I'm sure most of us have salivated over the new ultra-wide 21:9 monitors that are out now - if not you're a stronger person than me! Anyway, after a year or more or research and waiting for the right combination of features at an acceptable price - I bought one.
As you can see in my sig it's the Acer XR382CQK. A whopping 37.5" wide with 3840x1600 resolution. Have no doubt - this thing is huge. I'm lucky that I have a large desk that I custom built to handle 3x24's side-by-side so this thing fit well. Although, due to the depth of the stand I had to set it to the left of center. It's a corner desk made in three pieces, long left and right wings and a smaller center section - works great when I have 5 computers set up at once!
For the sake of the discussion;
I've had this new monitor for about a month now. I put both 24"s away and closed the laptop lid for good. Both the laptop and the desktop are hooked up to it and I'm now using a single monitor.
Right away I started noticing the effect of how Plasma places new windows on the screen - seems rather random, but mostly in the upper-left corner. Too often I have to travel the mouse to the far left to retrieve a window and put it in front of me. Also I use the "Application Dashboard" rather than Launcher or Menu so it's now very w-i-d-e and can by a bit annoying to find what I'm looking for. In both these cases, the dual monitor setup worked better.
On the plus side, I can easily have three windows open and fully readable right in front of me and the picture is much brighter and clearer than on the older monitors. Also of course, the occasional game I play (mostly 0 A.D.) is wonderful to behold at 3840x1600
Due to the width of my setup (both previous and now), I place my taskbar on the right side of the screen and this works well in either configuration.
I would love to be able to have windows open in the center of the screen and if Application Dashboard could be configured to be contained in a central part of the screen, but these are not deal breakers for me. I was considering dual 27" 4K monitors for a bit, but that was an even more expensive option. Overall I'm happy as heck with the change.
If you're interested in the Acer monitor, you can look up the specs, but I can tell you out-of-the-box it looked awesome, the speakers are OK - not equal to my Bose, but not horrible. The IPS panel has the normal backlight bleed but it's way less than the Dell 24" I had and it turns itself off completely (no glow) when sleeping and the Dell didn't. The curve is noticable in a good way - not overdone. There's a set of downward facing LEDs that you can change the color (I like the blue myself) that work like a keyboard light - awesome. My only gripes are input switching requires several clicks of the monitor buttons vs. the Dell had a configurable one-touch input swap, and the USB ports are on the back-side of the monitor. The side or even top would have been a better location as they're kind of hard to reach - left hand under the monitor, twist the wrist to plug in towards you, and hope you have the thumb drive right-side up! I choose this one because of a native 75Hz refresh without the added $100-200 dollars that G-Sync adds to the price.
EDIT: One other gripe: The speakers have no direct connection and no independent control, only through the HDMI/DP ports so when you switch inputs the audio switches to the new source and you can't manually select and hold a specific audio source. I would have liked this so I could launch music on one computer and still hear it while using the others.
I paid $1200 on sale, no tax and free shipping. Half a paycheck, but I'm at it all day every day so worth every penny
The high- end LG's are $1700 and the low end, smaller (34" and lower res) are about $700.
As you can see in my sig it's the Acer XR382CQK. A whopping 37.5" wide with 3840x1600 resolution. Have no doubt - this thing is huge. I'm lucky that I have a large desk that I custom built to handle 3x24's side-by-side so this thing fit well. Although, due to the depth of the stand I had to set it to the left of center. It's a corner desk made in three pieces, long left and right wings and a smaller center section - works great when I have 5 computers set up at once!
For the sake of the discussion;
My basic criteria was: USB 3.0 hub, at least 2 inputs, good warranty and company reputation, curved, and in the middle of the price range for these devices. My desired upgrade was to have more real vertical height on-screen because I have multiple things going on all day (I work at home on two different computers or more) and my eyes are over 50 so a larger picture would be very helpful.
My previous setup had been triple screen HD 24" monitors hooked up to three computers. Through various input switching, the two laptops could share one or two of the monitors with my main desktop which could use all three. About six months ago, I was able to dump one of the laptops and about the same time, I damaged one of the 24s so I was down to 2x24's - an overall resolution of 3840x1080. The laptop also had an HD monitor so I still effectively had 3 monitors, but it's only 17.6" so harder to read. Historically, Iv'e been using dual monitors since I was able to pick up an extra Dell 19" 1280x1024 (4:3 ratio) for cheap over a decade ago.
My previous setup had been triple screen HD 24" monitors hooked up to three computers. Through various input switching, the two laptops could share one or two of the monitors with my main desktop which could use all three. About six months ago, I was able to dump one of the laptops and about the same time, I damaged one of the 24s so I was down to 2x24's - an overall resolution of 3840x1080. The laptop also had an HD monitor so I still effectively had 3 monitors, but it's only 17.6" so harder to read. Historically, Iv'e been using dual monitors since I was able to pick up an extra Dell 19" 1280x1024 (4:3 ratio) for cheap over a decade ago.
I've had this new monitor for about a month now. I put both 24"s away and closed the laptop lid for good. Both the laptop and the desktop are hooked up to it and I'm now using a single monitor.
Right away I started noticing the effect of how Plasma places new windows on the screen - seems rather random, but mostly in the upper-left corner. Too often I have to travel the mouse to the far left to retrieve a window and put it in front of me. Also I use the "Application Dashboard" rather than Launcher or Menu so it's now very w-i-d-e and can by a bit annoying to find what I'm looking for. In both these cases, the dual monitor setup worked better.
On the plus side, I can easily have three windows open and fully readable right in front of me and the picture is much brighter and clearer than on the older monitors. Also of course, the occasional game I play (mostly 0 A.D.) is wonderful to behold at 3840x1600
Due to the width of my setup (both previous and now), I place my taskbar on the right side of the screen and this works well in either configuration.
I would love to be able to have windows open in the center of the screen and if Application Dashboard could be configured to be contained in a central part of the screen, but these are not deal breakers for me. I was considering dual 27" 4K monitors for a bit, but that was an even more expensive option. Overall I'm happy as heck with the change.
If you're interested in the Acer monitor, you can look up the specs, but I can tell you out-of-the-box it looked awesome, the speakers are OK - not equal to my Bose, but not horrible. The IPS panel has the normal backlight bleed but it's way less than the Dell 24" I had and it turns itself off completely (no glow) when sleeping and the Dell didn't. The curve is noticable in a good way - not overdone. There's a set of downward facing LEDs that you can change the color (I like the blue myself) that work like a keyboard light - awesome. My only gripes are input switching requires several clicks of the monitor buttons vs. the Dell had a configurable one-touch input swap, and the USB ports are on the back-side of the monitor. The side or even top would have been a better location as they're kind of hard to reach - left hand under the monitor, twist the wrist to plug in towards you, and hope you have the thumb drive right-side up! I choose this one because of a native 75Hz refresh without the added $100-200 dollars that G-Sync adds to the price.
EDIT: One other gripe: The speakers have no direct connection and no independent control, only through the HDMI/DP ports so when you switch inputs the audio switches to the new source and you can't manually select and hold a specific audio source. I would have liked this so I could launch music on one computer and still hear it while using the others.
I paid $1200 on sale, no tax and free shipping. Half a paycheck, but I'm at it all day every day so worth every penny
The high- end LG's are $1700 and the low end, smaller (34" and lower res) are about $700.
and check out the keyboard in that video too ... it's a riot of color!
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