Suggestions about the monitor setup?
Community Forums/General Help/Suggestions about the monitor setup?
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| Hey, I am planning to buy a new monitor but I can't decide; Should I buy a single 22'' or Should I buy double 17'' monitors? I am mainly playing games, modelling, programming, photoshopping. |
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| Many games won't support dual monitors, meaning that you'd be stuck with a single 17" most of the time for those. Unless you work on multiple photos at the same time, a single larger screen would generally be preferable for photoshop for modelling and programming it's completely personal preference. A single larger widescreen can be convenient to run an IDE on since you can see more of the same line of code without breaking it up across two panels. Personally I have dual 19" screens at my office PC, and a single 24" LCD at home. Before I bought the 24" LCD, I had a single 19" LCD at home and tried to use a dual setup there too for a while -- didn't work out at all. I love having the 2 screens at the office, and it makes perfect sense for the work I do there. At home, it was pointless: There were so many tasks (and games) where you could/would only use a single screen, that I wanted to sit straight in front of the primary screen. The secondary screen would therefore be way off to the side, making it even less practical to want to use. At the office I have a lot of different stuff open and both screens are sitting side-by-side right in front of me -- but that means that you're always kind of giving a sideway glance at the monitor that you're currently working on. That really doesn't work well for games. so personally I defiitely prefer the single larger screen for home use, but your mileage may vary. |
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| I run two screen at home, and one thing I like to do is run the games I play as maximized window, then I can still use my other monitor to browse the web or do other things while playing without the mouse being stuck to the game. Unless of course, the game is an fps or other style game that captures the mouse. |
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| Two screens have become my default monitor setup, and I wouldn't want to miss it anymore. But 17" is too small. Does you budget allow for two 20" widescreen displays? If so, go for that. 20" displays use the same resolution as the 22"ers, but you'll probably get them a bit cheaper. |
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Double 20'' costs too much :( I'm planning to buy a single 22'' BENQ T2200HDA. |
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| I ran dual monitors for a while but its more of a "wooo look at me I have dual monitors" than actually being of any practical use - I had a 21" CRT and a 17" TFT (both 4:3). Long term I just couldn't see the need for it. Using a single 22" LG WS monitor now. |
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| GfK, that's probably because you don't use software like Apple Aperture (library on the left, full screen preview on the right) or other applications where two monitors make real sense. You most certainly also do not have VMs running in the background or multiple open terminal server session windows or command prompts. Especially when I'm doing sysadmin/network admin work (which is my job), I find using two or more monitors much more efficient than having just one 30" display in front of me. I've used both setups: My Mac Pro has two 20" Apple Cinema Displays and at my old job we had a 20" iMac with an additional 20" Cinema Display and a Dell Precision Workstation with one 30" Dell display. But given the choice, I'd always choose two 20" screens over one 30" display. I find one screen configurations too uncomfortable for what I'm mostly doing, no matter how big that one screen is. A 30" screen is awesome for working on RAW photos, but for everything else it quickly becomes rather unhandy. But that's just me, and each to his own. ;-) |
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| GfK, that's probably because you don't use software like Apple Aperture Oh well, my personal preference must be null and void then. |
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| Your personal preference is your personal preference. I'm only saying that there are reasons beyond saying "look, I have two screens" to have two screens. I know photographers who even use a 20" screen and two 30" screens with their tethering software and Aperture in their studio. |
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| I also use 2 screens at work. Very useful. I happen to be a Network Admin as well. When you need to have access to your machine and other machines at the same time, seeing what is in your browser while typing commands in a command line terminal or three is very helpful. Like GFK said though, it is definitely personal preference. Using my notebook, I have gotten use to using just one again. But I could not do it for work. It would slow me way down. GFK, also I believe that you brought that response directed to you upon yourself by making your post seem as though you were not stating your opinion, but that there was no need for it for anybody. It is just the way that it read. I don't think anything anybody posted was meant as an attack. |
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| GFK, also I believe that you brought that response directed to you upon yourself by making your post seem as though you were not stating your opinion, but that there was no need for it for anybody. What I said was: I ran dual monitors for a while but its more of a "wooo look at me I have dual monitors" than actually being of any practical use - I had a 21" CRT and a 17" TFT (both 4:3). Long term I just couldn't see the need for it. Nowhere did I say that dual monitors had no purpose - I clearly said that I had no real use for that sort of setup. If somebody tried to twist that into something it isn't, that's their problem. Although it does tend to happen a hell of a lot around here. |
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| Well, if you're referring to me as that "somebody", then please note that your "wooo look at me" sentence indeed sounds like a very general statement that dual monitors do not have a practical use. It is not as clearly phrased only about you and your needs as you might have intended it to be. But, well, it doesn't really matter and I'll leave it at that. |
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| I prefer using one screen and multiple desktops (built in on Linux and OSX after Tiger, and available in various forms on Windows). This lets me group windows together logically, and requires less Alt-Tabbing. |
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| I use a single 30" screen at work now, but before that I was using dual 21" monitors. There are things I like about both,... the single large screen has more resolution (especially vertically,... 2560x1600 vs 2048x1080 for dual 1280x1024) That extra screen space is nice, but I really feel the computer took a performance hit due to the extremely high resolution. (I'm using all high end stuff, so it shouldn't be an issue of not enough graphics power) We also moved over to Vista and added other hardware at the same time, so It's hard to get a direct comparison though. Personally, I really like the 2 screen setup. I put extra menus and my web browser on the right monitor, and then I could work full screen on the left monitor without anything getting in the way. The large single screen feels a bit like going back to what I had before the dual setup, where I always have to shuffle what is on top. As I mentioned before, the single setup actually has more resolution, so it's possible to just position things differently on the single screen, but I liked having the physical divider to split things out. |
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