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[Tim May]

On Tuesday, August 7, 2001, at 12:10 PM, Harmon Seaver wrote:

> Tim May wrote:
>
>> My friends and I have been joking for a while about how we'll need to
>> buy 22-inch LCD monitors, like the Apple Cinema Display, just to be 
>> able
>> to see content that isn't advertising.
>
>         You mean you don't have a 21" monitor already? I was wondering 
> at
> what resolution you had your screen set to, with "one third" and "one
> third", etc.  You might find the whole web experience to be at bit 
> better
> with at least 1024 resolution. I'm using 1152 on a 19" monitor, and the 
> pop
> ups don't take up all that much screen space.

I'm quite happy with my monitor. It's a 15.1-inch LCD, 1024 x 768. It 
tilts, raises effortless on its pedestal, swivels, and the text is of 
course super-crisp. I would never go back to a CRT!

In my experience, it takes a 21-inch CRT to equal the subjective 
experience of  today's 15-17-inch LCDs. (An LCD monitor is brighter and 
has a wider viewing angle than laptop LCDs have, due to placement and 
number of fluorescent light sources.)

I expect to get the 17- or 18-inch LCD in my next major upgrade cycle. 
1280 x 1024. (It is possible to go even higher, even on these sizes of 
LCDs. A friend of mine has one of the SGI LCDs. Around 16 inches, 
running something like 1600 x 1200. Too hard to read, even with good 
glasses. The gorgeous Apple Cinema Display runs at 1600 x 1024.)

Interestingly, about 15-20 years ago there was much talk of the "3M" 
machine: a megapixel display, a megabyte of memory, and a million 
instructions per second. We have obviously gone up by 100x or more in 
memory (I have 576 MB in the machine I'm using now, and 320 MB on my 
laptop) and in processing power (billions of instructions per second, 
even billions of floating point operations).

But monitor size has remained at roughly the same level for years, 
though prices have dropped.

--Tim May