Question about monitor ratios these days

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Sep 24, 2001
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Why are monitors going to such wide and short ratios? It feels like your looking through a tricked out low rider hot rod windshield.

I'm currently on dual Dell 2412Ms and love the 16:10 ratio. Are there any decent monitors that are 27" (or 30+ ideally) with a more normal ratio and not the 3ft wide 8" tall styled ones we seem to be getting?

I play MMOs mainly and I want more height (not less height and more width that seems to be the trend)
 
Because most games set the field of view so your vertical scale is fixed and just show more to the left and right on wider screens. This means that unless your games HUD is locked to the corners (where moving into the corners means going into peripheral vision area), the Just Like Your Current Screen But Wider Monitor is strictly better in terms of showing you more.

Monitor sellers also like it because in wider form factors an X" diagonal screen has less total area and thus is nominally cheaper.
 
Your Dell monitor is 1920x1200.
27" monitors are 2560x1440.
34" Ultrawides are 3440x1440. It's a 27" monitor but wider.
 
Check out something like the HP Omen, 32" 16*9 and 2560*1440. Or you could go 40" 16*9 and 3840*2160 (4k).
 
Why are monitors going to such wide and short ratios? It feels like your looking through a tricked out low rider hot rod windshield.
Because it's cheaper for manufacturers so they're trying to sell it as cool and great and advanced, while it's mostly shit for the majority of PC use.
 
Just rotate your monitor so you get more height, lol.

3440x1440 with the browser full screen has tons of wasted space on a lot of sites.
hard-wide.jpg
 
I went from 2x 24" 1920x1200 to 2x 27" 2560x1440 myself. And you get alot more screen space at the cost of 1/10th less relative height compared to width. And if you look at actual pixels, there's no competition imho. If you go with a good 4K monitor it's even more impressive. But I went with 144Hz 1440p over 4K.
 
While 16:9 is great for general videos, I still prefer 5:4 for web sufing.

i am not aware of a single web site whose navigation experience is more complete at 1920x1200 than at 2560x1440. perhaps because i have not visited webrings since 2005.
19x12 lovers had their day, which ended when the cheap 27x14 koreans reached the market 6 years ago.
 
Why don't you just pretend. Get a nice 31.5-inch (32-inch advertised) 2560x1440 monitor and run a custom resolution of 2304x1440. Through the power of black bars, you now have a ~29.1-inch 16:10 2304x1440 monitor. Oh baby.

You can also use imagination to transform 4k into 16:10. Several 3456x2160 16:10 displays out there now. Just multiply the diagonal screen size by .925 to get to your 16:10 screen size.
 
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3440x1440 with the browser full screen has tons of wasted space on a lot of sites.
Don't pretend that fullscreen doesn't waste a ton of space on 16:9 displays too.
I generally browse with a 1440x1440 window in the center and other applications on either side.
 
i am not aware of a single web site whose navigation experience is more complete at 1920x1200 than at 2560x1440. perhaps because i have not visited webrings since 2005.
19x12 lovers had their day, which ended when the cheap 27x14 koreans reached the market 6 years ago.
It's not about 2560x1440 vs 1920x1200, it's about 2560x1440 vs 2560x1600.
 
Don't pretend that fullscreen doesn't waste a ton of space on 16:9 displays too.
I generally browse with a 1440x1440 window in the center and other applications on either side.

I have my browser on the right and other apps on the left,
cubicle-desk-hard-apple.jpg
 
With larger monitors and resolutions, the 16:10 niche has died.
27" and 32" 1440p replaced 24" 16:10, 32-43" 4K replaced 30" 16:10.
I like 16:10, but it was a product of its time. With the monitor sizes we have now, the problem of not having enough vertical space is only replaced by monitors being a bit too long horizontally (which you can effectively ignore, pillarbox or just use). It just doesn't make sense production wise.

I really wish laptops hadn't gone 16:9 for ages like they did. My 2007 Dell laptop was 16:10 and very pleasant to use - my newer 16:9 laptop barely feels good with the toolbar in the side instead of the bottom. Small 16:9 only makes sense with phones, vertically browsing, or playing videos.
Luckily Apple stuck to 16:10 if I recall, and current tablets and higher end laptops frequently use ratios like 16:10 and 3:2, so I'm getting my wish.

Personally I'm using a FW900 which is 16:10 and I'm looking forward to trying one of the 31.5" 1440p 144hz curved monitors. 31.5" / 32" is a good size for me, and I'm also not sold on ultrawides. Sounds like a nice concept to run it at 2304x1440p for that 16:10 goodness and less periphery to keep track of.
 
It's not about 2560x1440 vs 1920x1200, it's about 2560x1440 vs 2560x1600.

it is not. at least not on the OP, or market prices.
32-43" 4K replaced 30" 16:10.
Personally I'm using a FW900 which is 16:10 and I'm looking forward to trying one of the 31.5" 1440p 144hz curved monitors. 31.5" / 32" is a good size for me, and I'm also not sold on ultrawides. Sounds like a nice concept to run it at 2304x1440p for that 16:10 goodness and less periphery to keep track of.

Nothing properly replaced 30" 25x16 real state. a 30" PPI is very good for the display size, because you need to sit further away from a big screen than from a small screen. 4k screens are testing the limits of human ergonomics: either your eye can not handle the PPI at the ergonomically optimal distance, or your neck suffers handling the sheer screen size at optimal optical distance.
 
Isn't that the truth. I'm hoping the 32" monitors rumored for next year will fill the gap.

they come closer than anything else, but 32" (31.5") is only 15.5" tall; so they're a bit shorter than the 2560x1600 30's. Not a huge deal but uneven screen heights are a bit annoying. The potentially bigger hit is that they're 140 DPI which means scaling options are either 125% for 110DPI equivalent or 150% for 93DPI equivalent (1780 or 1390 pixel height equivalent). The latter would mean losing effective vertical resolution because of UI being scaled significantly larger than on my old screen. With the former, at arms length 100 DPI is about as small as can comfortably read at 1:1 scaling. Sufficiently high DPI and the resulting sharper text can help; at the same distance I can use a 280DPI laptop screen at 2:1 or 140DPI equivalent; I'm not sure if the much smaller extra pixel count will be enough to let me do the same.

Those reservations aside, I probably will be getting a 32" 4k 144Hz HDR (384 zone) GSync monitor when they finally come out. (Like the 27" equivalents, the production date for the panels has been slipping all year.) Not because they're perfect but because there's no indication of a 32" 5k panel in the works that could hit all of the same bullets except the refresh rate with enough pixels to make any potential scaling/readability issues much less of an issue. (5k 144hz would need displayport compression, the next HDMI spec that's even farther out from production, or a dual cable setup.)
 
To me anything 27" and above is perfectly fine at 16:9. I went to 27" 16:9 (2560x1440) from a 30" 16:10 (2560x1600) and prefer the smaller display at this resolution due to smaller pixels. The 160 pixels lost is pretty irrelevant for everything I do on my computer.

The real issue is that at the moment there are few options if you want to go above 27" size at 16:9, higher than 1440p resolutions. Even the upcoming 4K 144 Hz displays will be only 27" when personally I would prefer 30-32" for that resolution. I really hope a manufacturer steps up next year and delivers that but so far I have not see anything like that announced.
 
To me anything 27" and above is perfectly fine at 16:9. I went to 27" 16:9 (2560x1440) from a 30" 16:10 (2560x1600) and prefer the smaller display at this resolution due to smaller pixels. The 160 pixels lost is pretty irrelevant for everything I do on my computer.

The real issue is that at the moment there are few options if you want to go above 27" size at 16:9, higher than 1440p resolutions. Even the upcoming 4K 144 Hz displays will be only 27" when personally I would prefer 30-32" for that resolution. I really hope a manufacturer steps up next year and delivers that but so far I have not see anything like that announced.

TFT Central's panel database lists what appears to be a 32" equivalent to the 27" panel everyone has been drooling about since the first monitors using it were previewed this spring.
 
TFT Central's panel database lists what appears to be a 32" equivalent to the 27" panel everyone has been drooling about since the first monitors using it were previewed this spring.

Good to hear. Any more info about this or is it not on any monitor yet?
 
Good to hear. Any more info about this or is it not on any monitor yet?

I haven't seen any product announcements. Not overly surprised since I'd expect most makers to want to get the higher volume 27" models out; and the 32" panels are also being delayed from production repeatedly.
 
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