If you allow for laptop screens, that 100 DPI isn’t really the top of the consumer monitor spectrum.
I’m the proud owner (sort of) of a Dell Latitude D820 with a 15.4 inch WUXGA display. That’s 1900x1200, and 150 DPI for those playing along at home. I bought it almost exactly a year ago, and at the time, Dell was the only company I could find selling WUXGA laptops at 15.4 inches.
Now with a year under my belt on this bad boy, I know why they’re so hard to find. Everything is absolutely tiny. If I slouch back in my chair, I can’t read anything. Smaller images on websites essentially become thumbnails. (Thank goodness for the Firefox Mouse Gestures plugin that lets me scale up images with a quick mouse stroke.) And the natural dimness of laptop displays really doesn’t help things.
Yes, I could turn up the DPI settings in Windows, but lets face it, most apps don’t do very well, aesthetically, if you mess with the DPI settings. Even some of Microsoft’s own.
Anyway, if I had the choice to make again, I’d go with a 14.1" SXGA+ (1280x1024, 116 DPI) screen, for two big reasons. For one, everything would be a little easier to see. For two, the widescreen format just isn’t good for editing code or documents. Better to just go with letterbox and get multiplier monitors. If you’re someone that needs widescreen though, you might be better off with the more modest WSXGA+ (1680x1050, 128 DPI), or bumping up to at “desktop replacement” 17-incher for WUXGA (133 DPI).
(BTW, for anyone who wants to dismiss my complaints and is interested in getting one of their own, Dell discontinued this screen format for a while, but you can get it again now on the Latitude D830.)
Interesting, because I’ve seen people use 37" HDTVs as computer monitors.
Drool I would love to have my computer hooked up to this bad boy: http://www.samsung.com/Products/TV/DLPTV/HLT6189SXXAA.asp. All my multimedia and computing needs served to me right in the comfortable butt-groove of my couch. =)