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To wide-screen or not to wide-screen

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Tekzel:
F0dder, I am curious about the comment you made where you felt the 4:3 display is better for coding.  I couldn't disagree more, and I am curious what your reasoning is.
-Tekzel (November 06, 2007, 08:27 AM)
--- End quote ---
I tend to maximize my apps, it's faster than manually resizing... a text editor (notepad++) becomes way too wide this way, and even visual studio with solution explorer, toolbox etc. open is quite wide enough. On a widescreen, there's simply too much wasted space if you maximize, in my opinion, and I'm afraid that might encourage having way too long source lines.

-f0dder (November 06, 2007, 08:32 AM)
--- End quote ---

Ah ok, I understand where you are coming from.  For me, personally, I still disagree.  :)  I also maximize windows most of the time and I find the extra width to be more help than hinderance.  I personally find the widescreen format to be, in all ways, better than the old 4:3.  I like it wide, so much so that I have two wide screen displays side by side.  Guess its different strokes and all that.

TPReal:
Hello.

I've recently bought a new laptop, and it is wide-screen. I didn't want it to be but they produce mostly wide-screen laptops now. At the beginning I was skeptical about this, but now I got used to and I can say it isn't any worse than a normal 4:3 screen (those screens now seem for me to be almost square ;D). I tested a number of games, and most of them can be switched to match the monitor's real resolution, so they are not stretched, and the rest of them are stretched by default, but in my graphic card's (nVIDIA) driver I found an option to lock the ratio so that the view just doesn't use the whole width of the screen. Or you can disable resizing completely, and then the image doesn't touch any side of the screen.

On the other hand, when viewing a text file, or writing code, I sometimes miss some height, while there's a lot of unused place on the right side. But you can put there the Start bar if you wish, or in IDEs like BDS you can use this place for Object Inspector or Project Manager, which I wouldnt put there on 3:4 because they would make the code less readable for me (I don't like narrow code editing fields).

So to sum up, if you already badly miss height, consider buying 4:3. Otherwise, I'd recomment wide-screen.

TPR.

nontroppo:
Though partially off-topic (buying LCDs in general), this article was the best intro to LCD purchasing I've sen in a while:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000991.html

We have a widescreen Dell at work which is a TN, and boy is its colour response horrible! The differences between it and our NECs (VA) and CinemaDisplay (IPS) is astounding. On topic the widescreen is nice for app management (horizontal document comparison, text diffing is amazing on widescreen!), but I'd rather take two IPS monitors over a widescreen TN any day.

Jeff links to this nice LCD buying guide:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/other/display/lcd-guide-f2007.html

David A:
About wide-screen:

I have a normal 4:3 displays at work and home. On the display I usually have two windows side by side, be it web-browsers, terminals, pdf-readers or text-editors. I have instructed firefox not to allow sites to change its width. (And I hate apps that starts in full screen mode.) With 1600x1200 there is plenty of width.

I don't think of "wide screen" as more width, but rather less height.

Nod5:
A somewhat related questions: does anyone of you with LCD monitors use some suspension or wall fitting or "skycrane-like" arm to hold it or do you use the reglar plastic base that it came with? Whas it expensive? Any drawbacks? I'm planning to get some such alternative to the plastic base for my computer monitor at home. I want to use the entire table area, slide slide papers in under the (suspended) monitor and so on.

BTW I also prefer the 4:3 format. Though if I were to buy a new LCD screen today I might get one that can be (physically) rotated 90 degrees. Very useful for those of us that read a lot of pdf files on the screen.

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