Comment by layer8

17 hours ago

Eizo made a square 1920 x 1920 monitor which was quite nice: https://www.eizo.com/products/flexscan/ev2730q/

I had a blackberry passport and it had a lot going for it(best keyboard ever on a phone) but one thing I really liked for reasons I don't understand is it had a square screen and took square photos.

  • Square sensors ought to be more common because they maximize the field of view for a given lens. Well, apart from circular sensors.

  • Square (or squarish) formats were pretty standard in pro photography once upon a time. Bliss, the Windows wallpaper, was shot on a camera that shoots in 6x7 natively (that's a nominal 6cm x 7cm, really it's more like 55mm x 65mm) A lot of other medium format cameras also shot in 6x7 or 6x6. And of course, 8x10 is still the standard "medium size print." I find square (or squarish) easier to compose with than wide ratios. Street photography, portraits, and sports photography don't often benefit from wider ratios, to name a few examples.

That looks genuinely useful - I could see positioning a monitor like that on either side of my main monitor, at an angle, and using them for docs, reference material, slack, calendars, etc. All the screen space of a dual-monitor setup, without the separation right in the center! Ah well, shame they're no longer made.

This worked great for a home arcade machine. Kind of expensive, but worked equally well for both 4:3 games (Super Mario) and 3:4 games (Pac Man).