Widescreen monitors improve work productivity? Myth or reality?

I just run into a very interesting study, performed by Apple, regarding the increase of work productivity correlated with the usage of their 30" HD Display. This can be just a marketing gizmo, but it also could be true. We have to analyze that…

First of all, we must admit the fact that big widescreen and high-resolution displays aren’t cheap. In fact they are quite expensive. So, a company manager has to estimate if equipping the employees’ offices with this kind of equipment would be efficient and profitable on middle term at least. If the increase in work productivity satisfies certain levels, than the investment worths its price, and it should be taken.

Big screens pay for themselfs with a big productivity increase over the smaller ones

On the other hand, the working domain of a company is very important in the equation. A secretary that has to fill some Excel sheets and write some texts from time to time will do well enough with a 17" LCD, but if we’re talking about graphic design, web design, data processing or intensive programming, a big screen is a must. Let’s make some estimations. A decent 30" screen will go somewhere around 1500$-2000$. In the domains listed above, the difference between a 17" display and a 30" in terms of productivity would be quite meaningful.

The 30" Apple Cinema HD display offers a huge amount of information, with the 2560 x 1600 px resolution

Coming in contact with this areas almost daily, i would say at least 50%, if not more. And if we consider and estimated pay per day of around 100$, a 50% increase in productivity means 33 $ saved every day, considering that the employee does his job continuously, without interruption (yeah, this never happens in real world, but it’s just a premise in my judgement here). And if we divide 2000$ by 33, we get… 60 working days. That’s 3 months, without counting the weekends. So, hypothetically speaking, based on the numbers above, the investment would be paid off in 3 months. That’s quite OK, no?

The Samsung 17" display is even smaller than the Apple 20", the left one in this picture. And compare it with the 30" one, on the right..

Now let’s take a look at the study made by Apple that i was talking about earlier. You can find it here. Of course this study is more complex than the little sketch i made above, being done by specialists and analysing the cumulative effect of various activity over the productivity… Those covered different working domains, like digital imaging, design and general stuff, with programs like Adobe Photoshop CS2, Ilustrator CS2, Microsoft Office 2004 and QuarkExpress 6.5. The screens used were a 17" Samsung SyncMaster 172x (1280 x 1024 px) and a 30" Apple Cinema HD Display (2560 x 1600 px) matched with the same 2.7 GHz computer.

That’s how loose the Photoshop looks on the 30" Apple display

I won’t get into details, cause if you’re interested you can check them out yourself. But the conclusion is pretty simple. In every activity is important to be able to see a bigger quantity of information on the screen, and bigger displays allow that. In fact, that’s were the increase of productivity comes: from the easier access to the information needed to perform the various tasks. For example, it took a person 3 times more time to combine some image elements in Adobe Photoshop on the 17" screen that on the 30" one. That’s a 200% increase in productivity, if my maths OK. For a complete ROI (Return on Investment) estimate, check the tables on page 5 in the report. You will see that even at an estimated charge of 100$ per hour, the big display will pay for itself in a couple of months. And the bigger the charge, the faster the investment will pay off.

And the little fellow, the Samsung Syncmaster 172x

I have to say that I’m writing this article on my 17" Philips display. It’s OK, but i can’t say i wouldn’t want a 30" one… Maybe I’ll ask one to my boss, after he’ll read this article. And who knows, if i can prove my productivity increase will be big enough, i might get a raise!