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I'm thinking of upgrading my monitor. I've noticed that flat panels that can be adjusted between landscape and portrait mode are no longer always expensive and not necessarily scarce.

picture of what I mean

But searching for them to do price and feature comparisons seems hard because most sites for my local electronics shops don't list this feature in their search page and even descriptions of the monitors don't seem to always mention they can do this, or state it in a variety of ways, most of which are ambiguous.

Unless I'm missing something.

You could describe this feature as "tilting", "rotating", "pivoting", or "swivelling", but all of those terms could just mean that there's some degrees of adjustment of the viewing angle around the X, Y, and/or Z axes. Or just "portrait mode". Is one of these actually more or less standard or at least less ambiguous?

Related, do such monitors signal the OS when you twist it between landscape and portrait? If only some of them do so, does this feature have a name? (If it depends on the connector type etc I suppose it's getting off-topic so just the standard way to describe this signalling feature will do.)

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    Generally, hardware companies refer to orientable displays as being able to 'pivot' from landscape to portrait. (First company with consumer display was Radius and they called it Pivot.) 'Swivel' means that you can have them face a different direction without moving the base (as with a swivel chair). 'Tilt' means to raise or lower the vertical angle. Examples include ASUS, HP, Acer, Samsung. Retailers don't care or know and call the feature whatever they like. Actually, they tend to neglect anything that doesn't fit into a neat category within their database.
    – Mockman
    Commented Oct 11, 2021 at 20:23
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    Watch out for Horizontal and Vertical viewing angles. Usually only one of them is good, so while you can attach any screen to fancy VESA arm after rotating you might have bad experience.
    – PTwr
    Commented Oct 11, 2021 at 21:05

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You haven't missed anything - the terminology changes between hardware companies, and many review sites do not do a complete job. However, most manufacturers do a pretty decent job of describing their products.

You must distinguish between the purely mechanical part and the software part (the driver).

Changing the monitor's orientation must be done by the video driver, or the results would be unusable with text that is badly oriented and unreadable without some neck gymnastics. I haven't seen monitors that have such a setting, but such monitors must have some way of signalling their proprietary drivers of the change. Most drivers I have seen have this option in their settings, using terms such as (among others) Orientation, Landscape, Portrait, Flipped.

Mechanical manipulations are independent of the video driver. The most prevalent are the terms you have already listed: tilting, rotating, pivoting, or swiveling, but there might be others.

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I just Googled "portrait monitors" and "vertical monitors" and got lots of hits.

As for how the orientation is set, I am aware of only a couple of monitors that have this functionality. In my experience, it is a case of setting the orientation in your computers display settings.

EDIT: To add, pretty much any monitor can be used in portrait mode if you mount it on a VESA mount/arm. There are arms which allow you to rotate the monitor at will, or you can just mount the monitor on the VESA mount in portrait mode. I have seen people mounting ultrawide and curved monitors vertically using a VESA mount.

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    I know there are some terms that get some hits but I want to know if there's a "best" term most people use. I'm not buying off all of Google, just from a shop in my country and I need to figure out if any of the monitors listed in their sites, as I could check for say "FHD" or "USB-C". Maybe I should re-word my question? Maybe there is no answer. I'd be looking at the more affordable options on sale/clearance and I know some can do this without having to get an extra VESA mount. I just need to know how to find out which ones.
    – hippietrail
    Commented Oct 11, 2021 at 10:25
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(approx 2 years later, if anybody lands here after a search, like I did...)

Typical monitors do not signal their orientation to the operating systems.

I happen use a Philips Brilliance 241B monitor (I got it for working from home) that can auto-adjust orientation in real-time (as I am rotating it...), but it is using the manufacturer-provided proprietary software called SmartControl. I sure wish Microsoft would make a standard for this feature, as I am tired of manually changing orientation when the AMD driver fails to connect to all 4 monitors, and then Windows discards my desktop layout.

As for the terminology, it is rather clear now-a-days:

  1. tilt makes the monitor face just a bit downward or upward
  2. swivel make the monitor face just a bit to the left / to the right
  3. pivot changes orientation from landscape to portrait mode

(see here for example: https://www.macworld.com/article/234441/how-to-find-a-monitor-that-pivots-for-portrait-perfection.html)

Using "rotate" is indeed confusing, and without context I would assume it means changing the orientation (that is, to pivot).

I can not confirm that manufacturers do not describe the products properly. I am sure it is possible, especially for cheap products that can be missing the manual or quick-start guide, but in general manufacturers are interested to provide a complete list of features.

Like others said, you can always purchase a monitor arm, for any VESA compatible monitor (usually VESA 100x100), that almost all monitors today support. The arm then replaces the original stand provided with the monitor.

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