Display Niches:

Three Paths to Pixel Profits

By William Van Winkle

Part 3: Multi-Monitor Mania

Increase productivity with multiple monitors

The bottom line with multiple monitors is about fundamental productivity gains. When you spread a desktop across two or more screens, you can see more, toggle windows less, make clearer decisions, and accomplish more work in less time.

Scientific studies proving this point are still rare, but the evidence is starting to accumulate. The first major finding was in a study conducted in 2003 by NEC-Mitsubishi, ATI, and the University of Utah called “Productivity and Multi-Screen Displays.” The results stated: “Participants in the study considered multi-screen configurations significantly more useful than single screens and preferred multiple monitor setups on every measure of usability. They found them 29% more effective for tasks, 24% more comfortable to use in tasks, and found it 39% easier to move around sources of information.”

Next up is a series of more recent studies conducted by the Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment (VIBE) group within Microsoft Research, which created a 42” widescreen display with 3072 x 768 resolution—essentially three side-by-side XGA screens blended into one curved Plexiglas sheet. Microsoft’s investigation found that users’ productivity increased anywhere from 9% to 50% depending on the application or activity. Moreover, the group discovered that a broader display field can improve the user’s memory. “There’s something about engaging the peripheral vision that improves your spatial memory of what has gone

Slow adoption, big market potential

Irresistible, right? Every customer should want one...or two or three. You would think so. But the question is: Why is there so little multi-monitor demand?

“There’s a whole lot of ignorance and stupidity going on with regard to multiple monitors,” says Geoff Amthor, president of Digital Tigers, one of the leading manufacturers of multi-monitor solutions. “Anyone who’s ever used multiple monitors will never go back. It’s like you walked in and your IQ jumped 20 points. What you can conceive in your mind you can now see better, and you’re not so much like a dog chasing its tail jumping around from place to place.

“So what’s the market for multiple monitors?” Amthor continues. “Well, it’s everyone. If you think when you use a computer, if you’re not like a teller just pounding out some rote activity, you’re the target market. Seventy percent of computer users should be using multiple monitors. The reason that’s not happening is not rational. It’s not economic, because people have the money to do this. So any kind of market projection is merely guessing at the question of when are people going to stop being stupid. When will the light reach their brains? I mean, Forbes recently did a piece on Bill Gates, and they

Key markets

Traditionally, the leading market for multi-monitor deployment is financial traders, who strive to make money on the information they can see and assess at once. The little bit more data a trader takes in could make a $10,000 difference in just one day. This is why the finance sector hardly blinks at the added expense of going multi-monitor.

To sink its hooks even further into this primary multi-monitor market, NVIDIA did some fancy tweaking and enabled user profiles within the display drivers. So a trader can walk up to any eight-monitor desk, for example, log in as himself, and his applications and desktop arrangement will come up exactly the same way regardless of their location. If you’re dealing with three, four, five displays, you don’t want to have to rearrange and reconfigure everything each time you switch offices and log in.

The Digital Tigers product line

Digital Tigers focuses all of its product families on multi-monitor systems. Most notable is the company’s Zenview line of multi-screen displays, running from the two-screen Zenview Duo 17X (twin 17” LCDs; $899) up through the Zenview Arena Ultra HD ($7,499), comprised of a 30” main panel flanked by two 20.1” LCDs in portrait orientation all topped by three landscape 20.1” screens.

The hottest seller, according to Amthor, is the Zenview Trio 19S ($1,799), a triptych of 1280 x 1024 (SXGA) 19” screens mounted on one stand. Digital Tigers uses Samsung for all of its displays, although the 19S uses the highest spec parts, featuring a 1000:1 contrast ratio and 178degree viewing angle. Within the product line, you’ll find some interesting value points. For example, there’s a $600 spread between the Zenview Trio 20S (three 20.1” screens) and the 21S (three 21.3” screens), even though the resolution between the two SKUs, and thus the amount of information that can be displayed, is identical.

One thing that differentiates multi-monitor vendors is the refinement of their software. Multiple monitor support in Windows is present but rudimentary. NVIDIA gives us a better sense of refinement with its Quadro NVS drivers. But Digital Tigers and its Zenview Manager title (free with displays; $75 separately) show how multi-monitor should be done.

As you know, if you run more than six or seven apps at once, their taskbar buttons start to condense so much that you can no longer tell what each button represents. Zenview Manager creates a separate taskbar for each monitor. You can not only assign applications to open on a specific monitor but resize, position them precisely, and save the arrangement for reuse on each new system startup. There are plenty of other, smaller features, but one of our favorites is the ability to span a wallpaper across all screens rather than the usual Windows approach of cloning the same shot to every panel.

Another of our favorites in the Digital Tigers lineup is the SideCar series. SideCars are PCMCIA-based boxes (ExpressCard is coming soon) housing NVIDIA- or Matrox-based display adapters. Different models allow for up to four monitors to link into the SideCar. Add in the laptop’s own screen and you now have a five-screen display system. For presenters who want to run multi-monitor setups in different locations, SideCars are an easy way to leave bulky monitors at the various sites and only haul one notebook around to power all of them in turn.

Now, don’t get into serious multi-monitor configurations and think that any ordinary system is up to the task of powering all of those apps running on all of those displays. Streaming video may be 2D, but it’s still bandwidth-and processing-intensive. John Peddie told us