Quality of monitors for office work?

[Mark M]

Might be a bit of a daft question but does the quality of a monitor really matter for office work? Ive got a dual monitor set up and always just buy decent sized cheap monitors (all excel and similar based work).

A friend of mine has given me his monitor that he used on his gaming rig that hes just sole and whilst I dont have the specs to hand as Im at work now I was totally blown away at how clear things in Excel etc were.

Are there any benefits of using better quality monitors for office based work? Im not talking top of the line monitors but if there is justification in buying better monitors I will when I come to renew.

Thanks

 

[eddiew]

For graphics work, absolutely. Try doing any sort of design on a cheap TN and see how 6-bit colours and terrible viewing angles works out :/

You also want to watch for "flicker free" - as in, you want that! Cheaper screens may apply lower brightnesses by flickering the backlight; the dimmer you go, the lower the strobe frequency, and some people (myself included) find this gives them a lot of headaches and eye strain. PWM-free or flicker-free (interchangeable) is definitely something to insist on in any screen that you're going to use for long periods.

Avoid dirt cheap screens with only an analog VGA (15 pins, blue cable heads) connection, as this almost guarantees blurriness.

Higher resolution such as 4k might be favourable if you do a lot of large Excel sheets, since you can shrink the font to a lower size and still have good clarity. Personally I prefer a 1200p 24" or a 1440p 32", both of which are ~100 pixels per inch, and that works out to be a comfortable density where everything is readable by default and you don't need to do any crazy UI scaling.

You might also get benefit from a screen that can rotate to portrait mode. Known a few coders and document writers who like their 2nd screen to be long-ways so that they can see a lot of text at a good size.

All of these things can be found in 60hz business class screens, just not at the very bottom of the budget range. If your budget is quite loose, I'd always recommend Dell's professional series, since they are invariably good quality and my office has never, ever had one die, discolour, or develop a bad pixel, even after 10 years of use

That all said, it's worth checking that you have got your Windows ClearType set up properly, because that can give very ugly blurry looking fonts when it's not set right!

 

[Mark M]

Thanks for the comprehensive reply. I'll look into the few things that you mention as I have no knowledge of monitors at all in all fairness! My dual setup at work and at home are both ran off VGA and when I added my friends monitor it is via DVI so maybe that explains why its so much better?

I'll no doubt need to upgrade the cheap graphics cards Im running to enable DVI and/or HDMI outputs to better monitors.

 

[eddiew]

VGA -> DVI is very likely why it seemed clearer, yes VGA is an analog signal, being displayed on a digital screen, so you get a digital to analog to digital conversion and it's invariably lossy to some extent.

It's pretty hard to even find a graphics card with a VGA output any more, which gives you some clue about how outdated they are - but if it makes you feel better, a client's office got around this by using USB-to-VGA adapters... which cost more than the difference to a less-cheap screen that would have had a DVI input! There's an inherent peril in cost cutting