I tried to replace my triple monitors with one giant screen. I failed

Pixels aren’t the whole picture

To explain why this didn’t work for me, I need to talk about my normal setup. After 20 years using triple monitors, I’m kind of an addict. For the last five years I’ve used a 34-inch, 1440p ultrawide as my primary central monitor, and two 27-inch 1440p monitors on either side. I generally have a focused writing window on the primary left, a relevant source on the primary right. On my right monitor is Slack for talking to my coworkers, plus a social media feed. On my left is a secondary source or a video window, and smaller tools, like my standing timer. 

All of this is flexible and variable, of course. Things move around as necessary. And my setup when I’m gaming looks much different. But in general, I have a lot of information spread around in a horizontal line, with highly categorized zones. It usually looks something like this, and indeed, looks pretty close to that as I’m writing now.

Michael Crider/Foundry

Switching to the Alienware with the same desktop PC for a week, I knew I’d need to make an adjustment. A little napkin math says that 5120×2160 pixels is approximately the same amount of digital space as a QHD-QHD ultrawide-QHD array, 11.06 million pixels versus 12.3 million. But despite having roughly equivalent pixels, it’s narrower and taller. So in order to match my usual far more horizontal setup I’d need to do some rearranging. That should be possible, in absolute terms. And it was. 

But that screen is also smaller in absolute terms — the pixel density of 5K2K at 39 inches is 142 pixels per inch, versus about 110 ppi for my monitors. As I said in my triple-monitor newsletter, density is extremely important for user comfort, and you need to find a size for windows and text that work for you. I couldn’t make it work on the Alienware, at least not in my usual setup. I had to take things down to just one central, primary workspace, with two narrower zones on either side. 

Here, let me unplug my monitors and pop it over to my secondary desk, and take a screenshot of me writing this very article to show you. Sometimes I used two side-by-side windows instead, if the narrow content on the left just didn’t work out.

Michael Crider/Foundry