Is two better than one?

[SparkyTechWire]

Hi guys, I am building a new computer and my screen blew up on me last night while plugged into my laptop - don't worry too much the laptop is fine.

I took it back to Currys and they had no more in stock so gave me my money back (9month old monitor win - I will turn a profit either way)

My question is one which will be answered with mixed opinions, I plan on playing games on the computer (the main reason) but will be using the computer for web design and uni work a lot as well.

I think 2 monitors will be better for work, but that extra 1.5" may come in handy for gaming - or will I not notice it.
Or will the smaller screen make better graphics (noticeably less blurry)
So I put before you the old question of:
'is two better than one?'

1 23"monitor
or
2 21.5" monitor?

 

[R.C.Anderson]

I smaller screen, with the same resolution will look nicer than a larger screen.

Personally I would always go for a multi-screen setup (I have 3 screens - 26" (1920x1200) middle with portrait 19" (1024x1280) on each side, and I love it. Really miss multiple screens when I'm at work.

You probably don't know what multiple screens are like if you've never used them, but once you have, there's no going back

EDIT: Should have mentioned, the main benefit is when working, if you only have 2 screens, eyefinity is not worth attempting, as the bezel would be in the middle of the screen, so you could only use 1 monitor for that anyway (Although you can still display whatever else you want on the second screen)

 

[Axeia]

Depends a lot on the resolution, but let's assume everything is modern hardware and you get a Full HD resolution on both the 23" and 21.5" in that case your workspace simply doubles with a second monitor.
Now the answer to is twice the resolution better than once is a rather predictable yes.

Will it be noticeably less blurry, well the same resolution on a smaller screen results in a sharper images. However, there aren't many that would describe a 23" @ Full HD as blurry. If you found it to be blurry before it's most likely due to not running the monitor at the native resolution, if you for example use a 1280x720 resolution with a 1920x1080 monitor the image will look blurry. If you use a laptop for gaming this will happen quite often as the graphics card in a laptop generally is far less powerful then those you find in a desktop (even mad expensive 'gaming laptops' usually only have the same graphical power as that of a budget gaming pc). Most games run some kind of automatic hardware detection to determine how high the graphic settings can be set, in the case of a laptop this will generally be not all that high (below that of the resolution of an external monitor) and thus result in a blurry image.

Keep in mind that a laptop (with very few exceptions) is only able to use two displays at once: e.g. if you use 2 external monitors the laptops own monitor can't be used as a third display.

--

For uni work/web design a second monitor is just brilliant, you can keep your browser open on one monitor and MS Office or photoshop on the other. For gaming it can be useful to keep a walkthrough open on the screen you're not gaming on (one with a portrait mode option is especially useful for that). So yeah, for gaming it's fairly useless although for displaying 'game related' information such as a walkthrough or ventrilo/teamspeak it can be nice to have.