On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 10:47:54AM -0400, Bryan Larsen wrote:
> P.S. I highly recommend 30" displays. It's like multi-head, but better.
I prefer to run multi-head Xinerama. I have three 1600x1200, which is
the equivalent of a single 49.5" diagonal monitor at 4800x1200 resolution:
2.4MB http://idallen.org/tmp/2006-11-20_01-36-01.jpg
228KB http://idallen.org/tmp/2006-11-20_01-36-01_small.jpg
The edges of big displays are too far from and not perpendicular to my
line of sight. I sit about 30" from the centre lines of all three of my
monitors, each of which faces me straight-on. Each screen is only 16"
wide - the far edges of all my monitors are 1 extra inch away. On a 30"
display (24" wide), sitting 30" away means the edges are about 2 1/3
inches farther away and are at an awkward angle.
Big displays require a fancy video card and connector. I run my
three displays on three old cards (should upgrade to DVI some day):
$ lspci | grep -e Dis -e VGA
0000:01:08.0 Display controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. MGA 2064W
[Millennium] (rev 01)
0000:01:0a.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage
II+ 215GTB [Mach64 GTB] (rev 9a)
0000:03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc.
G400/G450 (rev 85)
> 2) use black backgrounds. 30" of screen is a lot of light. Reduce
> your eye strain!
Why is a light background a strain? I read black-on-white on paper with
no problem. I do use a slightly off-white Eterm background and run my
Dell LCDs at only 15% brightness, though. The light background keeps
my pupils smaller than black, and that makes the print appear sharper.
> 3) Watch for sales: dell.ca often has some awesome one day sales. My
> brother bought his 3007WFP for $1200.
I got each of my Dell 2007FP for $400CDN and I've seen them for less. The
3007WFP is 30" diagonal and 2560x1600 (4MPixel). I have the equivalent
of a 49.5" diagonal and 4800x1200 (5.8MPixel) for the same $1200.
These Dells each have picture-in-picture; so, I can reserve a little corner
of my leftmost display for a composite-video image of the front door cam.
--
| Ian! D. Allen - idallen [ at ] idallen [ dot ] ca - Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
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