Flat-screen monitors are incredibly inexpensive, boost productivity, and are generally better for the environment than older displays. Here's a rundown of what to look for
This is one of those good-news, good-news stories: The good news is that flat-screen computer monitors are incredibly inexpensive. The other good news is that, unless you happen to get a lemon, they're all really good quality. Essentially, flat-screen monitors make users happy and they boost productivity. And given the low, low prices, there's no reason to hold back.
Everywhere I look, users are more productive with larger monitors. A decade ago, most workers had 15-inch CRT "TV tube" monitors, and a few had 17-inch or 20-inch CRTs. Nowadays, it's rare to find someone with anything smaller than a 17-inch flat screen, and lots of workers use 19-inch, 20-inch, and 24-inch LCD monitors. My suggestion: Everyone should have at least a 19-inch monitor, unless there's just no room for it. The productivity gain far outstrips the price, and just about every desk can hold a flat-screen that size. If you go through your office, and begin replacing smaller monitors with larger ones (starting with any left-over CRT "TV tube" monitors), you'll have a happy, productive workforce.
But what to get? Although you probably won't go wrong no matter what you buy, some of the specs are worth paying attention to in a business environment. Some of the specs also are totally fine to ignore. For example, computer games and other home entertainment-focused consumers benefit from monitors that have a super-fast video refresh rate. For office applications, even if watching Webinars or the occasional YouTube video are part of the routine, it simply doesn't make a difference. You can save money with a "slower" monitor. By contrast, however, many office workers are likely to collaborate, and view work on a single monitor simultaneously. When one person is standing and the other is sitting, a monitor with good horizontal and vertical viewing angles is desirable. More on both of those later.
Let's start with the most important specs: Size and resolution.
Size: A monitor's "size" is measured, in the United States, in inches; elsewhere, of course, it's likely to be metric. Those are diagonal measurements, from the top-left corner of the active display to the bottom-right. Because they're diagonals, you can end up with monitors that are slightly rectangular (standard) or are very rectangular (modern wide-screen).
For example, a very popular monitor size is 19 inches. Many manufacturers offer 19-inch monitors in a standard format, with a display that's about 15 inches wide by 12 inches tall, or as a wide screen that's about 16 inches wide by 10 inches tall. (The resolutions of those screens are 1280x1024 and 1440x900, respectively.)
For most users, I believe that the new wide-screen format is better. Workers can have more windows open at a time (positioned next to each other), which is great for using tools such as those found in Photoshop, QuarkXPress, or Word. Wide-screen also is much better for users who use spreadsheets or other "horizontal" applications, where wider is better. By contrast, the maximum height they can get on "vertical" applications, like Word or Internet Explorer, is slightly less. It's a matter of taste, but on the whole, I really like the new wide-screen formats.
Resolution: Alluded to before, this is the second-most important specification for a monitor. It says how many pixels (dots) you have horizontally and vertically. A good rule of thumb is: For most users, the more the better. Generally speaking, the benefit of a bigger monitor over a smaller one isn't that the dots are bigger, but that there can be more of them, giving the worker a larger working area. In other words, you see more stuff at one time. (That's different than buying a bigger TV, where you see the same stuff but it's blown up larger.)
Putting it another way, if you want to give an employee more workspace to see more stuff on the screen at one time, like cells on a spreadsheet, you need to buy her one that has a higher resolution. Going from a 17-inch monitor that has 1280x1024 resolution to a 19-inch monitor that has 1280x1024 resolution won't improve productivity. However, some users have 17-inch monitors with 1024x768 resolution, and those people would benefit from that 19-inch upgrade. Make sense?
Now, there is an exception to the rule, and that's when you have users with poor vision. They would benefit from getting displays that are physically larger, but without necessarily higher resolution, because they do want to make the same stuff bigger. For those users, look for larger monitors with low resolutions. For those people, replacing the 17-inch 1280x1024 with a 19-inch 1280x1024 would be an improvement.
Pivot: Some monitors will swing from horizontal to vertical -- or as it's usually termed, landscape to portrait. A pivoting 19-inch standard monitor would therefore turn from 1280x1024 to 1024x1280. Some users love it. Some never use it. It's a matter of taste. Because most PCs don't natively support pivoting monitors, make sure that the monitor comes with software that's compatible with your operating system, otherwise the system won't work.
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