I’ve been running multi-monitor setups for a long time. While many people consider them just a showoff piece, they change their mind real quick once they have a chance to see how much their productivity increases with a dual setup. Today, for no good reason, I decided to fool around with my widescreen LCDs.
When most people think of a dual setup, they think of the above photo. This is the standard way to set up two monitors. However, LCDs have the ability to rotate and if you have a video card that supports this feature you can create a dual “tall screen” setup.
The tall screen is great for reading WebPages because in most cases you don’t have to scroll at all. The setup was able to display the entire navigation menu on my blog without scrolling. The setup is also great for MS Words. However, this setup does have a few drawbacks.
The first problem with a tall screen setup is my messed up wallpaper – they’ve been squished and look like a cartoon. The second, and more serious problem, is this setup can’t play games because no game support this type of resolution.
It takes awhile to get use to this type of setup because it’s not natural. When it comes to viewing images, people prefer wide to tall. This is because our eyes are position side by side to each other so a wide screen setup is more natural. If our eyes were position one on top of the other, than a tall setup would feel more natural. After living with the tall screen setup for a few hours I decided I just couldn’t get use to it and went back to the dual widescreen.
The tall screen would work if I get one or two more LCDs to turn it into a very wide and tall setup. Hmm, I wonder when Dell is having another sale on their LCD displays.