Are Huge Monitors Worth it?

tl;dr: Yes, but be aware of the limitations.

I have been using my 39" 4k monitor for a long time now. I wrote a review of it when I first got it and have now had it long enough I can give a full opinion.

Large monitors give enough real-estate to not tab between your normal applications. I usually have 4–8 apps open and visible at any time, which is very useful.

More real-estate changes your work philosophy

With 4k and higher monitors, the concept of what a screen is for changes. Before, you toggled between stacked windows. With a monitor that has both enough pixels and enough physical size so that your eyes can resolve the content, you can actually think of it as a table where you can spread your applications out and work with them next to each other.

This really changes the philosophy and mentality of interacting with programs and has some fascinating results. The best way to describe it is that in a house or workshop, you have places you put the key things you use so you know where they are. When you have a large enough monitor, you do the same, where Spotify is always in one corner, your coding window is the right third, the web pages are in the center, etc. These places help your mind understand what it is seeing much better and can really increase efficiency when you have to go between many windows.

That said, it can also be distracting, so sometimes, I have had to clear everything and just put one small window on a large, empty, background.

Positives:

• I love the real-estate. Having Email, Trello, Slack and Chrome open at all times plus whatever I am doing means it saves a lot of time tabbing between windows.
• Great for creating presentations. When I need Google Slides open, a window for copying images, notes for a deck, etc all in one place, everything fits and it is at high enough resolution.
• Amazing for coding. Sublime full height with multiple files plus room to actually test out an app/site/etc is a substantial improvement.

Negatives:

• Eye Strain: The brightness is about 30% higher than my MacBook Pro and also 25% more blue (Even with corrections in monitor settings). I think this is causing a bit of eye strain. The color gamut is limited because this is officially a TV rather than a high quality monitor.
• Head movement: To look around the monitor I actually have to shift my head which is probably slowing we down from an efficiency side.
• Lots of digital clutter: I am not sure it is a good thing to have everything visible at once. Lots of detail that it would be nice to wipe away.
• Physically large in most offices. It is actually too large to fit on my desk under the cabinets so I had to remove the stand and prop it on the desk.
• Bad for video games. Because of the huge size, it is very immersive, however that also means that my response time is slower in looking around. More deaths… :-(

Overall, I really like having it however feel that it is close to time to update to a newer version with better brightness control and also work on how I use it so I don’t let things get too cluttered.

Originally published at http://hansclee.blogspot.com on February 1, 2017.