Monitor size?
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I currently use a 17'' lcd monitor, I'm in visual Studio all day pretty much. I'm thinking of going to a bigger monitor but I'm not sure if there is any real advantage to it. Currently my monitor is fairly close, about an arms length away or less if I'm leaning in. I hate having multiple windows in view at the same time and always run them full screen and swap instead. That would not change no matter how large my monitor is because I like to focus on one thing at a time. Is there any real advantage to having a bigger monitor for Visual Studio? And what size are you using for programming?
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt
John Cardinal wrote:
And what size are you using for programming?
I use a single, 17" LCD at home and at work.
"A good athlete is the result of a good and worthy opponent." - David Crow
"To have a respect for ourselves guides our morals; to have deference for others governs our manners." - Laurence Sterne
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I'm going to wag and say the 32's are LCD TVs with either DVI input or DVI to HDMI converters. 13xx by 768 is a popular resolution for doing that although the thought of sitting close to big chunky pixels again makes me recoil in horror. :rolleyes:
-- If you view money as inherently evil, I view it as my duty to assist in making you more virtuous.
dan neely wrote:
13xx by 768 is a popular resolution for doing that although the thought of sitting close to big chunky pixels again makes me recoil in horror.
:omg::wtf::omg::wtf: You know, I could never explain that to my boss. He just laughed. We have a 52" plasma outside my office for demos, we have a 32" LCD as well. I take them to presentations, but have never tried to ask for them for my desk. My boss joked that I would steal the 52" plasma right away, but at 1340x768? X| X| Sorry, I like to actually have some "resolution" to my screen. I have never needed a real-time stained glass display. Presentations, where everyone is standing back? no problem, love the brightness, go for it. But I don't want a 52" on my desk.
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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I currently use a 17'' lcd monitor, I'm in visual Studio all day pretty much. I'm thinking of going to a bigger monitor but I'm not sure if there is any real advantage to it. Currently my monitor is fairly close, about an arms length away or less if I'm leaning in. I hate having multiple windows in view at the same time and always run them full screen and swap instead. That would not change no matter how large my monitor is because I like to focus on one thing at a time. Is there any real advantage to having a bigger monitor for Visual Studio? And what size are you using for programming?
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt
I have a 17 and a 22. I develop with visual studio 2005, and I like the 22 because I can leave my two side panels open and not have them interfer with my code area. I have it set at 1680x1050. I think 22's are the optimum.
Programmer Glenn Earl Graham Austin, TX
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Gary Kirkham wrote:
I have two 32" monitors.
got me beat. Who makes the 32" and at what resolutions? you run single card, dual monitor or dual to dual?
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
It's two Apple Cinema displays running 2560 X 1600 resolution. It requires 2-dual DVI's (nVidia Quadro FX 3500) Actually my memory was a little foggy, they are 30" displays
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
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Personally, I think that above about 19" the screen starts to get too big to be able to see at a glance. However, the *big* gain is when you have two monitors. I can't believe that some posters say that there is no advantage to this. I will never again try to debug a GUI application without two monitors. Imagine the situation... there is an annoying bug that only appears when when a sequence of messages appears in the message queue. You don't know quite what it is, so you set a breakpoint after the first (known) message arrives. You run through the application. Bang! You hit it... and your IDE pops up in front of the application being debugged, causing a host of extra messages to be places in your application's message queue. That's why two screens are useful.
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I currently use a 17'' lcd monitor, I'm in visual Studio all day pretty much. I'm thinking of going to a bigger monitor but I'm not sure if there is any real advantage to it. Currently my monitor is fairly close, about an arms length away or less if I'm leaning in. I hate having multiple windows in view at the same time and always run them full screen and swap instead. That would not change no matter how large my monitor is because I like to focus on one thing at a time. Is there any real advantage to having a bigger monitor for Visual Studio? And what size are you using for programming?
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt
I use 2 Dell 20" wide screen 1680x1050 LCDs (2005FPW/2007WFP). I would highly suggest multiple hi-res monitors over 1 larger monitor. Inches are not as important as pixels! As you said, you like to keep things maximized. One screen can have studio maxed on it. The other screen can have the app you are debugging running on it, or email, or docs. You get the idea. You will find your optimal layout. The one thing I have found exceptionally powerful with multiple monitors is the ability to debug draw issues that are vitually impossible to debug on a single monitor. Swapping back and forth between the debugger and the app on one screen completely messes up the paint/message sequence!
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The advantage is not inches ( no comments, please ), but pixels. I have a 22 inch monitor and if it wasn't able to do 1600x1200, it would have no advantage over my 17" LCD, which only does 1280x1024. The extra pixels are magic. I'd be lost without them. Even when I buy a notebook with a small screen, I try to get the higher res if I can.
Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++ "I am working on a project that will convert a FORTRAN code to corresponding C++ code.I am not aware of FORTRAN syntax" ( spotted in the C++/CLI forum )
I definitely agree. I have two 20" monitors at home for when I was consulting. Having 2x 1600x1200 is great when you're writing code. I did use one monitor as my primary where almost everything was blown up to full screen. On the other monitor I frequently positioned the windows so that I could see several of my other tools at once such as help documentation, ftp, ssh, testing GUI, etc. To always have 100% access to my code in one monitor and quickly test, upload, etc in my other was great. At my current job I have a 17". 1280x1024 is my max and I feel crippled. It's like all of a sudden losing sight in one eye. I've finally gotten a request for a new machine pushed through. Now I'm just waiting for it to actually become a reality. Matt
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I believe it really does help. Take your Visual Studio example, on a widescreen 17" laptop you are only able to see about 33 lines of code... what I have is a 21" monitor turned vertically and I can see about 86 lines of code...roughly the same resolution. The fact that I'm not scrolling around and am able to see a TON more code is great. Below is an article I found and an excerpt that I used to get justification for them to pony up the dough to buy it for me at work. It was a real pain, but that's another thread. Buy the monitor! Article ---- Gloria Mark, a University of California at Irvine instructor, later hired by Microsoft research labs and Mary Czerwinski who worked for NASA did an article on productivity. Here is the highlight -- The researchers took 15 volunteers, sat each one in front of a regular-size 15-inch monitor and had them complete a variety of tasks designed to challenge their powers of concentration - like a Web search, some cutting and pasting and memorizing a seven-digit phone number. Then the volunteers repeated these same tasks, this time using a computer with a massive 42-inch screen, as big as a plasma TV. The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains. Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that they begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16guru.html?ei=5090&en=c8985a80d74cefc1&ex=1287115200&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1129521853-ar/Jp1qnf0XCl9MGUEiLGA
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It's two Apple Cinema displays running 2560 X 1600 resolution. It requires 2-dual DVI's (nVidia Quadro FX 3500) Actually my memory was a little foggy, they are 30" displays
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
Gary Kirkham wrote:
It's two Apple Cinema displays running 2560 X 1600 resolution.
I thought those were only 30 inches. Apple, then Dell, then Samsung as far as 30 producton came about. http://www.apple.com/displays/specs.html[^] Ahhh, I see you corrected the original. I guess now I can mention, I have a 3rd 21 inch tied in from a linux machine using synergy.... I need to hook up my old 21" wacom similarly for a nice 4 monitor solution. ;)
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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I have two 32" 30" monitors. I don't think that there is any real advantage for programming, I am just here to brag. :-D -- modified at 11:35 Monday 15th October, 2007
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
Gary Kirkham wrote:
I have two 32" 30" monitors. I don't think that there is any real advantage for programming, I am just here to brag.
I'm using 30 2" monitors ... it's like having the compound eye of a fly. Sometimes it's hard to get context, but I sure can move fast ;-) Actually, I still prefer CRT's to LCD's but I'm going to have to eventually change (prehaps LCOS will save me :-). I use a single 22" at work and have a 22" and 17" at home but I never use the 17" eventho it's plugged up and can be used as a second monitor. It's difficult to have multiple CRT's (size, weight, heat issues). Flat panels are very nice for that. If you do GUI programming I think having two monitors is VERY useful. It can also be helpful in more complex developement environments like Visual Studio where when you are debugging you often need to have a lot of context available. I think resolution and clarity are of equal importance to size. Don't just compare size, look at DPI. Remember! as you get older everything shinks up and gets smaller ... even the text on the screen. :-)
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I currently use a 17'' lcd monitor, I'm in visual Studio all day pretty much. I'm thinking of going to a bigger monitor but I'm not sure if there is any real advantage to it. Currently my monitor is fairly close, about an arms length away or less if I'm leaning in. I hate having multiple windows in view at the same time and always run them full screen and swap instead. That would not change no matter how large my monitor is because I like to focus on one thing at a time. Is there any real advantage to having a bigger monitor for Visual Studio? And what size are you using for programming?
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt
I wouldn't go any larger than 22". Spend the extra cash you have on one or two additional monitors. For the price of a single 24" monitor, you could get roughly 3 20" monitors. Scott Hanselman blogged about the advantages of 3 monitors here http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ThreeMonitorsICantGoBack.aspx[^] The main thing is that you can leave the center monitor as your development environment and use the 2 side monitors for things that you do, but not every minute, such as e-mail, your web page in Firefox, your web page in IE, your IM tool, etc. It allows you to toggle back and forth. So you can see the web page that you're editing as well as the code without resizing, toggling, finding your place again, etc.
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I currently use a 17'' lcd monitor, I'm in visual Studio all day pretty much. I'm thinking of going to a bigger monitor but I'm not sure if there is any real advantage to it. Currently my monitor is fairly close, about an arms length away or less if I'm leaning in. I hate having multiple windows in view at the same time and always run them full screen and swap instead. That would not change no matter how large my monitor is because I like to focus on one thing at a time. Is there any real advantage to having a bigger monitor for Visual Studio? And what size are you using for programming?
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt
First off every programmer should have two monitors! We were at a HP related show as a vendor and required to have HP equipment in our booth, so we brought two of the HP w2207 monitors for our demo. In them selves they are great monitors, but the programmer friendly thing about them is that you can switch the orientation by rotating the monitor so that you have a very tall screen which lets you see lots of code or read entire web pages with very little scrolling. After the show I had both of them on my work computer and liked it so much that I took one of the monitors home. So now in both locations I have one HP w2207 and a 17 inch monitor. The application I am debuging is displayed on the 17 inch and the code on the vertical 22 inch, absolutely a great combination. The only trick being that you have put old books under the 17 inch to align it's top with the rotated 22 inch. I consider it some of the best money I have spent on computer hardware.
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I currently use a 17'' lcd monitor, I'm in visual Studio all day pretty much. I'm thinking of going to a bigger monitor but I'm not sure if there is any real advantage to it. Currently my monitor is fairly close, about an arms length away or less if I'm leaning in. I hate having multiple windows in view at the same time and always run them full screen and swap instead. That would not change no matter how large my monitor is because I like to focus on one thing at a time. Is there any real advantage to having a bigger monitor for Visual Studio? And what size are you using for programming?
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt
For me monitor size is important, but you must also consider your video card resolution also. There is no sense in getting a high resolution monitor if your video card can not drive it at those higher resolutions. That said, get the biggest monitor you can afford and drive it at the highest resolution you can easily read. For example, I use a 21" ViewSonic P810 at 1800 x 1440 resolution. At this resolution I get 66 lines of code on the screen versus 17 lines of code at 800x600 resolution. More lines of code on the screen reduces the amount of paging required to view the code, the more paging that is done the more likely one is to lose their train of thought. The more lines of code on the screen makes it easier it is to follow the code functionality. If I could get a bigger monitor I would because bigger monitors at higher resolution makes me more productive.
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/* Home */ 3 19" 1 15" http://beatdownbox.com/style.jpg //does this make the winner? /* work */ 1 depressing 19" monitor, and 1 15" monitor on my laptop :( needless to say i prefer my home setup :)
I now have set up envy. Does anyone know the technical term for this?
Vincent http://www.pub-olympics.com
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For me monitor size is important, but you must also consider your video card resolution also. There is no sense in getting a high resolution monitor if your video card can not drive it at those higher resolutions. That said, get the biggest monitor you can afford and drive it at the highest resolution you can easily read. For example, I use a 21" ViewSonic P810 at 1800 x 1440 resolution. At this resolution I get 66 lines of code on the screen versus 17 lines of code at 800x600 resolution. More lines of code on the screen reduces the amount of paging required to view the code, the more paging that is done the more likely one is to lose their train of thought. The more lines of code on the screen makes it easier it is to follow the code functionality. If I could get a bigger monitor I would because bigger monitors at higher resolution makes me more productive.
I get 70 lines of code at 1280x1024. ProFontWindows 8pt.
{o,o}.oO( Did somebody say “mouse”? ) |)””’) -”-”-
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I currently use a 17'' lcd monitor, I'm in visual Studio all day pretty much. I'm thinking of going to a bigger monitor but I'm not sure if there is any real advantage to it. Currently my monitor is fairly close, about an arms length away or less if I'm leaning in. I hate having multiple windows in view at the same time and always run them full screen and swap instead. That would not change no matter how large my monitor is because I like to focus on one thing at a time. Is there any real advantage to having a bigger monitor for Visual Studio? And what size are you using for programming?
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt
Monitor size is only one component of the question, also what resoloution. I run 2048x1536 on 21". I have bought other 21" monitors for the group, one of my group likes to use it at 1024x768. I suggested glasses. I also run 1920x1200 on my dell laptop. I still want higher resoloution....
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I currently use a 17'' lcd monitor, I'm in visual Studio all day pretty much. I'm thinking of going to a bigger monitor but I'm not sure if there is any real advantage to it. Currently my monitor is fairly close, about an arms length away or less if I'm leaning in. I hate having multiple windows in view at the same time and always run them full screen and swap instead. That would not change no matter how large my monitor is because I like to focus on one thing at a time. Is there any real advantage to having a bigger monitor for Visual Studio? And what size are you using for programming?
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt
Size is good... need more monitors. I currently use 3 20.1" wides and 2 22" wides. My linux box has one 20.1" wide, is used mainly as a server(next computer I get I'll be moving almost everything to linux). Windows has the other four, going 20"-22"-22"-20" around the desk. First one is for "live" copy of my currently coding project, second is coding window, third is for IMs/FX/research/etc and 4th is for dev copy of my project. Depending on what I'm doing, there are times that I need/want to see a few different code files at once, I can just expand the window and throw up more(I use Eclipse and EditPlus2, depending on language). I've found productivity go up quite a bit compared to my original setup of one monitor, more I can display at one time the faster I can get stuff done. Oh, and Synergy is god... I don't know how I functioned before that. It makes having multiple computers so much easier(as does Hamachi).
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First off every programmer should have two monitors! We were at a HP related show as a vendor and required to have HP equipment in our booth, so we brought two of the HP w2207 monitors for our demo. In them selves they are great monitors, but the programmer friendly thing about them is that you can switch the orientation by rotating the monitor so that you have a very tall screen which lets you see lots of code or read entire web pages with very little scrolling. After the show I had both of them on my work computer and liked it so much that I took one of the monitors home. So now in both locations I have one HP w2207 and a 17 inch monitor. The application I am debuging is displayed on the 17 inch and the code on the vertical 22 inch, absolutely a great combination. The only trick being that you have put old books under the 17 inch to align it's top with the rotated 22 inch. I consider it some of the best money I have spent on computer hardware.
Now that's pretty nice... my next computer I was planning on going with the Dell or Samsung 30"+ monitors... but I'll have to look out for something that has that ability now(looking for a little bigger than 22"). I agree with you... a programmer really needs AT LEAST two monitors, I currently have five on two computers(nice horseshoe shaped desk so it's easy to look at) and hate when I go somewhere and only have one monitor to work off.
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The advantage is not inches ( no comments, please ), but pixels. I have a 22 inch monitor and if it wasn't able to do 1600x1200, it would have no advantage over my 17" LCD, which only does 1280x1024. The extra pixels are magic. I'd be lost without them. Even when I buy a notebook with a small screen, I try to get the higher res if I can.
Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++ "I am working on a project that will convert a FORTRAN code to corresponding C++ code.I am not aware of FORTRAN syntax" ( spotted in the C++/CLI forum )
Christian Graus wrote:
The extra pixels are magic.
Exactly! Pixels make all the difference!
____________________________________________________________________________ "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Adams -- Shohom67
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I have two 32" 30" monitors. I don't think that there is any real advantage for programming, I am just here to brag. :-D -- modified at 11:35 Monday 15th October, 2007
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
Well I own a graphical display company and have four custom-made RFB displays running at roughly 30 million pixels each, driven by a couple of 9 GHz core vid cards. (the displays cover all four walls of this room so playing video games is more realistic than real life) Beat that! Without envy, thomat65
