Core77

30 inches of productivity

By Rain Noe - August 26, 2008

in Object Culture

A 30" LCD; we all want one, but will it change your work habits? Kevin Kelly thinks so:

The first thing I noticed was that the number of times I printed out hard copies of documents went down. Before, I would print copies of diagrams, specifications, and other reference material so that I could easily refer to them while working. Now I have space on the screen to have these visible. I wouldn't say I've made it all the way to the "paperless office," but it's gotten a lot closer.

Within a few days of using a large screen I began to experience a much more significant effect, though: when more of the things I needed to look at were already in view, the amount of time spent on visual context switches went down. Having more documents in view not only reduces the time consumed by the switch, but also the "recovery time" needed to remember what I was doing. A related time savings is that when a document I may need to switch to is visible, it takes less time to realize that I need it.

The display fills a lot more of my visual field - so much, in fact, that it took me a week or so to get used to how far away the left and right edges of the screen were. In the end, I found that this made it a little easier to concentrate (since my attention was less often directed toward wherever I'd been keeping the notes that wouldn't fit on the screen).

I found that once I got used to the idea that most things could be expanded to a size that required no window scrolling, I began to "think big" about a lot of things: my spreadsheets got bigger, my diagrams got bigger - and more unexpectedly: the size of the kind of thing I thought I could handle got bigger; and because I was much less often having to chop things into smaller pieces so that they could fit, things got simpler.

Less paper consumption, easier to concentrate, bigger thinking? What's not to like? Prices are dropping, too....

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SDC

16 years ago

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i recently got a work issued apple cinema ginormoscreen. we work in excel all day... on PCs. i find that i am more productive at home on my 13" MacBook utilizing 6 Spaces on OS X than I am with screen real estate.

workspace, to me, is not as effective as organization.
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BJN

16 years ago

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I got an NEC 3090WQXi a few days ago. I had been working with dual 21" display - one of which I used in portrait orientation. I calculated the total pixel area of the single 30" and found that it offers more total area (although I lose horzontal lenght of my workspace).

Paper saving? Not for me. I think that take is highly contingent on what you do and how you do it.

Positive side of the single large display: one unified desktop, on calibration, the potential for one very large image without bezel interruption.

Negative compared to dual displays: one large surface as opposed to two surfaces that you can angle toward you (I have to shift my head from side to side to avoid parallax given the close proximity of the display on my desk); two smaller displays fit more easily on my desk; big foot on the 30" infringes on keyboard and tablet space (I've ordered a bracket so I can do away with the monitor's stand).

My 3090 has a considerably wider aRGB gamut than my prior 2190UXi displays, and this creates extra workflow steps for accurately reviewing web content with non-color managed browsers. On the other hand, I'm finally seeing a full color gamut for printed output.
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