

Widescreen Monitors Can Save Companies $8,600 Per Employee, Per Year - AZA43
http://www.cio.com/article/194501

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AZA43
The study that came up with these findings was commissioned by a company that
makes widescreen monitors so that's a bit weird. But I have a widescreen and I
am significantly more productive using it than I was in the past with my tiny
15 inch standard format display.

~~~
spydez
Yeah, NEC funded it, but the study was vetted by the University's research
board, so it theoretically shouldn't be too biased.

~~~
Electro
NEC also make standard monitors, I really don't think they'd give a crap which
one you buy. It isn't a study of NEC performance versus Acer or anything, it's
just Standard Vs Widescreen and they make both in the same factories so I
don't see the bonus.

Perhaps they make more profit on a widescreen than a standard, but if
widescreen sales were actually boosted then market competivity would wipe
anything like that out. So I really see no possible benefit from biasing the
results.

~~~
jcl
One benefit of a study showing that one monitor configuration is better than
another is that it encourages people with the worse configuration to buy new
monitors.

Another benefit is an article on the CIO website featuring an illustration of
an NEC monitor as an example of widescreen monitors.

...Which is not necessarily a reason to bias results in one direction or
another, but it is a reason to emphasize the results enough to be
statistically significant and hence reportable.

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jcl
I can't seem to find a description of what the text or spreadsheet tasks were
that were used to evaluate the efficiency of the users. Judging from the
screenshots in the PDF linked to the story, though, they significantly
involved moving things between two documents or pages.

Granted, it is useful to know the relative efficiency of doing such tasks on
different monitor configurations. But, unless this is the only thing all of
your employees do all day, it's highly misleading to turn the efficiency
improvement into a dollar amount based on percentage of employee salary.

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zhyder
"All three groups were significantly more productive using 24-inch-or-larger
widescreen monitors (1920x1200 resolution, or larger) compared to 18-inch
displays (1280x1024 resolution), according to the research."

They're not comparing 2 displays with the same real estate (in area or total
pixel count). Well of course the _larger_ monitor will make you more
productive. I'm still dubious about the benefit of widescreen over standard-
format.

Widescreen's popularity has more to do with playing DVDs than with increased
productivity.

~~~
mdemare
True, I always choose standard size. I want vertical space much more badly
than horizontal, especially for browsing, editing source code and reading
PDFs.

~~~
ardit33
At work I have two 20.5" monitors hooked to a laptop. The main one is
horizontal, while the other is rotated vertically (NVDIA drivers let you do
that). I use the horizontal for everything, while the vertical one is for code
and code only.

It helps a lot.

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spydez
This sounds like the article from yesterday
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133356>), but the conclusions this one
draws are a lot more detailed.

They both reference the same study.

~~~
mechanical_fish
That's why not all duplicate submissions are bad. Sometimes Submission A is
what drives people to seek out and post New and Improved Submission B.

Of course, if news stories would _link to the freakin' primary sources_ ,
already, instead of acting like it's still 1972 and hypertext hasn't been
invented yet, we might not have to dig quite so deeply.

(Of course, half the time the primary sources are proprietary dead-trees
publications, so it's not always the fault of the journalists...)

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henning
Study sponsored by monitor company says to buy new monitors? No way!

