Apple’s launch of a specially configured iMac for schools not only consigns the eMac to history, but possibly also the cathode ray tube (CRT) with it. Apple has become the first major PC manufacturer to ditch CRT monitors for good, and other manufacturers may follow suit.
People don’t like CRT monitors because they are big, electricity-hungry and big. I say “big” twice for emphasis. Despite advances in product design, they were getting even bigger because people wanted more on-screen space, and every extra inch of screen adds even more depth to the tube.
My last-ever CRT purchase had to be unpacked outside in the rain because the box it was delivered in was too large to pass through the front door of the building. When it was finally replaced last year by an LCD equivalent, the office seemed a more spacious, friendlier and even brighter (confirmed with a light meter) place.
In return, I had to sacrifice resolution, dropping to 1600x1200. It’s not ideal for my work, but will have to do until someone starts selling affordable LCDs with resolutions upwards of 2048x1536. Unfortunately, I may have to wait a long time because of the current fad for widescreen displays.
I don’t want my screen to be wider, I want it to show me more stuff on-screen generally. Widescreen is great for watching movies, but quite pointless at work.
Ah, but widescreen lets you view two Word pages side by side, I am told. That would be splendid, except that the text is illegible if you try to squeeze two pages onto a widescreen LCD display. Call me weird, but practically all my business documents are A4. I know, it’s bizarre, isn’t it? In fact, I often rotate my display 90 degrees and use the Rotate function of the graphics card to let me edit documents in portrait orientation on a widescreen monitor.
It appears that many of these new widescreen displays achieve their additional horizontal pixels by a trade-off against the number of vertical pixels. So even if the monitor were a mile wide, I still wouldn’t get any more zoom out of my side-by-side pages. Worse, most widescreen LCDs can’t even be rotated any more; the bottom corner would probably hit the desk.
Surely my penchant for portrait pages is not an isolated quirk. Everything from a word processor document to a web page is almost invariably taller than it is wide. File lists, menus, inboxes… they all have to be scrolled vertically. Ever noticed how mice don’t have horizontal scroll wheels? We don’t want more width, we need depth.
I fear we won’t get it until monitor designers worry less about multimedia fads and start creating products to suit real-world computing.
