A big screen is better.

Last month I bought a 15 inch MacBook Pro laptop, which has a pretty nice screen, but not enough screen real-estate for the things I want to do. So on Thursday I got a larger secondary monitor, a 1920 x 1200 px NEC 2690 (25.5 inch diagonal screen).

I've been using my 3001 Scandinavia pictures as a screensaver. The picture changes randomly every 8 seconds or so, and does a "Ken Burns" pan and zoom randomly over the picture.In the past, I've found that this sometimes discovers for me an interesting crop that much improves the picture over the in-camera framing.

What I'm finding is that on this big screen a lot of the pictures that I had dismissed as OK but not very interesting, now have a WOW factor I never expected. Little details stand out (1920 x 1200 px is still a lot less than the 3072 x 2048 provided by the camera). Pictures showing low islands across a blue sea have an impact that they don't on the smaller screen (or on the CRT on my older desktop Mac). It's never as good as being there, but it's a lot closer to being there when the picture is on the big screen. I think the 16:10 aspect ratio might be part of the reason the effect is so much better than on my 1600 x 1200 px CRT.

Anyway, the point of this journal entry is that I would never have believed the size of the screen would make so much difference to the emotional effect of a photograph.