New Computer Possibilities - Part Four

LCD Types

For those who don't know, there are three different LCD technologies. The low end is twisted nematic (TN), which are found on most monitors and essentially all laptops. One of the characteristic failings of TN panels are their limited range of vision. Tilt your screen back and it will get dark and the colors will invert. Similar things happen from odd angles. This is very annoying if you've ever tried to watch a movie on a laptop, especially with friends. The bigger the LCD, the bigger the problem because parts of your screen will be darker than others.

The mid-range solution is called PVA (Patterned Vertical Alignment). The colors are better than the TN and there is no problem with viewing angles. The trade-off is expense and a slower response time. S-PVA, or Super PVA, is an overdrive technology to speed up the display and in my understanding this is generally successful without too many problems.

The high-end are In-Plane Switching (IPS) panels. These are the replacement for the very expensive high-end CRT monitors used in graphics work. The color reproductions are very good (and pretty much everyone at this end has a colorimeter to calibrate their display too) but speed is even slower. S-IPS is the overdrive technology, similar to S-PVA. These are very expensive displays and only necessary for professional graphics and photography.

So the question becomes, do I want to pay a significant premium (another 50% on the 21.5"/22" display) for a superior display technology? Alternatively, do I want another 2.5" in exchange for a lesser technology at the same price?

When I looked at monitors in the store, the 24" ones seem the best compromise. Anything bigger (26" or 30") is just huge and very expensive. You can buy two 24" displays for the price of a 30" and I might very well do that. I will also probably eventually get an ergonomic arm to lift the display to the right level sans phone book ^-^.

Two, or even three, displays might seem like excess but the increase in productivity is well-established. If I really do start making my living off of a computer, it's something I'll definitely want. You can put documentation on one, your editor/IDE on another and, if you have a third, your testing window. This is much faster and more natural than switching desktops or, God forbid, you have Windows XP and are constrained to a single desktop where you have to swap windows in and out >.<. I use a 3x3 square of virtual desktops so that I can easily swap between tasks:

Terminal	Editor	Web
	Documentation	Chat
		Music

The empty desktops are used for temporary applications. While coding, I spend most of my time in the Editor desktop and from here, I can swap to the Terminal, Documentation or Web desktops with one keystroke.

For obvious reasons, having nine physical displays would be a bit ridiculous, it'd be like being a air traffic controller or security guard (or the dad in Lain) but it's certainly been done, like this. At some point, there are diminishing returns. I think after three, it's too much. The nice thing about three is that you can have a center with two wings rather than your center point being a bezel. Thus I could put my editor in the middle, my terminal to the left and the web to the right, or whatever. I could still have other virtual desktops for different tasks.