If two is better than one, what about five? [Omnicrash] has posted a nice analysis of his monitor setup, which uses 5 portrait mounted monitors side-by-side. To minimize the bezel size between them, he removed the casing and built a custom stand that placed them all closely together for a surround viewing approach. He’s been using this setup for a couple of years and has posted a nice analysis of making it work for multiple purposes. On the upside, he says it is awesome for gaming and watching videos.
On the downside, NVidia’s drivers and multi-monitor setup are a pain, and some tasks just didn’t work with the bezels. He couldn’t, for instance, run a standard-sized remote desktop screen anywhere without having the bezel get in the way. So, with large, hi-res monitors now getting cheaper, would he do it again? “If I had to do it all over again nowadays however I’d probably just go with a single 34″ ultra-wide for about the same price..though I probably wouldn’t be able to help myself and would eventually be adding at least one on top and 2 in portrait on the side.”
Walmart right now has a 49″ Sceptre 4K with 4 HDMI inputs, one supports powered MHL so it will charge your phone while it pumps pixels to the TV – for $299
Where’s the fun in that?
I bought a similar thing here in the UK on offer for £299. Yes it did look quite good and actually allowed 2180p resolution, but only at 30hz with HDMI 1.4 from my HD7970 and it had atrocious input lag.
So imagine this setup up with 5 49″ monitors, I’ll let you get a towel.
Would be easier to just run a wall projector. Many 3 letter agency ‘command centers’ do that on a routine basis. Works great. And no bezel lines to get in the way.
Yes, but pretty crappy resolution by comparison. (5400 x 1920 is his rez) and a 4K projector, with a cursory search could be $5K-$25K
You can “multi-monitor” projectors as well. Hard part would be getting the brightness the same.
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/graphics_cards/m_series/powerdesk/edge_overlap/
VLC also somewhat supports this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYEp2CT6UZc
Here’s another example, using monitors instead of projectors but the effect is the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8gjOaGFcAU
DIY 4K projector anyone?
He could design the stands so that the outer monitors are slightly further forward than the rear ones so what little bezels they have can cover the bezels of the monitor behind them. Net result is 1 bezels width instead of 2 between monitors.
That was something I considered, having them overlap like you described. But I couldn’t stand the look of it in practice.
The bottom portion of the screen had the largest bezels and unfortunately it was also the thickest part (holding the LCD cable etc.), so I had to rotate them too much and the unevenness became very noticable.
voiding the warranty of 5 screens at once? I don’t know, seems a big risk given the craptacular quality you get nowadays.
Not sure if they put warranty seals on TVs. I used to work at a place where they would take the plastic parts off a TV, and install them into advertising kiosks. They would keep all the plastic casings and then reassemble if there was anything wrong with any of them, to claim warranty.
I’ve just reassembled them for my new setup using custom VESA mounts, and aside from the original tape that was used to hold the cabling to the panels you cannot tell the difference.
That said, I accepted that the warranty was gone the moment I started opening them.
“He couldn’t, for instance, run a standard-sized remote desktop screen anywhere without having the bezel get in the way.”
A typical high end generally mainstream (not 4K) 30″ monitor is 2560 x 1600. He is using LG 23EA63V-P’s though, which are 1920 x 1080.
What kind of remote desktop resolution is he running? 1280 × 1024 would fit just fine between 1600 pixels. Or even 1080. Not following what the author defines as a “standard-size remote desktop screen”?
Most of my RDP sessions are to PC’s running at work, most of them running 1920×1080 screens. So I’d either have to deal with scaling or with moving between bezels.