What is the ideal monitor size?
I know, it varies. Everybody has their own needs and desires. But I have been thinking on the whole monitor thing lately.
A few years back I ended up with a Dell U3415W 34″ 3440×1440 resolution monitor, one of the curved variety, from work because IT didn’t want them around anymore. They had standardized on a specific, smaller monitor, so when I was laid off in late 2021 they did not ask for it back. So it has been on my desk for a few years now.
This is pretty much my setup still, though I took the Blue Snowball mic off of its tripod
That monitor gives me a lot more desktop area to work in, which can be great when I have Excel or PowerBI open or am playing a game that really supports that much screen real estate.
The downside is that a lot of games do not support that much screen real estate. You may have heard me bemoan the fact that Lord of the Rings Online is effectively unplayable for me.
And even titles that do go full screen well are not always ideal. In EVE Online for example, even the maximum text size is a bit tiny for my aging vision, while in World of Warcraft, the physical space between my health bars in the upper left corner and other areas I need to keep an eye on is such that it falls out of my focus and into the blur of my far peripheral vision, so I tend to die more often due to simply not seeing my health bar decline. I had to turn on the red pulse option just to keep me aware.
Even in The Elder Scrolls Online, which keeps its UI minimal and boosts the size of NPC dialog with the monitor size… it is very good on the large screen, which is probably a side effect of console support… the text chat window, while it lets you boost the font size, is fixed in dimension so you cannot scale the whole thing up for an appropriate line length. A tiny complaint, but there it is.
So while I love wider vistas that the big screen offers, it is not without its price.
This came into special focus with the new computer because, as part of the setup I hooked it up to my old monitor in the other room, a 24″ Dell U2412M with a resolution of 1920×1200. While working on setting up the new rig and copying files, I was reminded as to how nice that monitor was, even if it is nearly 20 years old at this point. Everything was nice and big and easy to read.
The old monitor on the same table back in 2007
But, of course, you simply do not get as much stuff on screen due to the size limitation.
So I started wondering if there might be some middle ground when it comes to monitors, something between the bright, easy to read 24″ monitor and its 34″ cousin that can display all the things.
I decided that the critical metric was probably something along the lines of how many pixels per inch each displayed. That calculated out as (using this tool):
- 24″ 1920×1200 – 94 pixels per inch
- 34″ 3440×1440 – 110 pixels per inch
From that I figured there must be some happy medium between, some monitor that was higher resolution, perhaps in the 27-30 inch range, that maybe had a pixel per inch count around 100. Would that compromise get me something that put more data on the screen with better readability?
I may never know, because it appears that the gap between about 90 pixels and around 110 pixels per inch is empty. Why is it empty? Because of televisions I think. I’ve been back to look at screen resolutions as part of the hardware survey data Steam shares. Here is a grab from the January 2023 post I did. (January 2024 post if you want the delta, though I didn’t take a screen shot.)
Steam Users Screen Resolutions
1920×1080 dominates because that is the standard HD television resolution, 1080p. That resolution is produced in such quantity that the screens are cheap and ubiquitous. You can have two or three HD screens for the price of almost any higher resolution.
The larger resolution screens are more expensive, though maybe not as pricey as you might expect, in part because they represent some of the higher resolution options for television. 4K isn’t a monitor standard, it is a videophile standard. We just get that for our computers because they were already making them for TVs.
And for viewing video, higher pixel density is preferred. If you’re going to bother exceeding HD resolutions, there is no point in going a little bit beyond. You should push to into as many more pixels per inch as you can. Why do 100 pixels per inch when 110 isn’t that big of a stretch.
Basically, after looking around for a bit, I did find one resolution that landed in the 100 pixel per inch zone, which was 29-30 inch 2560×1080 units. Those are actually not that expensive either, running less than double a typical 24″ 1920×1080 monitor. This is likely because they are just wider 1080p screens, so benefit from commonality of production.
But I am not entirely sold on the wide screen thing either. I’m honestly more interested in a 16:10 ratio monitor, which is what my old 1920×1200 was, rather than the 21:9 ratio which that and my current monitor represent.
I suppose the ideal would be a 30″ 2560×1440 unit, which would be about 98 pixels per inch. And you can find monitors in that size, though selection is pretty limited. That means they are also about double the price of the 30″ 2560×1080 units. Do I want to drop $500 on something that MIGHT be better, based entirely on my untested operating hypothesis?
If I go down to 27″ or so, the price drops in half, but then we’re back up to the same pixel density of my current 34″.
If this were 2015 or so I would go to Fry’s or Best Buy to see some of the options in person. But here in the post-pandemic era, being able to shop at a physical storefront for anything besides luxury goods or groceries can be a chore.
Maybe I have built this up in my mind beyond its importance? And maybe there are other dynamics with current monitors that I ought to pay attention to. I see that refresh rates have gone beyond the standard 60Hz default of years ago. All the monitors we have, and we have a few, are at least a decade old. And there are other factors to consider I imagine.
Anyway, I am not in a hurry to spend money on this. I am in the collecting data portion of the journey.
All I know is that I can no longer go back to my old 1920×1200 monitor because, after five years of nudging, I finally got my wife to use that monitor. She finally upgraded from the 17″ 1280×1024 ViewSonic unit she inherited from me probably more than 20 years ago. She seems happy with the bigger screen. It is just me that is always discontented with the status quo.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 