[Closed] Wide Screen monitors

I have a 4k screen in 28". I can get 4 apps on it each with the same screen real-estate as full screen on a normal HD monitor. But then I do have the display scaling set quite small although not the minimum.

Ultrawide is brilliant, I use one as my main monitor, mostly for working - yes you can have 2 windows wide by side and it's effectively nearly as big as 2 screens. I have a 34" 3440x1440.

Ultrawide all the way.

Was previously using 2x 28" 4K dell monitor which produces simply a stunning image. When I had to lend my wife the second one and go down to a single monitor, thats when I noticed that I couldn't run apps side by side as I used to and opted for a Dell ultrawide. I dithered on the purchase as I was skeptical on whether ultrawides would work as well as a 4k monitor, but they are brilliant.

I've got a Dell 38", which is brilliant.

I have a Philips 328E - 32" curved and it's like 4 small laptop screens

Great for looking at many things at once although sometimes I look like a nodding dog on Zoom/Teams/Skype calls when I'm looking at different windows across the vast expanse of screen

It really depends what you mean by:

Probably middle-of-the-road price wise.

To me, that’d be a nice 34” curved in the 5-700 price range. 38 if you can stretch a bit, or 4k@32” is reasonable on windows at 125%.

Depending on laptop, if it’s modern and does USBC power then most of the high end dells/ LG do usbc-PD so only one cable to the laptop for power and display.

I'd say the opposite. 2 largish widescreens are much more preferable to me than a single ultrawide. I run a pair of 27" 4k monitors plus a mbp retina screen for over 10,000 pixels of width

The electriQ 34" 3440x1440 you can get for £290 is pretty reasonable, I have one and it's good for office use. Not great for gaming though because it suffers from freesync flicker at low refresh rates.

Ive used a ultra wide curved screen for the last twelve months at work. Ive just gone back to two seperate screens and find it much easier to work on.
One screen is less clutter cable wise. Then it depends on how you work. I tend to have multiple apps open all the time, so leaving them full screen on a monitor and flicking back and forth is easier than trying to manage them in a split screen setup. Obviously the ultrawide is great is you work with just two apps or really big spreadsheets.

I’d say the opposite. 2 largish widescreens are much more preferable to me than a single ultrawide. I run a pair of 27″ 4k monitors plus a mbp retina screen for over 10,000 pixels of width

Oh I don't only have the UW, that would just be foolish 😀 Alongside my 34" UW I have a secondary 1080p 23", and when working a 15" 4k laptop (laptop is running separately to the other 2 screens which are connected to my desktop pc).

I'd need 3 main screens to get the same working area as I do with an UW and a regular 23" monitor. At the moment I have all work stuff on the UW, then personal stuff/STW on the 23", and the laptop is used for work phone calls/teams meetings etc.

Ultrawide main screen is great, both for work and gaming. It works well for stuff like working from 2 spreadsheets side by side or viewing multiple pages of a document. Having at least 1 large monitor is better than the 2 small ones I had in the office, though I do still use additional monitors with it (laptop screen for work, 2 side monitors on my home PC) as they make it easier to arrange windows.

Mine's a 34" LG at 2560x1080, not sure of the model number. I wouldn't recommend the specific monitor if colour accuracy is important to your work but as a format I like it.

I got an Ultrawide screen recently and its great. I went with the Samsung LS34J550WQUXEN (rolls off the tongue) 34" Ultra-Wide 21:9 screen. It was £346.98n from EBuyer. I'd recommend it, though, as much as I've poo-poo'd curved screens in the past I think a curved screen might work better. Unless the screen is a long way from you then you get the sensation the edges of the screen is curving away from you. Its an odd feeling. Thankfully you do get used to it, but If I were buying again I'd go curved.

It really depends what you mean by:

Probably middle-of-the-road price wise.

Probably £3-400 which i imagine is actually low end in reality but not £200 🙂

We supplied a 49" Ultra-Wide last year, it was a magnificent looking thing, but you need a real "captain of industry" sized desk for it. I think Trade it was £800+ VAT although they're cheaper now.

Clever bit of kit, whilst it's one big screen, you can config it to act like 3 (possibly more) virtual screens so you can maximise windows without it actually making them 2m wide or whatever it is.

It was a silly bit of over-kill really, but if you've got the money, there's nothing wrong with a silly bit of over-kill.

Are there any issues with an Ultrawide when screen-sharing over Teams? I'd imagine everyone else will see a narrow letter-box of your screen?

Do you need to share a specific app instead, and then shape that window to roughly conventional monitor aspect ratio.... ?

With Teams/Zoom/etc, always just share a specific application anyway.

Ha, yes it's certainly safer. But I find it useful to share the whole screen quite often when collaboratively working on something across different applications. I've only come unstuck once so far (that's jinxed it..)

Some people can have issues seeing stuff if they're viewing your screen on a small laptop screen but that's a high res issue, not an UW specific issue.

And it's a them problem, not a you problem 😁

I've currently got two idential HP 24" monitors side by side each running at 1920x1080.

Am thinking I might get two 27" and move up a resolution (assuming my laptop can handle it). I assume the next step up is 2560×1440 (keeping the same aspect ratio). Wonder if that's too small on a 27"?

I normally use 34" UW screen, with laptop closed and separate keyboard/trackpad.

When needing to share multiple window/apps in zoom, then I open up the laptop and use it as a secondary display. Can drag in/out stuff to share which is much quicker than switching apps in zoom (e.g. between browser/terminal/IDE), plus appears at a reasonable size for other users.

Have to be careful that video is off when the laptop's camera is uncovered...

I'd echo what others have said. I'm using a 34" 3440x1440p display. I'd find it hard to go back to a smaller screen now I think. For most things, I have two windows side-by-side. Occasionally three-up. Sometimes just one huge window. For that reason, I don't think 2x27" 1440p screens would be as versatile (despite more pixels).

My screen's an LG with a USB-C connection so it's also got a built-in USB hub so automatically connect my keyboard / mouse / backup hard drives which is really cool. One cable turns the MBP into a proper desktop. Worth paying a bit more for that functionality IMHO.

When needing to share multiple window/apps in zoom, then I open up the laptop and use it as a secondary display.

This is indeed a good way to do it. Sharing an ultrawide screen seems like a bit of an unnecessary flex and might annoy other people, and as suggested everything will look tiny on a laptop screen. If I have a fullscreen PowerPoint presentation, for example, I'll see black bars to either side (no big deal, I have loooooads of space!), which means that when I share my screen other users (with a normal aspect ratio screen) will have the PPT in a box in the middle of the screen surrounded by black.

2560×1440 (keeping the same aspect ratio). Wonder if that’s too small on a 27″?

No I don't think so. 27" with a 16x9 or 16x10 ('normal') aspect ratio is very similar vertical height and the same amount of vertical pixels to a 34" ultrawide 3440x1440. Even at that pixel density, coming from my MacBook Pro (13") the loss of pixel density is very noticeable (the MBP's 'Retina' display "looks like 1440x900" but in fact is 2880x1800, whereas the larger screen is 1:1). I would think the next step down (1080p) would be pretty awful for productivity (where you want the maximum usable space for apps). In an ideal world, I'd like a 5k ultrawide, but they're too expensive for me.

With Teams/Zoom/etc, always just share a specific application anyway.

webex on a mac struggles as the bar along the top of the screen is 'part of the application' so shares your whole screen anyway. I bump my res down or zoom the work to avoid this

2560×1440 (keeping the same aspect ratio). Wonder if that’s too small on a 27″?

I'm running 3840 x 2160 on my 27" monitors, I have chrome zoomed to 125% and its fine. I'd say you can go bigger if you want.

A good point made by the multi-monitor people is about window management. If you can't or don't want to manage windows, UW isn't for you.

When I was in a mixed office where folk had a choice of 2x27 or 1x34/38 that was the main difference I observed. People on pairs of monitors tended to have _less_ open despite in theory more space, as they'd waste it a lot more either maximising or just snapping to half a screen.

If you're on a dell or LG, they have management software to split monitors into zones so you can snap windows to pre-arranged sizes/patterns (dell's software is better).

If you do a lot in a terminal, tmux with a 8x2 grid of panes on a 38UW is a thing of beauty.

I’ve got a non-widescreen 40” Philips and use Divvy to setup the windows on my MBP. Works a treat.

I got a cheap LG ultra wide for working at home last year, use it in conjunction with my laptop. I really like it as I have it setup with a 2/3 and 1/3 split using Microsoft Powertoys, allows you to snap windows to the zones.

As others have said good for spreadsheets but I really like it for project plans.

If sharing something on teams I just use the laptop screen and drag windows onto it as required.

Did have the laptop hooked up to the 4k TV in the lounge once. That was quite nice and I may look at one when it comes to replacement time.

I really like it for project plans.

Once you experience 38" of Gantt chart you can't go back 😉

Im just using the tv, 42" sony.
Spent a long time finding the right tv with the best refresh rate that can cope with fast moving imagery for my gaming. I cant remember the exact model but its got the best rate of all available, but still only cost 500.
But even this is proving too be a bit small now,given the size of the front room and im hoping to find maybe 65".- if anyone has a recommendation on that. TV, movies are standard viewing but its when gaming that the tv needs to shine, a bit like a high end gaming computer- runs everything else easily, but for gaming you need certain things to be the best they can be and some monitors and tv's are best geared to those.

Further away is better because didnt your mother ever tell you sitting too close, which you do with a computer screen is bad for your eyes 😉

thanks all

widescreen is ordered!

Am thinking I might get two 27″ and move up a resolution (assuming my laptop can handle it). I assume the next step up is 2560×1440 (keeping the same aspect ratio). Wonder if that’s too small on a 27″?

Works well IME, on one of my work PCs I have a 27" 2560x1440 and a 27" 1920x1080, prefer doing most things on the higher res monitor (the other one is mostly just for an RDP session or having a second doc up if I'm cut and pasting etc.).

I did a bit of calculation on screen real estate vs resolution vs the amount of zoom I need to read things vs viewing distance vs aspect ratio.

The optimum for me was equivalent to running 2560x1440 on a 32in-28in 16:9 depending on viewing distance. That is a 4k at 150%.

The relatively common 34in superwide 3440x1440 offer an almost equivalent coverage at 125% zoom.

Things I didn't realise were important:
1. A properly adjustable stand - height being the biggie. Fancy monitor propped up on books is just silly.
2. A joystick controller (not touch sensitive buttons) - but I'm switching between multiple laptops attached to it
3. IPS doesn't do black; VA doesn't do gaming; TN doesn't do viewing angles; Curved useless for design; HDR is mostly fake/irrelevant

I had 2x 24" HP 1920x1080 screens when lockdown 1 started, my wife stole 1 of them as she started working from home, then the other........

Picked up a couple of 27" HP 2560x1440 screens which are not ultra wide but are lovely. My work laptop will only run 1 at native resolution so I sent 1 back as they looked blocky at 1980x1080.

The monitor is lovely and high res but make sure your computer can push the pixels.

Only real issue is on video calls when you have to zoom in on spread sheets for those stuck using 13" laptops as the text is to small on their end.