Recently with the exams fast approaching and lots of eassy’s coming up, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and notes on my PC.
All’s been fine except I have noticed I’m flicking from page to page a lot on my screen. I’ve got a nice 17" screen running at 1280x1024 but stacking one screen on top of another (ala Split screen on Halo Xbox stylee) is a bit pants for displaying a lot of data on a website and requires a lot of scrolling. The virtual desktops in linux dont help much either.
Anyhow I was thinking that perhaps a widescreen or dual screen setup could help. Initially I thought the widescreen would be better as I’ve not looked into dual screens with linux. (probably very simple to do I guess…but may also require an upgrade card wise :p) I was under the impression a widescreen would take a up less space than two monitors (which is probably true)
I know a couple of people here have widescreen’s (PMM or Alta…whoever has that monster screen not included…thats not a widescreen, thats a damn cinema screen! :eek: ) and I do believe from talk various members also have dual screens. I’ve spotted some cheaper widescreen’s that seems to have got some fairly good reviews in the mags I’ve been reading (a £110 Hans-G 19" WS got a fairly good review in a Custom PC mag the other day…)
Obviously widescreen would be impressive with films as well as I’ve enjoyed using my widescreen laptop (even though thats a 16:10 ration and about 15.4") for films.
Anyhow, looking at the view of work and space here, am I likely to be better getting a widescreen over a dual screen? I’m also thinking that because my dad and brother have dual screen setups, I maybe able to wrangle some help getting a widescreen and could almost certainly sell the 17" to one of them as larger than there second screens. (and the spare room PC at home needs a TFT…):ghey:
Personally I never got on well with dual screens on Windows. I prefer one bigger screen. But a dual setup may well be cheaper.
It comes down to usable screen space, and the 19" widescreens tend to be 1440x??? which isn’t that great. A bump up to 16XX screens at 20" comes at a step up in price too.
Note some 4:3 displays have thin borders on the side so as to be less intrusive if you have two next to each other, but they tend to be higher end business models.
Its very hard to advise tbh as everyone personal tastes are different in how they like there information displayed.
I’m kind of widescreen & dual monitor at home 24" CRT and 18" TFT
but that stems from how I like to code & learn or arty things.
That’s (2560 x 1600) + (1280 x 1024) at max res.
Very odd setup I have in my View but I love it myself.
Now while I have all that screen space the option I have not got is to be able to rotate any of my screens into portrait mode rather than landscape.
To me that’s a dis-advantage because if you have reading matter long docs and web pages its nicer to have portrait than landscape as you can fit what your reading on it in a better to view style without having to ramp up the res on the display.
I know some of the people here have got widescreen displays with rotation features where the monitor rotates and the display changes mode.
Remember the Dells having it not sure what other makes have, I’m sure some will pipe up.
edit… piccy added
+plus the Sony TFt I have actually has a breakout box of tricks as some have seen before i brought a cheaper display for Mojo’s.
Means I run a freeview TV box of tricks into it as well there it serves 2 purposes.
I run widescreen + small screen, tend to put junk on the small screen that I’ll reference occasionally and have a nice large working area :).
24" (1920x1200) & 17" (1280x1024) at home, 23" (1920x1200) & 15" (1024x768) at work (15" is too small for the purpose, but I only have it as someone left it on my desk!).
19 widescreen always looks small to me. I have a samsung 22" widescreen and that’s plenty big enough for what I do, but as has been said a lot of this comes down to personal preference.
it’s all down to what your doing and how much your willing to spend, here at work I have 2 19" CTX LCD’s at 1280 x 1024, for work this is OK, at home I’ve run the same res on 2 17" LCD’s, I replaced these two with a 19" widescreen LCD 1680x1050 and it felt better, the wife now uses this screen and I’m using my 46" LCD @ 1920x1080
Another thing to think about, depending on what your using on the screens for, can your gfx card handle pumping out high res to two screens whilst playing a game? I know my 6600 would struggle with 2 screens, , but when I went to just the widescreen it was loads better.
