At my new job I was given a pair of 22" monitors. As at the prior job, I set one up in portrait mode to make it easier to view documents, code, web pages, etc -- you know, the things that have a taller narrower orientation naturally, compared to things like spreadsheets, Outlook, and assorted other things that really want to be wider (landscape). But there's some difference between the old and new setups, because even though I think the monitors were the same size, at the new job the portrait monitor is not quite wide enough. (Maybe I'm using slightly larger fonts. Maybe that's because of lighting, or something in Windows 7 vs XP, or who knows what?) So that was no good.

The "miss" is just small enough that if I could get a monitor with 16:10 aspect ratio instead of 16:9, that would be good enough. We identified a 24" 16:10 monitor (so also slightly bigger, which would help), but it's no longer available. So, my manager asked, would I accept this 30" 16:10 monitor instead? Um, sure. :-) (It's not actually a no-brainer; a coworker is experimenting with a 40" monitor and that's too big for me to see everywhere on it without moving around a lot. He said he has a little trouble with that too, but not as much and he's motivated because look at all the code you can fit on that!)

It arrived today. It turns out that, between the larger size and the 16:10-ness, I can use it in landscape orientation and still see enough code/documentation/web page/etc for that not to be an impediment. (We made sure the one we got could be rotated, just in case.) It's nice to be able to make a browser window wide enough for today's obnoxiously-wide site designs, and while there's a little adjustment (I sometimes have to move a bit for stuff near the edges), I'm really liking this "single larger screen" approach compared to "two smaller ones that individually don't work as well and together are kind of eh".

I've kept one of the others, set up in portrait mode. It sits off to the side to hold random stuff like IM windows, console logs that need to be available but not necessarily read closely, and stuff like that. Yes, I've just relegated a 22" monitor to "random detritus". :-)