On Win7, Windows key+left/right snaps windows to half a screen, and windows key+up snaps it to a whole screen. Combine this with two screens and you can fit a lot more windows on the screen with minimal effort. Likewise, a lot of full-screen games and movies and such only take up half your real estate if you have two screens—right now, I’m playing Railroad Tycoon on one screen and chatting on Facebook with the other.
Also, who makes a 40+” screen that’s 3000+ pixels wide for anything like the cost of two normal monitors? (I mean, they may exist, it’s a long time since I’ve gone shopping, but it seems unlikely)
Well, e.g., you can get a Seiki 39“ 3840x2160 TV/monitor for $500 from Amazon right now. It’s not the world’s best monitor (TN panel, 30Hz refresh, and be warned that many things don’t work well with very high-resolution monitors right now) … but it’s ~40” and it’s >3000px wide and it’s cheaper than some “normal” monitors.
Fair point! I think 1080 is fine for me and the extra screen space would be more useful than finer resolution, but I can definitely see how resolution could be more important for other applications.
Human’s lateral visual search is considerably more efficient than horizontal. 414 spreaded more laterally beats regular 650. There are ultra-wide huge screens, of course, but they weren’t cheaper per inches than two monitors when I did my research 6 months ago.
So now you have the same number of pixels as from that one big monitor, but you either need a fancy mounting mechanism for putting the monitors above one another or else need twice the width on your desk. And you get a big wide thing you probably can’t see all of at once, instead of something a more natural shape. And it’s divided into four bits which limits the possible shapes and sizes of your windows. And it’s more expensive.
Again, for sure you might have good reasons to choose four smaller monitors instead of one really big one. But (1) the one big one has definite advantages and (2) I repeat, I wasn’t saying “hey, everyone should get one of these things” but “yes, as it happens such things do exist and here’s an example”.
I wasn’t saying you (or anyone) should get one, only answering Alsadius’s question and indicating that monitors of roughly the kind he described do in fact exist.
(30Hz refresh would be very bad for gaming. If you’re using your monitor for software development or data analysis or designing buildings or writing novels, though, it probably doesn’t make much difference.)
I have one monitor aligned horizontally and another aligned vertically, and I feel this works better than one large monitor or a monitor that swivels between the two alignments. I think part of this is because with two monitors, it’s possible to rotate them relative to each other (ideally, I think, you would want a spherical / parabolic / hyperbolic monitor and this helps approximate that), but it might be that if I had hotkey shortcuts to easily throw windows where I wanted them on a single large monitor (like xmonad) I would be able to get most of the benefit.
I have a Thinkpad W530 and can connect 4 external monitors :-) But I didn’t get around to setup and use this capability (it also only works with the docking station, otherwise only 2+internal).
Why do you turn off the internal one? I use a screen layout which works well with one or more external monitors (I does limit playement of the laptop though).
Because you can normally only use 2 monitors per video card( I guess yours has the option run 2 on an integrated and 2 on a dedicated card?) and any 1 of my external monitors is much better than the 15″ laptop screen. If I had the option of running all 3 of them, I’d take it.
At any rate, nowadays I use my laptop purely as a desktop computer (external monitors, keyboard, mouse; almost never using it outside of home), so I am just going to build a desktop (with 2 graphics cards) next time around. With the level of functionality that smartphones and tablets have today, laptops are becoming obsolete for users like me.
My thinkpad has two integrated ones. One for power saving, one for gaming and can really drive 4 screens. The docking station is dumb (but expensive nonetheless).
There are external graphics cards or splitters you could use e.g. matrox triplehead2go.
Actually I do have a notebook and a 24″ monitor. As a practical matter I tend to do everything on the big monitor and use the notebook monitor very seldomly.
The one study supporting one big screen is of bad quality, the studies supporting two screens are of medium quality. The former study was done by Apple, it’s small and people were doing only one task (Spreadsheets); the latter ones had a bigger sample and people did various tasks. A survey over the productivity-blogosphere revealed people are mostly in favor of two medium screens over one huge screen. Bill Gates has multiple medium-sized screens, so does his close subordinates.
I have two bigish ones (23″, 1920x1080), just in case. I consider this was the most amount of utility per dollar I got in the last 2 years, excluding money spent on relationships. I intend to buy a third bigger one (33″) soon.
usually it’s cheaper per amount of screen real estate, but also it works a lot better for simultanously doing things that prefer to take up a full “screen” like games.
Why two screens instead of one really big one?
On Win7, Windows key+left/right snaps windows to half a screen, and windows key+up snaps it to a whole screen. Combine this with two screens and you can fit a lot more windows on the screen with minimal effort. Likewise, a lot of full-screen games and movies and such only take up half your real estate if you have two screens—right now, I’m playing Railroad Tycoon on one screen and chatting on Facebook with the other.
Also, who makes a 40+” screen that’s 3000+ pixels wide for anything like the cost of two normal monitors? (I mean, they may exist, it’s a long time since I’ve gone shopping, but it seems unlikely)
Well, e.g., you can get a Seiki 39“ 3840x2160 TV/monitor for $500 from Amazon right now. It’s not the world’s best monitor (TN panel, 30Hz refresh, and be warned that many things don’t work well with very high-resolution monitors right now) … but it’s ~40” and it’s >3000px wide and it’s cheaper than some “normal” monitors.
Why would I want that when I can get two of these, have 43″ of real estate, and $240 left over?
Because it has twice as many pixels as two of those.
(Is that enough reason? Maybe not. But that’s the main reason you’d want it, if you did.)
Fair point! I think 1080 is fine for me and the extra screen space would be more useful than finer resolution, but I can definitely see how resolution could be more important for other applications.
What extra screen space? I fear you may have been taken in by the monitor marketers’ cunning ruse of measuring size in (linear) inches.
A 39“ monitor with 16:9 aspect ratio is 34” x 19″ and has an area of 650 square inches.
A 22“ monitor with 18:9 aspect ratio is 19” x 11″ and has an area of 207 square inches.
So one of the former has considerably more screen space than two of the latter.
Human’s lateral visual search is considerably more efficient than horizontal. 414 spreaded more laterally beats regular 650. There are ultra-wide huge screens, of course, but they weren’t cheaper per inches than two monitors when I did my research 6 months ago.
Then get four, for $20 more.
So now you have the same number of pixels as from that one big monitor, but you either need a fancy mounting mechanism for putting the monitors above one another or else need twice the width on your desk. And you get a big wide thing you probably can’t see all of at once, instead of something a more natural shape. And it’s divided into four bits which limits the possible shapes and sizes of your windows. And it’s more expensive.
Again, for sure you might have good reasons to choose four smaller monitors instead of one really big one. But (1) the one big one has definite advantages and (2) I repeat, I wasn’t saying “hey, everyone should get one of these things” but “yes, as it happens such things do exist and here’s an example”.
30Hz refresh is a deal-breaker.
I wasn’t saying you (or anyone) should get one, only answering Alsadius’s question and indicating that monitors of roughly the kind he described do in fact exist.
(30Hz refresh would be very bad for gaming. If you’re using your monitor for software development or data analysis or designing buildings or writing novels, though, it probably doesn’t make much difference.)
I have one monitor aligned horizontally and another aligned vertically, and I feel this works better than one large monitor or a monitor that swivels between the two alignments. I think part of this is because with two monitors, it’s possible to rotate them relative to each other (ideally, I think, you would want a spherical / parabolic / hyperbolic monitor and this helps approximate that), but it might be that if I had hotkey shortcuts to easily throw windows where I wanted them on a single large monitor (like xmonad) I would be able to get most of the benefit.
If you have a laptop you can’t just grow the primary.
I use a laptop with 2 external monitors (I turn the internal one off), however, it does suck that you are limited to 2.
I have a Thinkpad W530 and can connect 4 external monitors :-) But I didn’t get around to setup and use this capability (it also only works with the docking station, otherwise only 2+internal).
Why do you turn off the internal one? I use a screen layout which works well with one or more external monitors (I does limit playement of the laptop though).
Because you can normally only use 2 monitors per video card( I guess yours has the option run 2 on an integrated and 2 on a dedicated card?) and any 1 of my external monitors is much better than the 15″ laptop screen. If I had the option of running all 3 of them, I’d take it.
At any rate, nowadays I use my laptop purely as a desktop computer (external monitors, keyboard, mouse; almost never using it outside of home), so I am just going to build a desktop (with 2 graphics cards) next time around. With the level of functionality that smartphones and tablets have today, laptops are becoming obsolete for users like me.
My thinkpad has two integrated ones. One for power saving, one for gaming and can really drive 4 screens. The docking station is dumb (but expensive nonetheless).
There are external graphics cards or splitters you could use e.g. matrox triplehead2go.
Actually I do have a notebook and a 24″ monitor. As a practical matter I tend to do everything on the big monitor and use the notebook monitor very seldomly.
The one study supporting one big screen is of bad quality, the studies supporting two screens are of medium quality. The former study was done by Apple, it’s small and people were doing only one task (Spreadsheets); the latter ones had a bigger sample and people did various tasks. A survey over the productivity-blogosphere revealed people are mostly in favor of two medium screens over one huge screen. Bill Gates has multiple medium-sized screens, so does his close subordinates.
I have two bigish ones (23″, 1920x1080), just in case. I consider this was the most amount of utility per dollar I got in the last 2 years, excluding money spent on relationships. I intend to buy a third bigger one (33″) soon.
usually it’s cheaper per amount of screen real estate, but also it works a lot better for simultanously doing things that prefer to take up a full “screen” like games.
And two monitors are great for when you want to watch Netflix while doing something else online.