Portrait Monitor to Compliment 27" Primary Display

Hi, I currently use two 27" displays for my work from home office - these are two Dell U2720Q 4K and they are connected to my work Windows laptop. I also connect my personal MacBook Pro to one of these and switch to it during the day when I need it. I need to buy a third monitor for a different room which will principally be used for personal use and therefore will mainly have the MacBook Pro connected to it, though I would like to be able to hook my work laptop up occasionally when I need a change of space.

I spend some of my work life delivering online training courses and I need two screens to be able to do this, the majority of my work time is doing the the usual corporate stuff (emails/skype/spreadsheets etc). I found that I was using only half of my 2nd 27" display for the most of the time as it was just too far away to use comfortably. So I experimented with flipping the 27" into portrait mode but it was just too big, a strain on my neck looking at the top section.

So, I am now considering moving one of the 27" Dellā€™s to the ā€˜other roomā€™ and buying a new monitor for my 2nd/reference monitor for work. Iā€™m really happy with the Dell 27"'s.

My question is, what is the optimum size of monitor to use in a portrait mode as a 2nd or reference monitor alongside the main 27" display.

Does anyone have a setup similar to this? Any monitor recommendations for the reference display?

I have considered the LG DualUp Monitor but given its unique dimensions I am unsure this would work

This was going to be my recommendation, since thatā€™s what I want :slight_smile:
I used a 27ā€ in portrait to the left, and a 27ā€ landscape to the right of my iMac Pro.
I could never find the happy place with the portrait monitor. I used it as a ref monitor for PDFs, etc. I could never get a good balance of text size and amount of text. Maybe 5K would help, but not sure. All this brought me to eyeing the DualUp, which would support tall and wider.

The ideal test would have been rotating the iMac Pro on its VESA mount 90*, but macOS doesnā€™t support that.

Not sure if any of this is helpful.

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This must be all quite subjective! I have a 27" 4K monitor in portrait orientation next to my (5K) 27" iMac. The resolution is set to get the same resolutions on both and Iā€™ve color calibrated them so they match. While I can tell the difference between the 4K and 5K (the 4K just appears less sharp because of non-optimal resolution) it works well for me as the portrait monitor normally is only displaying text.

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I used to run 2 x 24" screens alongside each other: 1 x landscape and 1 x portrait on the right side. I really liked it, since even 2 x 24" screen horizontally meant a lot of neck twisting (because the left screen was my main screen). The portrait screen was especially good for full-screen PDFs. They both ran off a Mac mini, but Iā€™ve since moved to a 14" MBP. So Iā€™ve sacrificed one screen and run the MBP open on the right as my additional screen. Iā€™ve not really encountered many issues, but sometimes miss the additional horizontal stretch.

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