Ask HN: Programming in front of a projector rather than monitor?
Has anyone tried this kind of setup? I have a big white wall in my room and no desk yet. I was thinking of just getting a projector with a very high resolution 720p or 1080p and using that instead.
That way I could sit on a couch or a chaise longue with just my keyboard on my legs. There would be a lot of eye movement because the width would be a lot greater than on a normal monitorand it would be quite far which I think would allow me to use my far sight instead of the shortsight that I use now when programming or reading.
The internet hasn't got much to offer on this subject, but I would guess that's also because high resolution projectors for home use have only been available for a short while and they're also more expensive than really big monitors.
Does anyone have a 720p/1080p projector at home and can tell how simple text looks like? Is it crisp enough? Is it foggy? Can you stare at a wall of text for 10 minutes?
I had a 9 foot wide 1080p setup in my last place (as a home theater). I could do casual work on it (light excel, web surfing for star wars boy or other idiotic YouTube videos, some email), but it wasn't at all suitable for coding or substantial lengths of time reading text. It also required the lights to be out or very dim, which made working with a printed reference very difficult.
Looked at another way, the tech is available and certainly cheap enough (and somewhat "obvious"); if it were advantageous, you'd hear about loads of people doing it. The tech has been out for years, and even in the early days they were well under $5000 (way, way under that now). Another thing to note, the bulb projectors dim over time, and the bulb replacement costs are not insignificant if you replace them at the point the picture quality starts to suffer (as opposed to when they completely burn out).
Walk into any company conference room and try it out. I predict you'll hate it.
There would be a lot of eye movement
I've tried a similar setup in the past and found it too be just too much work. It turned into lots of head movement. If it was about 4-8x the res then maybe it might work as you could segregate it into 4 or 9 workareas and just focus on one at a time. But it's simply too low resolution to work for that right now -- you'll end up moving so far away from it that you may as well just get a big monitor and a desk.
I have seen people with eye problems use projectors. One person was legally blind (could not drive at all), but is damn fine programmer. I wonder if inability to see too much at once forces the code to be terse, and easier to understand.