I finally went and bought my second LCD monitor a couple of days ago. As you can see, my four-foot-wide desk is starting to look a bit crowded.
The new monitor, a Digimate L1715, is the one in the middle.
Some stuff I learned, upon jumping on to the dual-monitor bandwagon:
- With LCDs, it’s very important that you get the same brand and model of your second display. This isn’t as important with CRTs because practically any mid-range CRT will perform similarly regardless of manufacturer and make. LCDs are a far more finicky technology and if you want to save yourself some calibration headaches, get the same model. (As usual, I learned this from bitter experience, which is the reason for this article. My older LCD was a Samsung 173V, which displayed a smaller color gamut than the newer Digimate.)
- Height-adjustability is a must. One of the Digimate’s handiest features is the ability to adjust the height of the display (and not just the tilt like on most LCDs or CRTs). This is important to me because most monitors sit too low for a work-desk like mine and what I used to do was place books underneath the stand to push it up an inch or so.
- Although it’s a well-known fact that adding a second monitor to your workstation can increase your work productivity by 50%, this doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a while to learn to make use of 2560 pixels of available screen width, and to be honest, I’m still trying to get used to coding on one screen and previewing on the other. I’d gotten so used to alt-tabbing my way around that I sometimes forget that now all I have to do is look a couple of inches to the right.
- There are at least 3 ways to make use of this second monitor, depending on the video-card you’re running. I bought an inno3D GeForce 6600GT to go with the Digimate and the included software allows things like Clone View (which means you get the exact same image on both screens), Horizontal/Vertical Span (your desktop is stretched across the two monitors) and DualView (which allows you to set separate resolutions and color-depths for each monitor; handy when your monitors are different sizes).
- Customer reviews of the Digimate say that it’s probably the best 17" LCD you can get at this price range (less than PhP19,000, or about US$300 online), and I have to agree. It’s not stunningly good but it’s also several strides better than my old Samsung. It’s also sharper than any CRT I’ve seen that isn’t a Trinitron, and consumes only one-third the electricity (so yes, 2 LCDs use less power than 1 CRT).
- Octagon Superstore (which disappeared from the public eye 3 years ago and suddenly returned by swallowing up Columbia Superstore) doesn’t suck, at least in terms of the monitors you can find there. I got the Digimate for PhP18,000 and found other good deals from LG (the 1730s, a 2003 model, is going for about PhP16,500 there).
- The Digimate is a bit of an ugly duckling when compared with some of the newer stuff coming from LG (1740BQ) and Samsung (173P) but it’s cheap, sturdy and performs pretty well for the price. Overall, I can’t think of a better way to spend eighteen grand, at least in terms of the overall effect it has had on the way I work.