Portrait 2

Two things. 1) I'm waiting on a call back from Acer as someone needs to be bitched at for five minutes over their dodgy viewing angle claims. With anything less than BRIGHT, blacks on these screens in portrait mode are terrible. At 3 ft viewing, the distance between my eyes is too great, so much so that each eye is seeing a different shade of black and it bugs your eyes out.

Acer V243HL = Bad for portrait viewing!!!

So in short... Be very particular about your monitor purchase if you are thinking about portrait mode. It does look cool, some games are awesome on it, there's little FOV issues with games, BUT it does have its down sides.

PRO's

• Like a big screen TV
• FOV not really an issue in game
• 3rd person and driving games are great
• Things look tall in game! (Buildings, Sky etc)

CON's

• Some programs wont like your res
• Vertical viewing angle of your monitors might not be adequate
• Monitors might not be in sync (seriously, vertical bob watching movies in vlc was out)
• Some websites (Ha, like mine) need greater than 1080 pixels to be viewed correctly
• NO BLU RAY! That's right, I'll get to that

2) BLU RAYS WONT PLAY IN PORTRAIT!!!

That is right people. Corel Windvd 11, ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre 5, Cyberlink PowerDVD 11.
None of these will play back Blu Rays properly on a surround setup in portrait mode. They either have strange artifacts, wont play on one of the screens or just simply refuse to start. The only thing I found that worked was to use AnyDVD and open the disc, find the movie file and play using VLC, but now my copy has expired and I cant afford another just yet... also, this is a huge pain in the ass just to play a Blu Ray.

SOOOOO, I think I will rejoin the realm of landscape surround gaming. It was a fun idea and definitely worth it if you have better screens than me, but too much of a hassle. Should be receiving my 3rd GTX 480 sometime this week and looking forward to playing BATMAN AC (fighting crime and heatwaves across Gotham) and Skyrim, both of which I have on pre-order.

I shall leave you with some dodgy shots of my now obsolete portrait setup.

Portrait

Well well well... Looks like I can't even use my own site now. The reason being is that I've rearranged my monitors to a portrait setup and my resolution is now 3500 x 1080. Once again I've managed to get away with a 130 bezel correction as it's the same width the whole way around.

I made the stands today out of 2x4 and cut vesa 10x10 sized holes out of an old computer case side. I'll post some pics tomorrow to show you all.

I've tested it out with RAGE and DIRT 3 and so far its pretty cool. Even made a 6 screen grid that i can place windows in with a hot key using Winsplit (inc bezel correction). E-mail me if you would like to know how I did this.

The only issue I have is that as all the screens have been rotated 90 deg clockwise and therefore the top of the sets are now the right edge. With me so far? Now the problem is the vertical viewing angle of the screens. Try sliding down in your seat and look at your screen. Looks crappy and blackish doesn't it! Well that's what happens when I lean to the left. Thankfully my bed is to the right and the image looks great from there, but sitting here playing games, there is a distinct colour difference when playing games in a low light situation (bright scenes are ok). For example, when playing RAGE (AWESOME!) the gun is darker on the right screen than it is on the centre one. Soooooo my question:

IS THERE ANY WAY OF CORRECTING VERTICAL VIEWING ANGLE OF LCD SCREENS OR IS THIS A MANUFACTURING THING???


UPDATE 1:  How LCD makers lie to you about viewing angles (2007 but relevant)

In the mean time, here is a small selection of portrait backgrounds for people to use.