A 49-inch ultrawide monitor is extravagant, ridiculous, and amazing | Hacker News Reader

A 49-inch ultrawide monitor is extravagant, ridiculous, and amazing

theverge.com

43 pointswalterbell24 comments

I use a 40" 4k curved HDTV as a monitor. It actually has about a million more pixels than this thing and doesn't require any aspect ratio finickiness when playing games or watching video. The only weird things about it are that I have to manually turn it on (DPMS power on doesn't work after it powers off) and the refresh rate is 18ms.

The thing is, I bought mine years ago for $600 because HDTVs have a vastly superior economy of scale. It kind of bothers me that we don't see more HDTVs with a slightly different firmware being sold as monitors. They're usually a lot cheaper.

I have two Samsungs (55" and 43"), and the lag is dreadful. Then someone told me to rename the hdmi channel I used to "PC" because that makes the Samsung drop all processing of the image. It actually worked. Still not great, but at least not frustrating now. Result might vary which hdmi port you use too.

I play on a 44" 4K Visio and it was okay at 30fps with a 1080p, but I was using the "lower quality" input. When I went from input #1 to #5, boom, 60fps and gorgeous.

Ironically in the early days of PCs (late 70s) TVs were what you used as a monitor (unless you had a printing terminal). To save money eventually someone figured out they could sell a cheap TV without a tuner.

A buddy of mine worked at a computer store back around '78 (if you're from Cambridge MA this was next to Heffron's near MIT). They got broken into one night, unfortunately after receiving a big shipment of hard drives (2 MB behemoths probably costing over a $2K in today's dollars). The thieves had all night to clean the place out and took...all the monitors.

I wonder what happened when they tried to fence those things.

”To save money eventually someone figured out they could sell a cheap TV without a tuner.”

I think it was as least as much to increase video quality as to save money. The antenna signal stage limited displays to the low resolution of televisions, that signal was designed for moving images, not for static text, and converting to the antenna signal and back added noise.

Once you decide to want to improve the use as a monitor, choosing slower phosphors (for a more stable image) and leaving out color (for cost cutting, and because technology for producing, say, 640x480 pixel full-color monitors at consumer prices didn’t really exist) were logical choices, and once you did that, using the tube to display a television signal doesn’t make sense anymore.

I'm talking about the days when you built your own computer (from individual chips) -- pre-Apple II days, nothing as exotic as 640x480 much less color -- in fact motels in those days would still advertise that they had color TVs! We didn't have one.

had similar idea (4k lg tv, one of the last with netcast). what you might want to look out for when picking 4k tv as a monitor:

- backlight pwm. tv is huge and covers most of your fov at monitor distances. pwm burns my eyes off, and it goes away only at ~100%

- some funny sharpening that shows as halo aroud small text, but is not perceivable otherwise. annoying.

if at all possible, test tv with your source before buying.

Hmmm... I use 24" monitors precisely so I don't have to move my head / eyes to see the entirety of a single monitor. Way less fatigue than when I had 27"+ ones.

24x2=48. Plus the bezels and your setup is at least as wide as this one monitor. I'm like you and like the bezels that are good for separating contexts.

> 24x2=48

Actually, it’s more like 42-43 inches (if my math is correct).

Diagonal measurements don't work that way.

A 24" (16:9) screen is about 21" wide. An equivalent double-wide screen (32:9) would measure 43.5"

The 49" Dell here is like two 27" screens side by side.

I think using this would be a pain in the ass in Windows, becayse the start button and the start menu is at the bottom-left corner... And you’ll probably strain your neck easily. Thinking about it, no one really thought about a desktop environment optimized for ultrawide displays, which makes me hesitant to buy one of these (apart from the problem that it takes up too much desk space)

I put my start menu up the centre of my two side-by-side monitors. If I were using this, I'd use the dual 16x9 mode and do the same. It has a couple of advantages, despite probably looking a little odd on a single monitor:

1) It is central to the screen real estate, meaning that I'm not dragging my mouse across a suburb to get to the start menu

2) It frees up vertical real estate, which is crucial when working on two side-by-side documents on 16x9 res. Even at 16x10, there's an excess of width compared to 2x A4 sheets. Thus, I want to maximise vertical real estate in exchange for horizontal real estate.

Having said that, anyone who uses such a monitor probably just hits winkey and types their application in search because they're likely power-user enough.

I use two 28 inch 4K monitors side by side with Linux on my workstation, and there is a bit of that issue.

I ended up cranking up the acceleration on my pointer input to easily toss the cursor around the whole desktop, and sometimes find myself annoyed with detail work or trying to drag very small targets and instead clicking something else nearby. Another issue is that after returning to the screen after some time, I can sometimes lose track of where the cursor is and have to thrash it around to cause enough motion for me to easily find it on the huge work area.

What does the mouse have to do with the start menu? Hit the keyboard button, type first few letters, hit Enter.

I wonder if it's good for coding: emacs, etc. I have tried a 30" once, and it was so large that I had to move my head a lot, if not constantly, which felt very tiring after a few hours.

What was your setup? I find while two windows of actual code is about my sweet spot, I could definitely use more panes for informational stuff: magit, output from long-running processes, etc. Plus space for the application itself.

There are some devs at my office who swear by it; most of us have 2 monitors. I'm sure I could get used to both.

Hopefully we'll get a Korean clone of it soon and I can buy one.

Are there good non-DELL alternatives for a nice sharp IPS 24" for dev work?

Nothing against dell. Good for them for building such a strong brand.

That's like asking if anybody other than Volkswagen makes a nice 4 wheeled car. Sure, everyone does. It's literally the most common new monitor size on the most common technology, Dell aren't the only ones to have figured it out.

I am using a 32” curved monitor. So far it does all the works for me for 3D modelling and video editing

Would like to be able to see through the Window at the sides of the monitor.

"the first thing that made me smile about the U4919DW wasn’t even the screen itself, it was the buttons"

ok then...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com