Ultra wide monitor

A couple of months (after at least half a year of thinking) I finally decided to do it. I decided to buy a Ultra wide screen for my home office. The one I had been looking at for months is the Samsung Odyssey G9 C49G95. It happens to be the opposite of cheap. Part of the triggering factor was a conversation on IRC in #nixos-chat where a person admitted that she had one of those. Then the real trigger to buy it was to find it at 23% discount. It was a return item to a store.

Here are some sketches l've made of how big and wide this monster really is.

Drawn sketch of the monitor size

Figure 1: Drawn sketch of the monitor size

Drawing in full resolution

It truly have been a boost in productivity, much more that I expected.

For a long time l've been of the opinion that the perfect size and resolution of a desktop monitor is 27" at a QHD¹ resolution. This gives me a size of things that is easy for me to read without the need to scale my desktop.

A QHD resolution also gives 33% more space to use as a workspace (compared to FHD²). QFHD³ doesn't really work for me without scaling, otherwise everything becomes too small. To make QFHD work would have to scale it down to 1.5 to get about QHD. This can sometimes be hard to get it right and look good. So a scaling of 2 is more natural. Then I lost my extra space just to get better looking fonts.

Given time I've realized that I don't really need the extra 33% width that QHD gives me over FHD. I have more use for the extra 33% height. It's even rare that I need the full FHD width.

So why go ultra wide?

This ultra wide monitor has the size of two 27" QHD displays in one panel. This gives me the insane resolution of 5120×1440. It still gives me the extra 33% height compared to FHD. Then I have the extra width without a bezel, 5120px / 3 = 1706px, 1706px is slightly less than the width of FHD. This means the width is plenty enough to run three applications side by side without feeling cramped. Try to do that on 2 separate QHD monitors.

This makes this single monitor be as useful as three QHD monitors side by side - but in one display. Despite being huge, it saves space.

This monitor: 10/10 - would pay full price.

Footnotes:

QHD is the resolution 2560×1440, think 4 times 720p in a grid. This is sometimes called 2k since it's less than 4k and more than 2000 pixels wide. But it's much more fair to call this 2.5k and reserve 2k for FHD.

FHD is the resolution 1920×1080, also known as 1080p. This could be called 2k since it's half the width of 4k.

QFHD is the resolution 3840×2160, think 4 times FHD in a grid. This is also known as 4k because the width is almost 4000 pixels.