbars and secondary windows.
mapesdhs - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I just wish the wider public was more aware of how industry, govt. & commerce operate,
what they do, the equipment involved, etc. People are staggeringly ignorant of what
makes a nation tick. As tech evolves, everything seems to become increasingly black-box.
As you say, there's often a vast gulf between consumer & industrial tech. Now if only we
had a medium which could be used to explain how stuff works... oh wait. we do, but it's
full of chat shows, soaps & reality junk. I've visited a moderately broad range of industrial
& commercial companies (from power stations to movie companies), always amazes me
the kit they use, how they work, etc.
Btw, I meant to add before, a lot of industrial imaging is greyscale, often with very high bit
depth (eg. 16-bit luminance with 16-bit alpha, ie. instead of 256 shades for each colour
+ alpha as in normal 32bit RGBA, it's 65K shades of grey with 65K alpha levels too).
Particularly true for defense, medical & GIS. Today it's done in a different way though,
typically with 10 or 12bits per channel that are then converted through RGB lookups
to a final greyscale output to relevant monitors. NVIDIA has a couple of relevant PDFs:
http://www.nvidia.co.uk/content/quadro_fx_product_...
http://www.nvidia.co.uk/docs/IO/40049/TB-04701-001...
Still not quite there yet with fully native 48bit RGBA which used to be possible
with old high-end tech, but not far off.
Ian.
lukarak - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
This would be great for a cyclops, but i think humans have two eyes side by side so monitors with greater width than height are not all that illogicalcoburn_c - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Sure would make that 4 corner snap thing in Windows 10 useful.MamiyaOtaru - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
used a 5:4 for a long time (1280*1024) and currently have a 4:3 (1600*1200). Not a fan of increasingly wide screens, but this one does manage to look pretty damn weird even to me. Would be awesome to take to LANs, just for the looksrobin051 - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
Seriously, USB2.0?Backbutton - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
I never liked the 16:9, and wish 4:3 was available. It was marketing and cost cutting that pushed the consumer to embrace 16:9--good for watching videos, but not for practical/serious work.I still have my Eizo Nanao 17 inch 4:3 CRT--it is still working perfect, but I need to take it to the dump, no space for it.
I got 2 Samsung 20" 4:3's at 1600 x 1200. When they were discontinued, I bought a Dell 20" 1600 x 1200 to keep as a spare.
When I went on a consulting assignment, I requested that they get me a 20" Dell 1600 x 1200 or I would bring my own, because I wanted the vertical pixels. They said they would get me one, but then said they would get me a Dell 24" 1920 x 1200, rather than the 20" because it was cheaper (with their discount). I did not want one, but they said why not, you get the 1600 x 1200, plus 230 pixels more, so I agreed. I liked the Dell UH2410 1920 x 1200--it was great, after I left the assignment, I bought two of them for myself. And they are what I use now. I keep the three 20" 1600 x 1200 as spares, and don't use them because except for Eizo, no vendor sells such resolution anymore.
I hope the 4:3's and 16:10's make a comeback. The more square screens are more naturally, and suitable. The 16:9 was such a bad idea.
Also would like to see the same in TV's. I am still using my 27 inch Sony TV of 24 year vintage. It is on the blink, and that worries me--no where to obtain a replacement, and difficult to fix. The 4:3 27 inch is much better than a widescreen.
everdark81 - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
It would be interesting to see a 1440x1440 display with a similar height to a typical 27" 2560x1440 monitor for placement on each side.mattlach - Monday, January 19, 2015 - link
With a 21.5" 1920x1080 screen in portrait on either side, this could be the next perfect PLP setup...Can't find this screen for sale anywhere. Anyone know what it costs?
TwoMetreBill - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link
Any availability and pricing info yet? I've searched the web and only found pricing (but not availability) for Sweden at around $1,100 USD.wowlfie - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link
I really really wish they would make a 34 inch or larger square monitor. I use a 34 inch Benq right now but hate the narrowness of the wide screen profile. A square one negates portrait and landscape and merges them into one. Much better!