Most screens use a ratio that optimizes for reading side-to-side, meaning they’re wider than they are tall. 4:3 and 16:9 are more common, but 21:9 can still be found in home monitors (often sold as ultra-wide). The actual pixel count can vary wildly (just like the size can) so ratio is not necessarily an indicator of how good your game or online video is going to look on-screen. Still, it’s valuable to know – it can help you adjust your quality accordingly, which will save you computing power. You don’t need to stream a video in 4K resolution if your monitor only supports up to 1080p!
Picking the right screen for your setup will change the way you work and play, but a larger screen is not necessarily better all by itself – to compensate for the area of a large screen vs. the total size of your mousepad or desk, you may have to increase your mouse’s sensitivity, for example. The number and orientation of screens you choose will affect your entire desk setup, including what chair you’ll need and how you sit. Furthermore, most computers understand what you’re asking when you expand a program to full-screen on one monitor, but if you get a gigantic one, you’ll need to tinker with settings to view more than one blown-up program at a time comfortably and without manually resizing the program.
That said, there are benefits to oddly shaped screens. Many competitive gamers use gigantic, curved monitors to play – the game can cooperate with the screen to show an enormous field-of-view, giving the player a competitive advantage while playing , alongside being more immersive than two flat screens pressed side to side. Rather than creating a blind spot in the middle with two screens, or two blind spots to either side with three screens, the issue is eliminated altogether.
They’re pricey – for the pro of not having a border in between two monitors side-by-side, you’re paying a surcharge in the hundreds. If you’re competitive, it might be worth it – the borders may interfere with your spacial recognition enough to warrant that. But similar, cheaper options exist if you’re not quite ready to go crazy with a two-foot-wide monitor just yet. “Borderless” or thin-bezel monitors, for example, are easy to set up, and often much cheaper for the tradeoff of a much smaller but still visible border between two screens.
But you don’t necessarily need a curved screen for everything. Ultra-wide monitors make movies shot for the Ultra-wide movie theater mode look better. This is a problem that plagues all screens – some movies even have to be cropped for theaters with narrower screens, or put black bars at the top and bottom to make up the difference. However, by adjusting for those smaller screens, bigger screens have to add black bars to the sides of the film instead (fancier theaters can sometimes disguise this empty space by pulling in curtains, if they have them). There’s no universal answer that will always keep the film uncropped and never have any black bars to add, but having a longer screen in this case saves more blank space than a shorter one.