OT: monitor size

It works much better with complex tasks so you have multiple documents and apps open at one when doing the complex task.

Most obviously with design work where you can have the code, the app being developed and other stuff like your notes and stuff like google searches all open and being used at the same time.

You get a much better more useful image in wide screen format.

Brian Gaff snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote

Yes, particularly with the biggest screens so the edges are in focus as well as the middle.

There is one monitor now, which is close to being a square.

LG 28MQ780-B 28 Inch 16:18 SDQHD (2560 x 2880) Nano IPS DualUp Monitor

it is similar to two 2560 x 1440 monitors stacked one above the other.

Being as the diagonal is 28", and the panel is square, dividing by 1.414 gives about 20" on edge. There would be a bit of bezel wrapped around that dimension. Panel dimensions tend to be the active area.

The stand mechanism is just as weird as the display panel dimensions. Being a square panel, it likely would tip over easier if using a conventional monitor "foot". I would think a VESA plate and a counterbalanced arm, would serve in place of the provided "post" support. A North American would need more freedom placing the monitor to be happy with it. Some of the counterbalanced arms can do that.

There aren't many pictures of it, with an actual image on it. The marketing photo includes the usual South Korean fixation with "pencils". Some of their other objects for local consumption, the AIO computers have a "tray" near the bottom edge of the screen, where your pencil is to be placed. This picture, includes a conspicuous supply of pencils, indicating a need for "law and order" to be brought to the desktop. This particular monitor, has no pencil tray :-) This means you will need a South Korean keyboard with its own pencil tray. The person depicted in the image, is obviously a "rebel", the antithesis of law and order. I expect to see all those pencils, restrained in trays.

The South Koreans have done square monitors before, but the distribution was just for South Korea. This is obviously a big experiment. It's too bad they brought this out, when everyone is poor as church mice.

Paul

I'd watched a video from an architect using one

Are they for use with medical diagnostic scanners ?

All this discussion of monitors made me have a bit of a rethink this afternoon.

I have the 4K monitor, but wasn't happy with how I positioned the laptop's own screen underneath that (mainly for MS Teams as that seems to be the thing I'm endlessly flicking back-and-forth to nowadays).

The laptop is pretty slim and will open to 180°, so I got a length of aluminium U channel and some adhesive felt pads from Wickes.

I drilled/dremeled/filed slots in the channel to allow access to the power button and thundebolt port (single cable powers the laptop and provides 40Gbps of bandwidth for monitor/network/external drives/kvm etc)

Then VHB taped it to the back of the monitor, so the laptop slides between two opposing channels and is wedged in place by the felt.

I was wary of making the felt too tight, but actually it ended-up slightly too loose, it droops a little to the left, so I'll have to cut the tape off with fishing line and re-position it slightly, maybe eventually araldite it instead?

Before the fan was underneath, blowing down onto the desk surface and it didn't take much CPU usage to get it spinning faster, now it's blowing away from the back of the main monitor into empty space, which I thought would help reduce fan speed, but it seems to have annoyed it and it's on more often than before :-(

Nice, it makes a good companion monitor.

I'm guessing your laptop panel isn't one where the viewing angle affects the colours very much? Some TN panels can look bad if viewed from too high or low.

Where are the air intakes? Some laptops take them from the sides, where this might block one side of the airflow.

I like the spirit level - more monitors should have those :)

Theo

Funny enough I had exactly that same layout thought today and was explaining maybe plans for it to a colleague, so your photo will come in use....

however then, I think I'll stick to my current office layout which has our 14" HD laptop open 180° stuck to the wall with a 24" HD monitor to the left of it, and a 43" 4K wall mounted TV stacked above.

Which is basically, with all screens running to the laptop (and an external USB "video card" device to help), the combined area of six HD screens and also complete chaos when I open many windows, they overlap when something else urgently is opened, and I then forget which screen had what window.

You can have too many screens and then an oncoming headache!

At 1920x3072 it's pretty high DPI just to run Teams

Yes, it doesn't suffer when it's sideways

It doesn't have any vents at the sides, but the airflow isn't as I thought, it sucks in from underneath, and blows out at the back around the hinge, when it's open to 180° instead of around 135° it's more restricted, I'll try angling it less than "flat".

Yes, in the past I've used two equal-sized monitors, I'm finding windows not so good when mixing and matching sizes, it thinks my 180° monitor is taller than the main monitor, just because 3072 is more than 2160.

Also I have three virtual desktops on the large monitor, and Teams won't remember the "show this on all monitors" setting.

Windows came quite late to the muli-screen business.

That would be very useful for me. Does it require specialist software or is the capability there in, say, Windows 10? Thanks.

...and then it occurred to me to check in the various word processors I use, where - of course - I found exactly that display option.

That works for two consecutive pages in the same document, but you could also have a single page displayed in your word processor and a single page of a reference document in a pdf reader. Drag one window by its header, until the cursor hits the edge of the screen and it will automatically resize to take up half the screen. Any other windows will reduce to small snapshots and clicking on one will resize it to take up the other half of the screen.

My interest in this is because for years I've used a 16:9 monitor swivelled to portrait mode so I can view a complete A4 page. But the screen I have, which is 20" diagonal, is too small now for comfortable viewing of material which is in landscape orientation and therefore takes up just half of the screen.

A bigger monitor would solve the latter problem, and the possibility of having two A4 pages side by side would be a welcome bonus.

For PDF documents I use xournal

That's new to me; I'll take a look. Thanks.

Went down this route for my new office layout (which is still not complete).

I bought a 4K 43" monitor with multiple inputs so that you can have two or more computers connected at the same time and use some fancy software to allocate the screen real estate.

So far I'm only running my laptop, but the software will nicely split the screen down the middle and let me have two windows side by side or take one to full screen if I need to.

I'm doing something similar with a 40" TV Full HD as a temporary measure with this PC which still gives me a reasonable side by side view but is more clunky.

A 40" monitor (replacing two monitors, one landscape and a small one portrait) gives me an approximation of what I had before.

As usual, setting out to get full 4K support (to use the new 43" 4K TV) has proved more complicated than expected.

Oh, and running Teams in full screen 4K gives my poor little laptop a major headache as it needs to run the CPU almost flat out to render all the moving graphics from participants.

Cheers

Dave R

Yes. I can handle HD videos with most of my machines, just. But 4K they were not designed for