Forget the 30 inch monitor, get multiple monitors

If you're a gamer, one monitor is the way to go. If you're a workaholic like me, two 17" or 20" LCDs is a much better choice in terms of cost per pixel:

One 24" screen gives you 2.3 million pixels for $700-$800, whereas two 17" monitors gives you 2.6 million pixels for $300-$400.

One 30" screen gives you 4.1 million pixels for $1400-$1500, whereas two 20" monitors gives you 3.8 million pixels for $800-$900.

Some 17" and 20" monitors come with extremely thin bezels (borders around the screens), making for a modest division between the monitors.

I wonder why large monitors cost so much more per pixel than smaller monitors?

http://www.digitaltigers.com/displays-arena.shtml

Scroll to the bottom.

'nuf said.

One other thing. I used to have two SGI 1600x1024 monitors hooked up to my G4 tower, in side-by-side arrangement.

This is kind of hard to describe, but I found it felt most comfortable when my line of sight was perpendicular to the screen, and far less comfortable when I was viewing the screen at an angle, and the greater the angle, the more uncomfortable. For one thing, there's a degree of geometric distortion, like when you're trying to read something from one side, rather than straight ahead.

This can be reduced by moving the monitor farther away, but that can be a problem if you use small fonts.

This can also be exacerbated if your monitor has a poor viewing angle.

So I'm not sure if I'd like a big screen. With multiple small screens, you can at least adjust the angle of each screen so that each faces you straight-on. With a big screen, you have one point which is perpendicular to your line of sight. With multiple screens, each one can be adjusted to be perpendicular to your line of sight when you turn your head.

.... As an addendum to my comment about the menu: the menu behavior makes me miss the NeXT menu system. The menu was a vertical, floating stack of rectangular buttons, with submenus appearing as stacks to the right of the main stack. Submenus could be torn off and repositioned anywhere on screen. And the menu for an application could be moved anywhere on screen. IIRC, if you switched to another application, its menu would appear in the normal location, unless you'd specifically moved its menu as well.

In addition to the main menu, right-clicking (or left-clicking) could optionally bring up a full clone menu at the location of the mouse pointer.

In a dual-screen setup, you could move menus as you pleased to suit your workflow. And instead of having to mouse all the way over to the other screen, you could just right-click and get a menu right there.

It would be nice if Apple could enable something similar, if only a keyboard shortcut that would temporarily toggle the main menu between screens for convenience.

it is nice to have Photoshop's pallets on a separate monitor, and use the other one for the work area.

I've used 2 displays for years, even now that one of them is a 20" Cinema Display. Wide displays just aren't wide enough for real work (debugging, all of Photoshop's palettes, etc) and a 2nd screen is a must for me.

I love my 30". There's no doubt in my mind that it increases productivity. My previous setup was a 23" and a 20" next to it, which I sometimes used as well.

As far as web programming or web design goes, I hate using anything other than my 30" now. Rails development, for instance, is a piece of cake with a 30"... you have a terminal, textmate, a couple of web browsers and PDFs open all at once without having to switch between.

Obviously if your work consists of typing email and word doucments, though, it's probably not that helpful.

For a good many of us, it's a moot point. Until Apple graces the non-pro hardware with dual-link DVI, 30" isn't happening anyway. I could maybe afford a 30" or a Mac Pro, but not both.

Place me in the "drives me nuts" dual monitor camp. I love the idea of a dual setup, but I find them wildly distracting, and for whatever reason they always make me feel off balance (because of the lack of a visual central axis).

I have a dual display setup and the only thing i do not like about it is that the menubar and dock are only shown on the primary display. I wish there was software that would move the menubar and dock as i moved my mouse from display to display. It's a pain to move back to the primary just to get to the menu. I know the resolution is to memorize every keyboard shortcut but that is not logical.

http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/11/dell-busts-out-e207wfp-20-inch-lcd-for-the-budget-set/

dual/triple this and life will be grand. from a usability stand point, i think horizontal screen real estate is vastly more important than vertical since we can assume that the available vertical limit is sufficient enough while the horizontal space adds greater value in allowing more windows exposed and ready. the marginal gain is greater in my mind.