| Twenty-four inch widescreen. These four words should bring utter exhilaration and uber-tech-geek elation. But for the past few days, they've brought me nothing but dissatisfaction and a desire for a downgrade. I've been using one of these things as my PC monitor for a couple days, and I have only one thing so say: It's too big. It's so big that I installed Google Desktop and expanded the sidebar to fill up 25% of the screen. It's so big that I moved the monitor to the right so that I only have to focus on the left 75% of the screen. It's a completely unusable amount of space. My eyes can't see that much information at once. My brain can't process it. I actually have to move my head to see two opposite ends of the monitor. It's ridiculous. And once again, I'm confronted with the question of "Why?". Why do people like widescreen? Why is this format in use? Ok, I understand its use in TV and movies, but why computers? I don't watch movies on my computer. I read websites. I write things. I play with engineering tools like Excel and Matlab. I don't need 20.5 inches of horizontal viewing space. Nor do I need 12.75 inches in the vertical. I'm very tempted to go back to my "old" 19-incher. It offered me plenty of space and never felt too big to comprehend. Like most technologies, I thought, "19 inches? Who would ever need anything bigger than 19 inches?" They tried to pursuade me, "You don't know what you're missing." Oh, how they were wrong. #technology |