To your question: Well…between you and me and the wall, I am describing my HOME setup. Having three monitors at work might be considered a wee bit “opulent” for the office.

But, two … depending on what you do… well, that’s just good horse sense.

The word is productivity.

It’s the productivity, you see. It’s kind of like giving people a laptop. When people look at the cost of a laptop, I always figure it’s a good investment. Spend $2,000 and people will work at home, on weekends, one the road, and in the evenings. Seems like a good investment. Fact it, it almost seems a little underhanded.

Anyway, dual monitors are all about productivity. In that vein, and for that reason, we’ve set up a number of folks with dual-monitor systems. Let me explain.

First off, monitors are relatively cheap anymore. Second, all our PC’s come with dual-port graphic adaptors. (Usually it’s one DVI and one VGA (DSUB 15 pin.)

So the incremental costs are negligible.
Moreover, those costs are far outweighed by the productivity enhancement — this is especially true when you do things like:

• Design web-type pages where you need to make sure things look right at different resolutions.

• Do data entry and/or data validation (like cataloging documents). You can have the document open on one monitor, and the cataloging interface (Sharepoint) on the other.

• Design any sort of graphics or do any sort of CMS stuff where you manipulate information between multiple systems.

• Edit or write things where you often combine stuff from multiple sources, such as the web, other documents, and the like. The ability to work with multiple windows is potentiated when you can actually see them and slice and dice and cut and paste between them all.

But.. Specifically …”how many have dual 16:9 monitors?” Actually, none. As we replaced 4:3 monitors, with 16:9 monitors, I “recycled” the 4:3 monitors.

People with dual monitors have two 4:3 LCD monitors. I have one 16:9 and one 4:3 (that way I can see what a scrunched up SharePoint web page looks like, for example).

Surprisingly, not many people actually want dual monitors; just some library folks (cataloging) and some communications folks (CMS and graphics work, etc). In fact, I was surprised that a number of people didn’t even want the 16:9 monitors. I thought this really weird. Several explained that, with the wider monitor they had to move the mouse farther and didn’t like it. Others insisted that the wider (16:9) monitors were “shorter.” Despite me explaining that the old 4:3 and the new 16:9 were, in fact, the same height, the optical illusion won out.

This is the long way ‘round to getting to Gavin’s variant on Lincoln’s famous quote: IT never pleases anybody, most of the time; and most of the people, all of the time, except the day you hand out new laptops.

I am approximating the dual monitor experience by propping open my docked laptop and placing it beside an external 24 inch LCD. I would like to spread this to my officemates, but I am not sure how it will be perceived my general staff and by upper management.

So, how many of your officemates have dual 16:9 monitors? How do the line workers view this type of setup? and your poubahs?

Thanks,
Matt

With only my dual-monitor setup (the triptych is at home) I can have the app to be documented open on one screen, and still be able to churn the words on another. and.. it makes clipping screen shots, et al, soooooo much easier.

Right now I’m busily working on a nice visio flow chart…with the various pages open on the other monitor. If only I had three here, I could be answering your comment too!

‘sides.. it’s cool.