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Displays Hardware

LG Introduces Monitor With 21:9 Aspect Ratio 311

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the my-neck-hurts-already dept.
skade88 writes "LG has released an ultra wide monitor. It really is wide (WxHxD: 699.7 X 387 X 208.5 mm) — take a look at the thing! It looks like it would be good for movies shot in larger aspect ratios such as 2.20 for 70mm film or 2.39 for modern cinemascope films. But OS GUI designs need to catch up to the ever horizontally expanding waistline of our monitors."
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LG Introduces Monitor With 21:9 Aspect Ratio More

LG Introduces Monitor With 21:9 Aspect Ratio

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  • WTFGA (Score:5, Funny)

    by spongman ( 182339 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:06PM (#42263725)

    great. just waiting for laptops to follow this format as they inevitably will. then we'll be able to read up to 3 lines of text at a time!

    • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by jeffmeden ( 135043 )

      great. just waiting for laptops to follow this format as they inevitably will. then we'll be able to read up to 3 lines of text at a time!

      And they might find it in their heart to put the number pad back on to average laptops again instead of reserving them for the hideously overpriced (and hard to justify to management) ones...

    • Re:WTFGA (Score:4, Funny)

      by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:19PM (#42263903) Journal

      Won't be long before laptops look like ironing boards.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by The Grim Reefer ( 1162755 )

        Won't be long before laptops look like ironing boards.

        Hmm. If we make them buoyant and waterproof they can double as a surfboard. Too bad Apple owns rounded corners. ;-)

        • Won't be long before laptops look like ironing boards.

          Hmm. If we make them buoyant and waterproof they can double as a surfboard. Too bad Apple owns rounded corners. ;-)

          Yeah, that's the thing I hate about modern handheld appliances. Anything not made by Apple has those sharp corners.

    • Re:WTFGA (Score:4, Informative)

      by MikeyC01 ( 231948 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:34PM (#42264093) Homepage

      great. just waiting for laptops to follow this format as they inevitably will. then we'll be able to read up to 3 lines of text at a time!

      Toshiba's had one for a few weeks (at least)

      http://us.toshiba.com/computers/laptops/satellite/U840W/U845W-S410/ [toshiba.com]

      DISPLAY RESOLUTION
      1792x768 (HD+), 21:9 aspect ratio, Supports 720p content

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by poity ( 465672 )

      In the future, monitors will just be a thin ribbon of pixels.
      Hey buddy we have a really great 70" x 5" screen, but forget about that technical mumbo jumbo, it's 70 inches wide! Perfect for the living room! :D

    • great. just waiting for laptops to follow this format as they inevitably will. then we'll be able to read up to 3 lines of text at a time!

      Good thing three lines is also three paragraphs! Sorry coders.

  • GUI designers (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:09PM (#42263753)

    But OS GUI designs need to catch up to the ever horizontally expanding waste line of our monitors.

    Yeah. My hope is that Windows 9 will offer some way to divide the screen into multiple views so that more than one document/application can be shown at once. Not just little tiles that zoom up to full-screen applications. Kind of like little, virtual screens that you could open to provide access to your content, like a doorway.

    They could call them "Doors."

    I'm surprised that nobody has come up with this already.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zlives ( 2009072 )

      aero tiles?

  • A 21:9 (which reduces to 7:3) monitor would be good for drawing two windows side by side at 7:6 aspect ratio, using features such as Tile Vertically (in Windows since 3.1 if not earlier), Snap (in Windows 7), or analogous tiling features of other window managers [wikipedia.org]. That'd make it easier to see your code editor and the documentation at once in an IDE, or seeing both the input and output video at once in a video processing program like VirtualDub, etc.

    • Or just multiple windows. I can get 3 emacs windows side by side on mine, but I have to hide the terminals behind them with a slight gap so I can click them. If even wider I could just put a couple terminals to the side vertically.

      I am a big confused about the article's comment that OS GUI designs would need to catch up to this. There is nothing the OS or GUI needs to do here.

  • Just think -- how many source files you can have side-by-side on this baby :)

    Many programmers already use two monitors side-by-side in a multi-head configuration, so I don't see why this would be any different.

    • For work I think I'd prefer the two monitors tbh, as you can angle them both towards yourself.

      This looks like it's so wide that it would be preferable for it to curve around slightly like an imax cinema so that all parts of the display are facing you directly.

      Now that, I would buy. It would be perfect for gaming as well as work and movies.

  • Arrgh! Where's my 16:10 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HeyBob! ( 111243 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:10PM (#42263773)

    You can find them, but they're expensive and harder and harder to find.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pope ( 17780 )

      And they'd be angry that very few films are shot that way. This 21:9 monitor is a waste of time and space.

  • OT: Splitting physical displays in Windows? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by swb ( 14022 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:12PM (#42263807)

    The concept of an ultra-wide monitor makes me think of one of the frustration I have with increasingly large displays and window arrangement.

    It's all well and good to have a huge display or several of them at high resolutions, but it's super annoying to layout windows in a way that lets you see multiple application windows on the screen at the same time. I have two 1600xwhatever displays, but there are times where it would seem more beneficial to have three 1024x768 displays for application window management, even though it would be marginally lower total resolution.

    It would be nice to be able to split a display, especially wide screen displays, into virtual monitors so that arranging app windows would be easier. I've found some utilities that seem able to remember window positions, but that assumes I always want the same layout (almost never) and they almost always suffer from the usual glitchyness.

    Is there anything that does this?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bmo ( 77928 )

      I dunno man, I just snap applications to either side of the monitor in KDE. It seems to work well.

      Doesn't Windows do this? I thought that's what aero-snap was.

      --
      BMO

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Qzukk ( 229616 )

        Windows can do it with two screens, but not with the mouse (the mouse gesture to dock to the side of the monitor is to drag and drop the window against the edge of the desktop area, you can't dock to the edge of the monitors where they touch).

        To get the docking effect with two screens, you have to use the Windows + left/right arrow key, which will dock the current window to the left or right side of whatever monitor its on. Repeatedly pressing it will cycle through the monitors, as well.

    • Pre-Win7:
      CTRL+Click on the tasks in taskbar, Right click, Tile horizontally/vertically

      Win7:
      WIN+Left/Right (and to a lesser extent: up and down)
      WIN+SHIFT+Left/Right (for multimonitor cases)

      Also, AMD has Hydragrid, which was pretty decent, last time I checked. But in Win7, I find it largely superfluous.

    • Winsplit Revolution [winsplit-revolution.com] is pretty good for this and free. The default settings are ctrl-alt-numpad key moves the window to that section of the display (so 7 would move it to the top left taking up 1/6th of the screen). Hitting the same combo again gives the top left but going 2/3 of the way horizontal, again gives 1/3. The other number pad keys work similarly and the arrow keys move the current window between monitors. I think there's combos for maximizing and minimizing as well.

  • 1366x768? Only if she's 11" (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:14PM (#42263833)

    I like big monitors and I cannot lie
    No other brother can deny
    When a display walks in with an itty bitty bezel
    and a 21:9 aspect ratio I get sprung

  • Rotate 90 Degrees (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cosm ( 1072588 ) <thecosm3@gma i l .com> on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:16PM (#42263863)
    YES! I need one of these for work to rotate 90 degrees so I can maintain these 10K+ line functions without scrolling for an hour, functions written by our offshore friends who only definition of refactoring is trying to un-FOIL a binomial a second time.

  • Fuck this wide shit (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Stormwatch ( 703920 ) <`moc.liamtoh' `ta' `oarigogirdor'> on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:17PM (#42263867) Homepage

    Wide screens? More like SHORT screens! That's how they sell you a smaller screen with the same "inches" (hypotenuse instead of area). You have to get a very large monitor if you want a decent amount of vertical space.

    • Agreed. Trying to find a monitor these days that's 1280 tall or greater can be challenging. (Without turning the monitor sideways, but then it's too skinny.) It seems like everyone thinks you only use your PC to watch movies.

      I don't think I've ever watched a movie on my PC. A trailer, maybe.

      • Trying to find a monitor these days that's 1280 tall or greater can be challenging.

        Actually, 27" monitors at WQHD (2560x1440) seem to be catching on in South Korea, so you can find them easily on eBay for less than $400. Very tempting. But it's still as I said, you have to buy a huge monitor to get some vertical space.

        • Trying to find a monitor these days that's 1280 tall or greater can be challenging.

          Actually, 27" monitors at WQHD (2560x1440) seem to be catching on in South Korea, so you can find them easily on eBay for less than $400. Very tempting. But it's still as I said, you have to buy a huge monitor to get some vertical space.

          I wouldn't be opposed to that, if they were color-accurate enough for serious Photoshop work. I'm certainly not against more resolution per se, but merely adding more horizontal doesn't buy much.

          • I wouldn't be opposed to that, if they were color-accurate enough for serious Photoshop work.

            They're usually S-IPS LEDs, so probably yes. I heard they're pretty much the same stuff that big brands use, but sometimes from imperfect yields, such as a dead pixel here and there (some ads claim "perfect pixel", so they will check that this is not the case).

    • What's funny, is that it has the same 2560 pixel horizontal resolution as the Apple Cinema Display, with only 1080 pixels vertically, where the Apple has 1440. They are the same price.

      Apple is selling a display with 25% more pixels for the same price, and in an aspect ratio that's good for EDITING movies, rather than watching them. Well done, LG!

    • Wait until a flexible LCD is created - then you'll get tape monitors (6.3mm tall and 20m wide, wound on a reel).

  • Is this a real pixel aspect ratio, or a stupid artifact and trickery?

    I've seen "widescreen" monitors that take a 4:3 aspect ratio pixel count into a widescreen monitor (*cough* Dell *cough*).

    It's maybe useful for people who want to use their computer to watch movies, but as an actual computer monitor it was a complete joke. A circle drawn on screen was an oval, text was wide and flat. It was 'widescreen' only in the imaginations of marketing.

    Any time I look at a widescreen monitor now, I check the specs,

    • Well, that's easy to calculate given the specifications listed in the article.

      21/9 = 2.33
      2560/1080 = 2.37

      They're not perfectly square pixels, but close to it.

  • The word is "waistline". "Waste" is what comes out of one's ass, or the quality of text often used in Slashdot articles.
  • We don't need even more disproportionate aspect ratios. It's pointless. Even if we consider the field of vision the eye can see is closer to 2:1 rather than 1:1, consider the following:

    s - b - c - d - h
    e - 1 - 3 - 2 - y
    g - 7 - 5 - 9 - a
    o - 8 - 4 - 6 - k
    r - n - z - u - w

    Look at the central digit - 5, and try to determine the outer digits whilst staying focused on the "5". It gets progressively harder the further out you go.

    Now consider a widescreen monitor, and apply what we've learnt to that. Detail will resolve horizontally just fine, but vertically, there's a jarring loss of relative '

  • Similar to dual 4:3 monitors (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This wouldn't be so bad in a large enough screen size. A single 21:9 would be closer to the dual 4:3 monitor setup I used to have (at home and at work)... which gave me 8:3 ( 24:9 )

    I do not like the dual 16:9 setup I have at work now; it is ridiculously wide with very little vertical height. A single large 21:9 monitor would be much more useful than the 32:9 I get from dual 16:9 monitors. There is a lot of useless real estate with a dual 16:9 setup.

    • FWIW, some of my team members have a 16:9 and 4:3 setup, the 4:3 is handy for terminal sessions.

      Me, I manage somehow with all that sidespace. All this so everything can become an HDTV. Or is it that they can make screens wider for substantially less effort and incremental cost than both taller and wider?

  • Ok I can see when they went from 4:3 to 16:9, it created some issues, as a lot of software had that aspect ratio more or less fixed in. But in an age of screens with different resolutions, and resizable Windows is the new aspect ratio that big of a deal? I don't think so. Most new design is less about pixel location from top left but from the different spots. For the most part information is left aligned, right aligned, or centered. Data elements with more data than most screens can hold are often width

  • Reminds me of a decades old sketch. (Score:5, Funny)

    by aix tom ( 902140 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:22PM (#42263945)

    In a German comedy show (back in the 70s or early 80s) they presented an "ultra-wide-cimema-maxi-super-scope or something" format, where they presented a 100m dash run "in it's entirety" on screen from start to finish without panning or zooming. It was like about a 160:9 ratio. They apologized for the "slight black bars at the bottom and top" when presented on the 4:3 TV sets. Which was basically completely black with 2-3 scan lines lit in the middle.

  • Please use Golden Ratio.
    This is the best ratio, it is natural and beautiful.
    16:10

    • This is the best ratio, it is natural and beautiful.

      Because it has some intrinsic property that makes it so, or because everyone just believes that to be true?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gknoy ( 899301 )

        This is the best ratio, it is natural and beautiful.

        Because it has some intrinsic property that makes it so, or because everyone just believes that to be true?

        Given how prevalent it is in nature and human culture, there is probably a little of both. The wikipedia article on the Golden Ratio [wikipedia.org] notes several diverse places where it's appeared through history and nature. It is frequently associated with beauty and harmony, and there seems to be some indication that it correlates well with what we consider beautiful when looking at people.

        Pertinent to your question, the Wikipedia page does note that there seems to be some disagreement on whether we do indeed have a pr

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Metrol ( 147060 )

        This is the best ratio, it is natural and beautiful.

        Because it has some intrinsic property that makes it so, or because everyone just believes that to be true?

        Yes

      • the intrinsic property is its definition a+b:a = a:b

        that is harmonic for the same reason a sound is harmonic as opposed to white noise: the brain recognizes a pattern and gives itself a pat on the shoulder.

        • that is harmonic for the same reason a sound is harmonic

          If it was for the same reason as sound we'd all be most pleased by ratios of 2:1 or 3:2 (35mm photographs), wouldn't we? I don't see how the two sides of a rectangle, for example, can interfere with each other in the way sound waves can, producing a new waveform, which is what our ears pick up on - not a "pattern" per se.

  • Problem? (Score:3)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:46PM (#42264249)
    What's the problem with a display like this? If I wanted one of these, I'd just use it the way I use my current displays. Windows are windows... I just make them the size that I want. Why should I care what size/shape the monitor that I'm using is? I use different monitor setups at my different offices, sometimes one, sometimes two, some are widescreen, and some are closer to "fullscreen", and I don't see the difference.

  • Widescreen is good for TVs, not for monitors (Score:3)

    by JDG1980 ( 2438906 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:47PM (#42264263)

    But OS GUI designs need to catch up to the ever horizontally expanding waistline of our monitors.

    Or, alternatively, manufacturers and retailers need to stop trying to pass off tunerless TV sets as monitors.

    A wide aspect ratio is great for HDTV and feature films. But when you're trying to get work done on the desktop, 4:3 is still superior to the alternatives. Actually, for web browsing and word processing, a 16:9 monitor turned 90 degrees might work fairly well – but this is poorly supported with existing operating systems and it would break Windows ClearType, which is needed to get halfway decent looking text on today's low-DPI displays.

    This LG monitor isn't that terrible – it has a resolution of 2560x1080, which means you aren't losing any more vertical space than you would with a standard 1080p monitor. But 1080 vertical lines is about the minimum that is even somewhat acceptable. What frightens me is the prospect that we're going to wind up with 1792x768 or some such abomination becoming the standard on laptops. For some reason, vendors really seem to love those short-screen 768p displays, even though they don't match HDTV resolutions or any other known standard.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • 1920x1440, at about 27", would play HD video without scaling, with vertical space left over, and give me vertical space for coding, page layout, etc. And it'd be 4:3.

  • Now my TV will waste 2/3 of the screen watching older flicks. This is why I like my Projector in my basement.

  • "But OS GUI designs need to catch up to the ever horizontally expanding waistline of our monitors."

    Or manufacturers could stop assuming that the only thing we want to do with our computers is sit and watch movies.

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