Monitors 17/19" Square Monitor vs. 22/23" Rectangular Monitor

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eternoMind

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The comparison was arrived at between the two kinds of monitors simply because of a couple of factors.

1) Price - they are almost priced the same give or take a few hundred bucks.
2) Availability - the monitor needs to be sourced today or tomorrow which rules out buying online. Local availability of square monitors is a problem according to my regular dealer.

A lawyer friend needs it and as you can guess, working with documents will top the usage bar. Additional work will involve web browsing, email and the likes. So you can say that 95% of the times, the monitor will be displaying documents (A4 and legal sizes, not sure if i needed to mention that).

Based on these facts, which one should I recommend him? He does have a separate 32" TV but watching HD movies (biggest plus point of 16:9 displays) is not his cuppa anyways!

I realize that the 16:9 aspect ratio ceases to make a difference after a certain monitor size as far as document viewing are concerned.
Question is, do 22-23 inchers fit this criteria? Do square monitors still have a clear advantage compared to widescreen ones?

His PC btw, is a an Athlon X2 II 7750+M2N68+2GB RAM combo with onboard graphics.
 
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For the same screen size, a square monitor will be better for A4 documents than a widescreen one.

But, since you have to choose between a 19" square vs 22" rectangular monitor, I'd say go with the rectangular one as it will offset the form factor with its larger screen size.
 
Shubham1401 said:
For the same screen size, a square monitor will be better for A4 documents than a widescreen one.

But, since you have to choose between a 19" square vs 22" rectangular monitor, I'd say go with the rectangular one as it will offset the form factor with its larger screen size.
Click to expand...

The first part you've said is true!
It's the second part of which I am not sure about. Furthermore, rarely will my friend ever need to work on documents displayed side-by-side. The display will also almost never be used for anything except document work.

indy1811 said:
You can also read two documents side by side comfortably on a larger widescreen monitor.
Click to expand...

This situation/need will almost certainly never arise!

Quotes given to me by local dealer for Dell E1713S 17 inch - 6.9K and Dell E1913S 19 inch - 8K. Also, warranty is indeed 3 years onsite.

@Crazy_Eddy , @vivek.krishnan, @6pack your thoughts!
 
^ I got my dad the older Dell E190S for pretty much the same reason - document viewing/website browsing. He was briefly using my widescreen 2007WFP and would get bugged whenever MS Word would automatically line up pages side by side :p Websites are still optimised for the 1280 x 1024 res. In terms of area, the square panels are actually kinda larger, so with that res the pixel pitch tends to be a little larger. In my case it worked out favourably since older people prefer larger looking fonts and scaling up looked a little weird (on XP; Win7 seems to do a better job). You could also take widescreen monitors and rotate it into portrait mode, but it felt weird for me.

The only real downside is that there are no IPS panels available in the square form factor, although the E190s is nowhere as bad as the laptop TN screens.
 
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@Crazy_Eddy thanks for your inputs. Convinced my friend to go for a square monitor and we bought the 17 incher from Dell for 6.9K. The retailer was willing to sell the 19 incher for 7.8K (slightly older stock) but friend decided that 17 was enough.

And expectations from our side were certainly reasonable and although it is certainly no IPS, the intended usage renders that fact non-consequential.
 
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