50" for my desktop.
What? Most people I know can't even handle the current 30" monitors. It feels nicer having two 27" monitors from a not-grossly-exceeding-peripheral-vision viewpoint.
What? Most people I know can't even handle the current 30" monitors. It feels nicer having two 27" monitors from a not-grossly-exceeding-peripheral-vision viewpoint.
I don't like the bezels between monitors in a multi-monitor configuration. I don't like the low-DPI of my 30" monitors. And I certainly don't like the price of the Dell U3011.
When you say you know people who can't handle a 30" monitor, do you mean that? They would refuse to use a 30" even if they were given one? I've only met a few people who are of that particular disposition, and I personally consider them odd. It's a weird self-flagellation or quasi-Luddism.
In my experience, most people don't deal with 30" monitors because they have been effectively fixed at over $1,100 for the past 8 years, only recently being disrupted by the Koreans and Chinese. From that perspective, where a small 1080 monitor can be had for a couple hundred bucks, it required a special type of enthusiast to pay the steep premium for 30" displays. But it looks that we're finally getting some changes in desktop displays, and I consider this positive progress toward what I would consider an ideal. To reiterate what I've said elsewhere, I want desktop computing to use nearly-immersive display technology, and I think this is more realistic in the mid-term than VR goggles.
But to be absolutely clear, I consider 30" too small for desktop computing today.
Not at all. It's practicality. Close enough to read normal-sized text clearly, and the edges fade into peripheral vision; far enough that I can see the whole thing at a glance, and I start having to zoom to read. I'd use one if it was the only monitor available, but I'd prefer a 24".
If it works for you, that's nice. I'm not calling you a freak of nature, so please don't call me a self-flagellating Luddite.
I am emphatically against the notion of "good enough," and those whom I personally have heard express confusion about the appeal of large monitors have routinely described various technology levels as "good enough."
I don't mean to suggest that everyone who would refuse a large display is definitively a Luddite. Furthermore, I am abusing the definition of Luddite here to mean someone who is satisfied with the status quo.
That said, I cannot relate to the appeal of small monitors whatsoever. It would frustrate me greatly to use a 24" LCD for a whole day of work. All the alt-tabbing, control-tabbing, the loss of context, and window shuffling would get old, quick.
Incidentally, for me, I'd have to sit very close to a 24" LCD to have its edges fade into peripheral vision. I like having my monitors about 2.5 to 3 feet from my eyes. A monitor would need to be 50" or larger for its edges to fade into peripheral vision at ~3 feet.
Something else I really enjoy about large monitors is the ability to zoom in and then sit back further (4 or 5 feet) and relax. I like the flexibility of varying the viewing distance nicely between 1.5 to 5 feet by leaning in or leaning back depending on use-case and my feeling at the moment.
There's no fundamental reason you would have to -- if you have a window manager that extends the "drag to the side to half-maximize" behavior that Windows 7 has to, say, include dragging to the corner to "quarter-maximize" (ideally, with four appropriate keyboard shortcuts, one per corner, so you could do it without dragging, as well.)
I primarily use it to map three finger click to middle mouse button, but when I discovered it also had the window-sizing-by-dragging-to-the-edge feature I turned it on and have been very happy with it..
Seems to me that if you have several open apps then to type into one of them you have to either move your hand to the mouse and click it or you have to alt-tab. Even if you have "focus follows mouse" then you still have to move the mouse over to the window before you can type…
At least in Windows and KWin, drag to the destination window's icon in the task bar and it should come to the front... But yes, still not as convenient.
Yes. There are a few issues at play:
1. I want more screen space so I want a bigger monitor
2. My desk has a finite depth. For better posture the monitor should be far enough away that I don't need to move my head to see from a corner to any other corner
Multi-monitor set ups are probably worse, my physio sees a number of ppl who use them. But any big screen will have the same effect, encouraging neck and spinal issues.
I'm curious - if you need to put a big monitor further away and increase the font size to keep it legible, don't you lose most of the benefits of "bigger screen area" and gain only crisp rendering and clarity?
For my multiple 30" monitors, I keep them each about 3 feet from my eyes, more than an arm's length away. I suppose I have been blessed with fairly good eyesight because I don't zoom the view, instead keeping everything at 100% for most day-to-day usage. If I'm feeling like I want to relax, I'll zoom things in and recline a bit.
I guess from my layperson perspective, I'd much rather move my eyes and head than deal with the contextual and organizational problems I would face by having to deal with a window stack. I'd rather not have to throw my left hand over to the tab key or have to reach for my mouse to shuffle some windows. I've used a multi-monitor configuration with the largest monitors I could afford for over a decade now and don't yet feel this has affected my physiology. But maybe I have a silent killer sneaking up on me?
If you did need to zoom in to keep text legible for eyesight reasons, I'm not sure if the value would be as pronounced. But yes, I do think the clarity and crispness would be compelling enough for me. I've routinely said that if I rest my 300+ DPI cell phone on the surface of one of my Dell 30" U3011 monitors and look at both that and my monitor's display at the same distance (roughly 3 feet), the cell phone looks shockingly more legible and superior in just about every way. I so want to just tug at the edges of my cell phone's screen and make its screen big enough to fill my entire desk surface.
The last computer monitor I bought was the original 24" Apple Cinema Display. I haven't used it for day to day computing in 7 years or so. The reason for that is because I bought a laptop. For the first year or so I plugged the laptop into the display but as I bought newer and newer laptops the difference in resolution got smaller. My current laptop's high DPI screen has almost quadruple the number of pixels as that display.
So, there are 2 reasons that I've not bought a large display.
1) I don't want to need it. If I get hooked on a large display, then I've killed the fundamental utility of the laptop—to be productive anywhere. If I suddenly need a 30" screen to feel as productive as "normal" then my laptop is useless to me. A tethered laptop is not portable any more. I really enjoy the freedom to work on my couch, in an office, coffee shop, or on a whim, out in the backyard on a nice day, without ever feeling like I'm compromised.
2) The current batch of 30" displays are not high DPI. Compared to my latop screen they look pixelated and downright primitive. That seems to be changing with these announced screens and I'm happy about that.
Also, there's technically a #3, which is that anything larger than my 24" monitor will not fit on the desk that I have (it has a self that isn't adjustable or removable). But that's kind of a weak reason and I could probably fix it if I really cared.
However, I do feel that your description hints at the essence of what I was saying earlier: that avoiding a large monitor is somewhat like self-deprivation. You don't want to get spoiled by becoming accustomed to the increased productivity yielded by a large monitor with a large virtual desktop. You're a mobile worker, so that makes a lot of sense. I do most of my work at either my office or at home. So I have two modestly-powerful workstations with lots of monitors at each location (in total, I've spent about twice as much as I would have to buy a high-end laptop).
Because I am not a mobile worker, I have a particularly small laptop (a Surface Pro). I feel crippled when I try to do serious work on my laptop because the screen is so tiny and there's so much context hidden by windows stacked on one another.
In a further-out future, I hope that laptops (or whatever portable device we carry) can one day project a very large, very high-DPI display of their own, giving you and me the best of both worlds.
If I read you correctly, you'd love to have the increased productivity of a larger virtual workspace, but today's technology and your need to be mobile keep you thinking it's best to focus on mobility first. That makes a lot of sense.
I totally agree that the current batch of 30" displays are disappointingly low-resolution. So much agreement on that! Primitive, stale technology, stagnant for 8 years. But I think I've already said enough about that in this thread. :)
Yes. Also, as my laptops' screens have gotten larger, my desire for a bigger screen has gotten lower. My first laptop was 13" and 1280x800 and I tethered to a big screen constantly. It was just too small for me. My current 15" laptop screen (which is 16:10 aspect ratio and high DPI) is good enough for most things. The wide aspect ratio is great for programming, since it allows 2 columns of even very wide code.
I do wish I had one screen dedicated to the app/web page/whatever and one to the debugger (code/vars/console/etc.), but that's really the only time I feel even slightly constrained. And like I said, right now it's good enough that I'm willing to trade that last desire for more portability.
That's a big part of the preference dynamic too. The price per resolution got stuck and didn't budge above 27" for years.
Hopefully one day I'll be happy with four 50" 8K screens.
Curved high dpi 50" please!
Exactly! If I could have all my wish-list items in desktop computing, it would include a large, concave, high-DPI, OLED display with mouse and gesture input.
The "curved" people want is concave screens so that, at the optimal viewing point, all points on the screen are equidistant for the viewer (people with multimonitor setups often approximate this by angling some of the monitors, but concave monitors would avoid the need for this.)
The idea is convex < flat < concave.
Given that I'm not terribly happy about vast screen resolution with existing software, I'd much prefer smaller, higher-PQ, super-high density screens while we as an industry figure out how to make immersive displays usable.
Just MHO, of course.
Plus, if you gave me a 65" 400 DPI screen today, I would drop everything and immediately put it to use. I would set it up on a drafting-style standing desk and would enjoy extremely high-clarity text throughout my desktop user interface. I would hand-craft the desk myself and I'd shower you with thanks and praise.
The point being, I want to be an early adopter and hopefully there would be enough of us for the UI designers to eventually target our demographic. Right now, so much UI R&D is on small form-factor that it's a little heart-breaking to someone like myself who spends 8 hours a day working at a desktop. Science-fiction movies routinely taunt us with immersive desktop computing and we're just barely moving the needle in that direction.
Actually, a simple, tiling window manager (ion3, ratpoison, OSX with SizeUP) does just fine.
I am running triple u3011 monitors with OSX Leopard, running Sizeup, and its basically like having 10 small, no-bezel displays in front of me (left and right screens are split into a quad, and middle screen is split down the middle).
Lose the gratuitous candy-UI elements and it all works just fine :)
Even with no change whatsoever to our current operating systems, my enjoyment of my desktop computer would increase tremendously if I could scrap my multi-monitor setup, replacing it with one high-DPI very large monitor.
But I think the point still stands that interfaces could be improved (and probably quite a bit) to take advantage of this kind of hardware. As dragonwriter said elsewhere in this thread, it may start as just simple things such as providing more flexibility on top of existing quality of life improvements that have been added to window managers based on the recognition that these monitors are larger and you can view more information at once. I would like to see such a monitor coupled with gesture input (along with mouse). I'd love to be able to do gestures to pick up a stack of windows and arrange them in a quick hand motion, for example.
Regarding the raw pixel, a typical 30" has 4.1M pixels, so two have 8.2M pixels and the Seiki has 8.3M which is hardly a difference, your point still stands though.
The lag due to 30hZ is a big drawback, my mousing accuracy is noticeably lower, but I can live with that.
What I cannot live with is the fact that the monitor goes blank and then re-detects the HDMI signal all the time -- perhaps 25 times in the first few minutes and then once every 5-15 minutes afterwards. I'm using the HDMI port on my Intel Haswell board and have updated drivers and the Seiki firmware, and still get this issue. Seiki support is bad, and lots of people have this issue. They specifically released a firmware update that is supposed to resolve this but it doesn't help me. Perhaps another brand of graphics card would help but currently it's broken.
Plenty of free desk space!
(Also, in the pro-sub-30" argument: it's difficult finding affordable movable arms and mounts for 30"+ monitors)
With my main MBP display as a good 2nd screen (great for telecons where you share one screen - you can keep your side-channel chats and email private on the other), one large main screen is perfect.
I've been using 3 very cheap Korean IPS's for over a year now. Play rough with them and they break. Annoying, but acceptable knowing that I was saving a lot of money, getting the best image I'd ever had, and I'd be replacing them in 24 months anyways.
It could be a component that is used by other 4k monitors, but it really seems specific to this Seiki (in varying sizes), as they have released a firmware update that is supposed to help.
It's interesting to me that the blanking events are grouped together and mostly in the beginning. My best guess is that the monitor adjusts some timings and eventually gets it right, and whenever it's turned off it has to figure out the timings all over again. But I don't really know what I'm talking about...
More to the point, I want an immersive, uninterrupted display surface. The bezels in a multi-monitor configuration just serve to annoy me by wasting space on my desk and in my field of view.