"Eisenstein playfully hyped the virtues of the "dynamic square," a screen that was exactly as high as it was wide. He did so in part because to him the square was modern, charged with productive machine force. This more purely cinematic screen was, according to Eisenstein, necessary for properly showcasing the energies, conflicts, and collisions germane to the moving image arts. It would also, at least in theory, be the most accommodating frame, capable of hosting images composed for planes that were either horizontal or vertical. Eisenstein proclaimed that previous industry standards (4:3), as well as contemporaneous calls for wider screens, were nostalgic, calling forth a dated viewing regime dictated by traditional art forms."

https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals...

It was impossible to see the whole screen, that was especially great with 3D movies (Space Station 3D, etc.). Also the 2D movie premiere of The Matrix Revolutions in IMAX DMR film was awesome.

So I would prefer movie theatre/TV/monitor screens with almost 1:1 or 4:3 ratio over 16:10 or 16:9.

* The IMAX Vienna had a 600m2 screen, 24000 watt 6 channels surround sound, 458 seats, demolished in 2009: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAX#.C3.96sterreich , http://web.archive.org/web/20030422003546/http://www.imax.at...

But I wouldn't trust Eisenstein much for that matter anyway.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3612616/

I don't know if a completely square monitor would be as well received as something at least slightly rectangular - 1920x1440 (4:3) might be a good compromise.

When I code, horizontal space is never at a premium. It's always vertical space I'm short on.

Pulling out my T42p retro laptop, with its 4:3 screen, always gives me the warm fuzzies. Love that aspect ratio.

This is incredibly useful to a whole load of office employees, who want to refer to two word docs, or 1 word doc and 1 PDF, etc. This is where widescreens shine (and 16:10 is even better than 16:9) and why I think they've excelled well in the workplace.

A 16:10 monitor rotated 90 degrees (what I have right now) is OK, but it wastes space at the top and bottom that the 4:3 monitor would be using to zoom the document more.

A horizontal 16:10 monitor with two PDF's, as you mention, is too small for me (at least with my current 24 inch monitors). Caring for the eyes is essential when you're looking at on-screen PDFs all the day. I would probably like that layout with a 30" monitor though... although maximizing windows in two monitors is still more comfortable than tiling in one big monitor.

If you're using Windows, here's a neat feature I went years without knowing: Windows key + left arrow arranges the window to occupy the left half of your monitor, and similarly with right arrow.

The last few places I've been have been strong supporters of dual monitors, so I might be in a bit of a thought bubble on that, but also because monitors have gotten dirt cheap so why not. You can get dual IPS for the price of a fancy office chair.

I’m seriously considering buying an LG 34UM95 monitor¹ for precisely this reason. It’s so wide (34" screen, 21:9 aspect ratio, 3440x1440 resolution) that I could sensibly divide the screen into 3-4 full-height columns with different source files open in each for development work.

Currently I have a decent Dell 30" as my main screen, but at 2560x1600 resolution I wind up using it with a 2x2 split for coding, which roughly halves the number of lines I can see at once in a long file.

I’m a little sceptical about trying a 1920x1920 screen at that physical size for similar work, simply because I’d worry about what prolonged use would do to my neck with that much vertical movement being needed all the time.

¹ http://www.lg.com/uk/monitors/lg-34UM95

tl;dr: Vertical: Mostly eye movement. Horizontal: Lots of neck movement.

Given proper resources, I'd consider getting one. Just wanted to share my funny anecdote that it's so large, I rolled back and forth to take advantage of it all :)

However, from my typical centered vantage point, windows near the corners appeared skewed.

Presumably this is the advantage of the new curved screen version¹, though so far it’s considerably more expensive and it looks like at least here in the UK no-one has it available for immediate purchase.

¹ http://www.lg.com/uk/monitors/lg-34UC97

They call these 16:9 displays widescreen. I call them shallowscreen: they are just don't have th evertical space for work. Why are my work tools made with screen form factors that are only suitable for watching movies?

And yes, I love my T43, which has a lovely display and keyboard even though it is almost 10 years old. Alas, it is just underpowered today.

Last time I completely rebuilt my home setup I got monitors that can be rotated into portrait. I've not used the facility nearly as much as I thought I would, but then again I've not done much development since so that might be why.

Having one portrait and one landscape seems to be idea for web development: portrait for coding and landscape for output (as that is what the user's will likely have) & the things that don't fit properly in 1080 pixels wide.

You don't want to large a monitor in portrait for coding though: you'll be looking down a lot (or up+down if you sit with your head centred) which might be quite bad for posture. Beyond a certain size you are probably better off with a large monitor and some UI hack to artificially split it into columns.

It certainly is. My browser is never even that wide now, and the only thing I ever run full screen is games.

4:3 is about right for a laptop since you can't make them too "tall" or they'll become difficult to handle, much like books.

It seems to me that a 16:9 monitor is exactly what you need -- rotated vertically. Get one that pivots!

This sounds really weird to me. I absolutely relish the ability to have an editor and terminal side by side without either of them feeling "squeezed up". If you're using an IDE you can also get a lot more space for actual code even with those annoying side areas that IDEs tend to have.

I recently upgrade to a 5k imac... and it's an absurd amount of space. I don't see the point in griping about aspect ratio when it's merely size and density that we really want.

But on a large desktop display, I end up with lots more windows at any one time, including lots of small windows that stay around and in one place for a long time: things like notes, feeds, things to come back to, etc. And, in that large space, I can size each window as large as I want, so I much more often can use a natural-feeling aspect ratio for its content. In other words, large displays are the only ones for me in which a "desktop metaphor" GUI actually feels and functions like a desktop. So, on a large display (aside from games/movies), I don't care too much about aspect ratio, I'll fill up the edges of whatever space I've got.

My current fave monitor at home is my ca2008 Dell 2405 with all it's 1920x1200 glory. The Pixel is second, but a distant second because the screen is so small that if you actually use the full resolution you can't read a darn thing.

What's happening in the sky or on the ceiling isn't particularly useful to us, and as long as we have reasonably sure footing, the same is true of the ground or floor. We spend our days interacting with things mostly in the horizontal visual plane. Things that we approach or that approach us mostly move in this plane as well.

[1] There were a few famous experiments a few decades ago showing that what we see as we grow up affects the development of the visual system: https://computervisionblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/cats-and...

Unfortunately, OSes and other software tend to mess this up: in particular, the fact that those handy fullscreen commands actually fill the screen with the selected window or picture or video or whatever is no longer good news if some or all of the edges of your screen are far enough away from the comfortable centre area of your vision (see http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-large-display-paradox/ ). This was appropriate behaviour in the past, when both pixels and screen inches were limited and expensive and so it was safe to assume that the whole of the screen was well within the user's central viewing area—and in fact was probably covering much less of that central area than was at all ideal. Nowadays the user should be able to define a central fullscreen area that (possibly) doesn't take up the whole screen: then (by default etc.) fullscreened items should be expanded to the limits of the "fullscreen" area and no more. The rest of the screen can be filled with other information: maybe the other open windows pushed to the side in an OS X Exposé-like manner, or things like image metadata for a viewed image. The brightness of the outer area should be subdued to prevent it from distracting from the central image. (A practical use for whizzy translucency effects!). The information out in the "gutter" will be glanceable, but won't feel like it's impinging on your view of the fullscreened item (if it does, you didn't make the fullscreen area large enough).

http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/news_archive/32.htm#dell_u2515h

16 / 9 = 1.77

2560 / 1140 = 2.25

It's closer to today's CinemaScope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinemaScope "today it generally refers to any 2.35:1, 2.39:1, or 2.40:1"

  resolution    size    width x height  ppi
   2560x1440     25"    21.8" x 12.3"   117
   1920x1200     24"    20.4" x 12.7"    94
   1920x1080     24"    20.9" x 11.8"    92

Reading logs or browsing code is quite nice with the vertical screen, as is reading some vertical oriented pdf materials. Cat videos are usually watched on the horizontal screen. :)

I found it so disturbing that I never used the monitors in portrait mode.

The setup is perfect for Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects - I can set all my menu/preview windows on the portrait, landscape for primary.

Could I use a monitor like that? Not really, I thought about it for a while but it just wouldn't help me anymore than what I use now.

Of course, many monitors are worse. A 1920x1080 27" monitor is only 82 pixels per inch!

The monitor I'm buying next is probably the Dell UP2414Q. With 3840x2160 resolution on a 23.8" panel, it has 185 pixels per inch. It's expensive and you need a machine that can drive it properly, but that is a nice pixel density.

If I need to use something with a higher dpi for any length of time, I have crank up the font size which causes some problems in some applications.

Right now I use a 19" 1280x1024 and a 20" 1600x1200. A monitor like this would be great.

I see this as a big failure of "modern" graphic systems. Having a 105 ppi should just mean more refined graphics, not smaller size of rendered objects.

The way a GUI appears on the screen should be a function of the screen size and the viewer distance, not a function of the screen ppi! We must get rid of all the layers of hacks that we have accumulated over the years (the reference 72 ppi, for example).

Absolutely. This is one of the main reasons we were stuck with such incredibly shitty low res displays for so long. Up until windows vista, high DPI monitors were simply unusable in windows. Even now they have problems.

We still have a similar problem forcing us into having tiny screens. Windows and all the desktop environments that copied it are absolutely worthless at their primary function: managing windows. So people prefer two small monitors over one large monitor simply because the two small monitors allow an easy "make this take up half my screen space". Something that is of course trivially easy to implement, but most "modern" windowing systems don't care about at all.

For what it's worth, in GNOME 3 and Unity (Ubuntu) moving a window to the left or right border will make that window half of the screen. Same with top and bottom border. Moving a window to one of the corners resizes it to a quarter of the screen.

There are all sorts of other useful shortcuts that use the Windows key as a modifier, for example Windows+E to open a File Explorer window. Basically, try Windows+(every key) to see what it does.

Also, even in the newest windows it is still crippled. Applications can prevent themselves from being resized like that, and often things like games that you would want to run in borderless window mode can not be moved around using windows shortcut keys.

You probably will sit half a meter (1.64ft) from a 26.5" monitor, maybe more, right?

According to isthisretina.com the density of a 26.5" 1920x1920 becomes equivalent to retina (326ppi) at about 34 inches (86cm).

Typically I have three displays in a row: a monitor on the left and two computers on the right, a MacBook Pro Retina and a ThinkPad W520 (145 ppi). Whichever computer I'm primarily working on that day goes in the middle and is connected to the external display.

I wouldn't be able to use a display 34" from my eyes unless I used a different pair of glasses, and then I'd have to switch glasses back and forth to look at the different screens! Unless I gave up using the laptop screens at all, but I'm not about to do that.

So with all my monitors at the same distance, what feels like a "retina" density is the same on all of them.

I was just stressing the fact that depending on the size and distance, even sub-100ppi screen densities might be good enough.

Admittedly if you sit 20" from the screen regardless of its size you may want a slightly higher ppi.

If someone can easily focus at different distances, then of course that opens up more options.

That's not a bad idea, from both a cost and power standpoint. I wonder why nobody has done it?

Same thing with digital cameras. There is a good use case for a grey scale image sensor. Higher sensitivity, fewer artifacts, lower power. But, sadly, nobody has built an affordable one yet. Sure it's not a large market, but there are hundreds of cameras that are almost identical, why doesn't somebody dare to do something different?

[0] https://www.maxmax.com/b&w_conversion.htm [1] http://www.43rumors.com/january-shipment-report-dslr-crash-m...

http://us.leica-camera.com/Photography/Leica-M/Leica-M-Monoc...

There are a few good use cases, I think:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/31/256-shades-of-grey/

It's a somewhat apples-and-oranges comparison, but maybe that's the price you need to pay for such a niche camera.

It's pretty much out of the question, alas....

http://www.necdisplay.com/category/medical-diagnostic-displa...

http://www.necdisplay.com/p/medical-diagnostic-displays/md21...

I've seen zilch available in the consumer space, though.

EDIT: Better choice: The OLPC lets you turn off the screen backlight and that gets you a grayscale display that works even under direct sunlight.

[1]: http://www.solcomputer.com/sunlight-readable/sol-vision-moni...

For sub-27" displays these days I think 4k is definitely the way to go. Affordable modern graphics cards are perfectly capable of driving such displays now and I think, or at least hope, that by the end of next year they will have become a pretty standard mainstream choice. A non-standard aspect ratio is all well and fine, but if it's still at standard dpi resolution it's just icing on a cake that's getting towards the end of it's shelf life.

http://www.barco.com/en/Products-Solutions/Displays-monitors...

However, what would be interesting is if this was priced at normal monitor prices ... the ATC monitors are incredibly expensive.

"But after a few minutes, I realized that non-standard monitor sizes are most likely abundant in various industries, such as medical, when they are designed for a specific purpose and quality. So while a 1:1 monitor is something interesting to see in the consumer space, perhaps it might not be so new when considering industrial use scenarios."

They're all made in Japan though so they're not the usual fare.

My dual monitor setup has one landscape, one portrait, and I'm never going back. Viewing documents & code is just so much more convenient.

My eyes are positioned horizontally in my head, giving a "wide" field of view. So a widescreen monitor always feels more comfortable. Unless anyone has a single, perfectly round eye in the middle of their face, I don't know why you'd want a square monitor. :) That's my opinion, anyway!

Any reference materials can be on the very edges with a very slight turn of the head or a big eye swivel.

I've heard that the "aspect ratio" of humans' field of view is approximately 4:3, so if that's the goal, you'd want...2217x1662. 1:1 is actually closer to 4:3 than 16:9. My guess is that the tendency to scan left and right rather than up and down is the stronger argument for wider aspect ratios than the human field of view argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_%28image%29#Pract...

Seems to be OOS virtually everywhere, though.

Hoping for a power of 2 square model.

But that's mostly because my love for (sqrt(5)+1)/2 is near-Pythagorean in its scope.