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I enjoy my widescreen monitors, one in portrait mode, one in landscape.

Sweeter would be if my main monitor (landscape mode, 1920x1200) could fill out that unused vertical space beneath it.

Do they make square-shaped monitors, 1920x1920? Or anything close therein?

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You could get a correctly-sized monitor to stick on the top/bottom, which should be able to be the correct size. – Phoshi Dec 10 '09 at 9:03
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Monitors have generally been of 2 major form factors: 16x9 (widescreen) and 4x3 (older style). While most have gone to 16x9, You can still get 4x3 monitors if you look around. That's as close as you are going to get. A purely square monitor would be a specialty item and quite expensive if you could find it.

If you want to know why this is, it is because computer monitors follow TV/Video standards. TV's started as 4x3 devices. Movies were 16x9. Monitors reflect what Hollywood produces.

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Actually, widescreen in pc's is mostly 16x10. It's only the last couple of years that pc- and laptop-screens with effective 16x9 format have been made. – fretje Dec 10 '09 at 8:24
16x9 is uberfail! what the hell would i want 1920x1080 when for when I can have 1920x1200, whole 180 pixel more... – Don Salva Dec 10 '09 at 10:00
I use 1920x1080 and I'm a very happy 23" user! Actually I managed to write this comment :) – Chris Dec 10 '09 at 11:41
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5x4 is slightly closer to square. (Specifically, the SXGA 1280x1024 resolution, which bucked the 4:3 convention usual for monitors, and thus resulted in not-quite-right aspect ratios for many CRT users.) You can still quite easily get 19" SXGA LCDs, but of course they're yesterday's story and you're not going to get any resolution with ‘1920’ in it. :-( – bobince Dec 10 '09 at 12:44
@fretje - I was simplifying and so lumped 16x9 and 16x10 together. they aren't materially a lot different. – Steve Rowe Dec 10 '09 at 21:08
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Here's a graph from Wikipedia showing standard video resolutions.

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Nice graph, but it doesn't give any 1:1 aspect ratios, nor explain why there aren't any. – outsideblasts Dec 10 '09 at 8:09
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