Advantages of Dual Widescreen Monitors In Portrait Orientation

Image of typical portrait display distortion via Wikipedia

For a few weeks now I have been using two Dell 24" 2209WA panels in portrait mode. These panels are unique in that they are both cheap (about $220 each) and use IPS technology, which means they can be used in portrait mode without terrible, awful view-angle distortion.

One of the major benefits to portrait mode is the increased vertical viewing area for websites. Very few websites are wider than 1050 pixels, but many are very tall.

Furthermore, since Firebug attaches itself to the bottom of the browser window by default, it is much more comfortable to view Firebug and a website at the same time in this orientation.

1050 pixels is wide enough for two 80-column text files side by side, with some extra for line numbering. Vertically I get about 147 lines, although this is really more than is necessary for context when programming so I tend to use some space at the top of the screen for other terminals. Since I often need more than 80 columns in my terminals, this setup works better than trying to put a terminal beside a double-columned vim session in the landscape orientation.

Another advantage to using two medium-sized panels instead of one large panel is that you can turn one half off to save power when you don't need it.

A few problems: Vista and XP do not support ClearType in this orientation. I believe Windows 7 does. Linux does.

NVIDIA's Linux driver seems to have some trouble with rotated displays: there is tearing that is not present when the displays are not rotated. This is probably fixable, but it's not that distracting.