[psurfer]

Surely some adventurous happy 20" CD owner (or daredevel 23" thrill-seeker) must have wondered about using all those pixels Vertically once in a while... Anybody tip it on end for the world's most kick-ass Portrait monitor?

Any contrarian opinion out there why that shouldn't be done (aside from issues of obtaining a secure method of balancing the display to avoid tossing $2000 monitor off the desk)?

[ericwass]

I was just thinking about it today. But I wasn't about to experiment with my spankin' new 23"er. How would you get the mac to draw everything at 90 degrees?

[Judge_Fire]

The major reason cited for the new flat panel iMacs not having a 90° swiwel feature was the inability of current graphics cards to support the needed screen sizes.

There's a software hack to rotate the screen to arbitrary angle, but it doesn't scale to screen and it sucked the CPU dry.

Couldn't find it tho, sorry.

Much of what I do is portrait rather than widescreen, so I'd love this feature

J

[psurfer]

I was assuming that portrait mode would probably be limited to use in apps like Photoshop or Illustrator, that allow you to rotate an image. -Wouldn't that function make the vert image fill the screen (and correctly orient text)?

[spiky_dog]

my suggestion: get two 17" lcds (with their oversquare aspect ratio), build a stand for the second so that it is above the first, then use displays to set up the virtual configuration to match the physical. voila: insant tall display.

[Judge_Fire]

Originally posted by psurfer:
I was assuming that portrait mode would probably be limited to use in apps like Photoshop or Illustrator, that allow you to rotate an image. -Wouldn't that function make the vert image fill the screen (and correctly orient text)?

Most of the photos I take are portrait by default, web pages I read tend to be long rather than wide, as are PDF and DOC files.

MacNN forums are definitely portrait mode stuff

Landscape mode is great for viewing several documents or pages side by side, but a lot of the text based media I read would benefit from the extra pixels in portrait mode.

I've played with a 'pivot' display by ViewSonic not too long ago and it was sweet. It might have been one of these:

http://www.viewsonic.com/products/lcd_vg175.htm

It says it works with a Mac, so I'm not quite sure why you couldn't somehow trick an Apple LCD to do it, too.

J

[robby818]

my school has viewsonic lcds that can pivot. I noticed that the viewing angle is much narrower when the lcd is in the vertical position. once you pivot it you cannot move your head too far off from center. these are older 15" displays but i believe it is an inherent issue with LCDs in general.

[psurfer]

I wouldn't expect to (easily) have everything correctly oriented in portrait mode w/out some serious hacking, but for Photoshop images which we Know can be turned vert or horiz, the long cinema displays look like a natural.

Come on, CD users - I read a long list here the other day of proud new owners. You mean to tell me not one has an image they want to view that won't fit those height-challenged widescreen ratios?- Stand up your monitor on it's end and show us what you got!

[Sven G]

As Portrait, the makers of the Pivot software which used to work in Mac OS 9, have officially ceased development for Mac OS X, there could be some opportunity for Apple, third parties, and even open source developers to make a new version: the best thing, of course, would be to have pivoting support directly integrated into OS X - maybe if the Apple tablet comes out...

[hadocon]

Originally posted by spiky_dog:
my suggestion: get two 17" lcds (with their oversquare aspect ratio), build a stand for the second so that it is above the first, then use displays to set up the virtual configuration to match the physical. voila: insant tall display.

I have tried this (with a 15" displays) and it is a no go. For some stupid reason OS X does not like this configuration and although it works, many apps windows automatically snap back to the top monitor and resize to fill only one screen.