Professionals need our 4:3 screens
cs.put.poznan.pl
cs.put.poznan.pl
Eizo makes 1:1 desktop monitor, I managed to get one used for a good price I love it! I would get a second if they did not cost so much.
http://www.eizoglobal.com/products/flexscan/ev2730q/index.ht...
Also 5:4 is basically stuck as 1280x1024. You think for the desktop monitor market there would be more variety of aspect ratios made with higher resolutions.
Two of those side by side would be perfect.
I have dual 2560x1440's at work (24") and that's nice but the extra 608 height would be great for things like Chrome devtools etc.
You have just turned two 5:4 monitors into a 10:4 monitor - and the closest format to that exists in a form of current 21:9 monitors, with acceptable prices.
When used in a discussion regarding the desirableness of the aspect ratio 4:3, 1:1 etc, I find this statement quite amusing :)
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2560-2048-FHD-20-1-inch-LCD-...
Also medical monitors tend be very expensive for what they are, but have good contrast. Also a lot are only gray scale.
4:3, not 1:1. They were really expensive but I've found that I don't mind: I adore the colour and the first is almost 15 years old now.
All I do is stare at large expanses of text, mostly emacs and konsole. Why would good colour make a difference to that? I've no idea. But my expensive Eizos are somehow pleasant to look at, to read from, in a way that €200-€300 screens aren't. So my advice is: Pay for that second Eizo. You may still have it in 15 years and the price per year is okay anyway.
A 4:3 aspect would give 1920x1440. You have 1920x1080. Where has the bottom quarter of the screen gone? It's not there.
How can that possibly be better?
I'd take 3:2 with high enough resolution as that's the equivalent of 2x 4:3 side by side in portrait. That would be a fair trade off. I'd still prefer a 4:3 laptop though!
All the losses from browser header, footer, OS status bars, browser chrome or IDE widgets are at the top and bottom. Making that 16:9 letter box skinnier.
I'd prefer more lines to be productive - to display the whole email without scrolling, or the whole method definition or half the article on a site etc. When I want to watch a full res HD movie I'll take black bars top and bottom.
It all comes down to opinion; I'd rather have a wide screen than a high screen, because I feel really agile with my huge trackpad.
> Please consider the needs of such user as I and many of my colleagues. Academics and various assorted IT professionals are not an insignificant group of users. And even if only a part of them are having the same frustrations as me when buying notebooks, this is still a large group, I’m sure. Please consider providing such people as us with a little choice in the matter of screen ratios. There is our money in this for you. Lots of money!
I don't think there's "lots of money" there. I also think the companies that make these laptops do the necessary market research and come to the conclusion that wide-screen sells better.
16:9 is in my opinion quite terrible for computer work, 16:10 is ok but hardly great.
The most important use-case I have for side-by-side windows is having a file explorer as the second window, which too does not need half the width. I disable the tree pane (using tabs instead if I need multiple folders together), and do a 3:1 split for the windows. Even then, I see myself always maximizing the primary window for a better focus.
I place the Windows taskbar on the sides to create more vertical space for documents, and discovered accidentally that placing it on the right side made it less distracting for work. (Perhaps given left-to-right reading order, our initial focus is skewed towards the left.) These seemingly little things do make a significant difference to usability and productivity.
Well - he has no trackpad, actually. The X60s he mentions has only a trackpoint. But even though this trackpoint is wonderful for scrolling, it's not the point - he wants to see the content, not scroll through it.
I get it, when I upgraded from X61s to to a new 12" laptop, I also didn't like the reduced screen height. But these old laptops had low resolution screen, and the extra resolution of FHD screen more than makes up for the smaller vertical physical size. And I can have two documents side-by-side.
I have a Microsoft Surface Pro (or Surface Book Pro - I can never remember which because I find the naming scheme ridiculous and irritating but, basically, the most powerful variant)[1], which has a screen that's much closer to 4:3 than 16:9.
I tend to like to have files open side by side. Not just code, but often documents, web pages, and sometimes spreadsheets. This does not work nearly as well on a 4:3 screen as it does on a 16:9 screen. A particular bugbear is Visual Studio, where I like the solution explorer open next to my side by side files: I can make it work on the Surface, but it's not great, and I find myself having to reduce the font size.
16:9 works much better for me, particularly when I'm on the move and am forced to only use a single screen.
[1] Off topic but I do not recommend you buy one of these due to unreliable WiFi connectivity, unreliable trackpad, a tendency to drain the battery very quickly (12 hours or so) when sleeping, and disappointing overall battery life. These would be irritating issues in a £600-1000 laptop, so they're absolutely unacceptable in a £2400 laptop.
21:9 curved 34" at 3440x1440 is perfect for Visual Studio. I have bought two of those for myself now; home and work (U3415W, X34). 21:9 is as if made for VS.
There's even a bigger 38" 3840x1600 (the U3818DW) that I'd love to see.
You're talking serious real estate you caon use with no silly scaling, ie 1:1 or 100%.
Sadly, thanks to another bugbear of mine with the Surface Book, I'd need to carry the dock around with me rather than leaving it at the office if I wanted to do that at home.
This is because the Surface Book itself only has one mini display port connector - you need the dock if you want to connect two monitors.
Let me say it again: I do not recommend anyone buy a Surface Book (although ironically the author of the article would probably quite like its screen's aspect ratio).
I actually surround my home 34" Predator X34 with two U2412Ms (1920x1200) on an Ergotech stand. The sides are similar enough in DPI for it not to be jarring, and they are floating in air over my desk making for a very nice work area. Used to be 3x of the 24s until I upgraded the middle. The GPU has 3x DPs which makes it easy - but with a newer setup you could possibly daisy chain type Cs?
Is it a tablet with a thin attachable keyboard? => Surface Pro
It's 3:2 probably, 13.5" 2256x1504 ...
Reflective screens are the biggest shame. They’re worse but they sell better. For a while 4:3 looked “old fashioned.”
Turns out that a tall form factor works for phones, but thankfully most manufactutors relize that tablets should be 4:3 or close to it.
My three ThinkPads X60s machines are all Broadwells, with nice 12.1" 4:3 high res screens using modern backlights I fabricate myself. They work so well I intend to build more.
Even the Dell XPS sorta-corporate line has some matte options but they are tricky to find.
What if all browsers suported single page split view? So that the left side was your regular view, half width, and the right side was the continuation of the same page, where the left side ended.
+ 1.
Our two eyes are placed horizontally, giving us a landscape field of view. Yet, left-right eye movement/tracking is limited, so print or online reading material is mostly portrait. I guess we did not really evolve for reading! :-)
The book printing industry did not face this problem as they print on both sides of a page and then position these as the left and right pages of an open book! And sometimes also use of multi-columns formats when using wider papers (e.g., newspapers) or smaller fonts (e.g., journal papers).
Could someone not create a browser plugin that automatically lays out the content onto the left and right sides like a book? How would scrolling work is a question, as also asked by a comment here [1]. Do we really need scrolling? Aren't page flips just sufficient? :-)
I work on a 16:9 27" display where this is moot (still, I feel like I use the center 50% of the display 90% of the time) but I feel this pain in laptops.
At 16:9, for page-based content (all text editors and code tools, productivity tools, web browsers; terminals less so), you're forced to display two pages side by side. Still, they're shorter vertically than your eye can handle. Horizontally, your eye will either gravitate towards the center of the display, or have to switch between the two sides (ultimately rendering the extra area of the display temporarily useless)
At 4:3 in full screen (especially important for smaller displays) you can have a sidebar or ancillary tool occupying 1/3 or 1/4 of the screen, and the paged content occupying the rest.
I've made my peace with 16:10.
I've had over the years ThinkPad 760, 600X (600 was one of the best laptop ever designed given the constraints in available tech, not sure anything can ever top it), T42, T61p, T420s and now P50 and it is a worthy family member as good as any of them. I /really/ wish they had a P4x that was 14" while retaining the xeon/ecc and 4k but that must be too niche.
I was sad when we lost 4:3 screens.. and was hoping the ThinkPad 25th Anniversary edition would have been delivered to David Hill's design intent.. just to have a real special piece of art if nothing else, but I don't think we'll ever see the industry go back.
How about macOS? I currently run macOS on one of my ThinkPads (x220 Tablet). Would macOS be as simple to install on the P50 as it was on the x220 Tablet? [0] Would macOS be able to take advantage of the P50 hardware, including the 4K display?
What’s the battery life of P50 like with Windows? How is it with the operating systems I use, listed above — Linux, FreeBSD, macOS?
The rise of so called "Smart TVs" and tablets gives us a hope that people who are only interested in watching movies will finally stop buying computers at all, and once again professional users will be the main focus of laptop and computer monitor manufacturers :)
You can basically use the central 3:2 section for most stuff unless you need to tile some windows wider, yet you still have huge vertical height to enjoy. It really is a great way to avoid multiple monitors, bezels and expense.
I use a 40inch 4k monitor. You don't even need scaling (i can still read it without glasses). You get massive vertical height and plenty of width to play with.
Just because it's not the perfect ratio doesnt mean you can't just buy a monitor of sufficient size to use a section of it to suit your needs. And when i want to put my feet up i still have a huge 4k movie screen.
It would be great if the choice was there to just buy a 3:2 but the sky is hardly falling down just because 4k got here.
Although I would be happy if your prediction turned out to be correct!
I've mostly made my peace with a 16:10 monitor as it at least allows me to have two documents side by side and this is still findable in a laptop.
Laptops are trickier but I'm hoping in the age of tablet-hybrid detachables that a rotateable tripod comes of age.
A better approach I've found is to have files open side by side. On my old 17-inch MBP I used to edit three source files side by side. I can just about get away with this on my 15-inch retina model, but find two works better.
My Surface Book. is a bugger for this because, for one thing, the screen is smaller at 13.5", and then you also just don't have the horizontal real estate without reducing the font size slightly
80 character limit sounds like it makes sense for order, but depending on size & eyesight, a lot of the screen may end up wasted.
Personally, I hate nothing more than seeing lines wrapped like
this when reading
emails wrapped to 80 characters per line. This wastes vertical
space, making the
problem even worse.I have an external monitor flipped to portrait. Only other option is to get some kind of beastly tablet set-up.
Browsers, word processors, CLIs, etc. run top-to-bottom, and can make you feel claustrophobic on the tiny 16:9 screens most laptops have.
Also, keyboards are more wide than tall, so an extra wide case allows wider keys or more space between keys.
At least after 2012 you could get Retina display Macbooks and later PCs that you could use in other modes without looking bad.
All that being said. For reading, I much prefer my iPad because it is 4:3.
Most of the time I am in this editor-thingee where the left-hand side is a tree-structure showing an overview of the project I am working on and the right-hand side is some sort of detail view.
Perhaps there are some toolbars too but they are just fine being vertical.
I still wish for more vertical landscape in the middle, but... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I also find horizontal space much more valuable.
>the highest possible screen,
>the lowest possible weight.
Rotate the monitor sideways. According to the only 2 criteria that matter to him, a 16:9 monitor on its side is way better than a 4:3 monitor in any rotation.
> This is why my desktop LCD monitor is mounted vertically the whole time, and this is also why I would like my notebook monitor to be positioned likewise.
Alternatively, you can shrink the keyboard. I'm sure that if he tried a keyboard with smaller keys, he'd suddenly add a third requirement to his list: Regular sized keys.
I remember the days of people complaining about laptop keyboards, and I'd much rather have a slightly wider screen that I didn't need than smaller keys.
I do strongly prefer 4:3. As an academic, a large portion of my time is spent reading papers in PDF, and opening papers side by side is mostly useless - you want to read, not compare or copy from one to the other. When coding, it depends on how your mind works. I understand that many people may want to have several files on screen at the same time, but my mind works mostly by focusing on a single file at a time, and rapidly switching context to another. Having several windows visible at the same time distracts me.
All the author (and other people wanting 4:3, like myself) are saying is that we want to have 4:3 as an alternative. We do not want to force 4:3 on anyone, just to be able to buy laptops with 4:3 screen, even if they are a minority of the product range. Is that that much to ask? Would it be that bad for people who prefer 16:9 to have 90% of laptop screens designed for them, instead of 100%? Because as long as you are OK with that and you don't need 100% of the screens to cater to your preference, I don't see why posts like this should create any controversy at all.
I have a 12.9 inch (first gen) iPad Pro. Using it in portrait to read is completely amazing. It is actually almost too tall for my lap like this (I am not a large person), but I can just manage.
Some of these folks may be able to get away with this solution if reading PDFs, web pages, etc. I assume that at this point it is also possible to do console style development on an iPad (remote apps, ssh, etc). The only bummer is the iOS local development problem for people that need the software flexibility of working locally. I really, really wish Apple would allow this.
But for reading and writing, the iPad Pro is pretty darn hard to beat.
Wish Apple made an iPad dedicated for video with 16:9 screen that you could place on a stand. Was hoping HomePod would have included a screen, like the Alexa, but it didn't..
this guy's real problem is probably that 768 pixels isnt enough, not the wasted pixels to make the width 1366; so the solution is probably not being as cheap, and getting a higher resolution screen on a small latptop