Could a 30-in. monitor help you do your job faster?

Providing employees with 30-in. computer monitors can boost worker productivity at companies where 17-in. or 19-in. monitors are typically used, according to a French consultant hired for a study sponsored by Apple Computer.

The study, which evaluated Apple's 30-inch Apple Cinema Display, concluded that large screens can offer gains of up to 50 percent to 65 percent in productivity on a variety of specific office tasks and can earn back their extra costs in time savings over several years. The 30-in. display costs US$1,999.

But other experts say those conclusions are wrong, arguing that the productivity improvement estimates are too high and that using two monitors side by side would likely be a better productivity booster than one larger monitor. The 40-page study was conducted by Andreas Pfeiffer, principal of Paris-based Pfeiffer Consulting, for Apple, which paid for the research.

Pfeiffer looked at a range of computing tasks, from moving data between Microsoft Word and Excel files to image manipulation using Adobe Photoshop. In addition to studying the 30-in. LCD display from Apple, Pfeiffer also did the comparison using a 17-in. Samsung SyncMaster 172x LCD monitor. The Apple monitor has an optimal resolution of 2560 pixels by 1600 pixels, compared with 1280 pixels by 1024 pixels for the Samsung monitor.

The productivity gains, he said, occur because workers using larger monitors can avoid repetitive tasks such as switching between overlapping application windows. Instead, they can have more windows open side-by-side on a larger monitor.

The time savings are for commonly performed tasks and not meant to indicate overall productivity increases for workers, Pfeiffer said. Using a larger screen will only improve specific tasks where data is moved or manipulated quickly.

Pfeiffer's testing showed time savings of 13.63 seconds when moving files between folders using the larger screen -- 15.7 seconds compared to 29.3 seconds on the 17-in. monitor -- for a productivity gain of 46.45 percent. The testing showed a 65.09 percent productivity gain when dragging and dropping between images -- a task that took 6.4 seconds on the larger monitor compared to 18.3 seconds using the smaller screen. And cutting and pasting cells from Excel spreadsheets resulted in a 51.31 percent productivity gain -- a task that took 20.7 seconds on the larger monitor versus 42.6 seconds on the smaller screen.

"There's a very, very clear and strong correlation between screen size and productivity," Pfeiffer said. "If you're used to a having a 15-in. or 17-in. laptop and then go to a smaller resolution laptop, you can realize [the difference]. There are certain things that can really slow you down."

A larger monitor is as important as higher resolution, which allows more of an image to be shown on the screen, he said. "Of course individual behavior will impact productivity," he said. "A user who insists on using [program] menus will be slower than one who uses keyboard shortcuts, for instance."

Page Break

"I can surf the Net on one monitor and do something else on the other," said Peggy Duncan, an personal productivity expert and principal of PSC Press. "It all goes back to seeing more stuff at one time. But, in my opinion, productivity is increased more by using dual monitors."

Laura Stack, owner of The Productivity Pro consulting firm in Denver, said Pfeiffer's estimated productivity gains are way too high. She would estimate a maximum 5 percent productivity gain for workers using a larger monitor. "But you're not going to see the boost in productivity you'll see by adding a second screen," which could increase productivity as much as 30 percent, Stack said.

"People are not robots," Stack said. "It's impossible to see those kinds of productivity gains" as measured in the Pfeiffer study.

Neen James, a personal productivity expert who runs Neen James Communications, said a single larger screen could provide health benefits for workers such as less eye squinting, but she agreed that dual monitors would likely offer more verifiable productivity gains. "Those sorts of claims are fabulous from a marketing point of view," she said of the study, "but you can make statistics say anything."

Another productivity expert, however, said that either solution -- a single large monitor or dual displays -- could help workers, depending on what they do. "I think it would be a very personal decision," said Jan Jasper, principal of New York-based Jasper Productivity Solutions. "There's no contest to having more space [to work]."

Akilesh Bajaj, an MIS professor at the College of Business Administration at the University of Tulsa, reviewed the Pfeiffer report but said more research is needed before accurate conclusions are reached. "There's a lot of image processing [in the study] so it's easy to see where [the larger screen] would increase productivity," Bajaj said. But anecdotal remarks from colleagues estimated that they would not see substantial gains in their own work from having a larger screen, he said.

One multiple-monitor fan, Martin Doucet, owner of Vaixe, a small Montreal-based book publishing company, said he uses one primary 19-in. CRT monitor and two additional 17-in. CRT monitors to get his work done more efficiently in his home office. Doucet said he has been using the system for two years, with one screen for manuscript proofreading, another to follow the author's story plan and the third for communicating via e-mail or instant messaging.

"Having that much room makes it easy," he said. "I have everything at a glance. It saves time because you don't have to ALT-Tab all the time."

Apple's 30-in. display hasn't had much competition in that size range since its introduction, but Samsung Electronics America will debut its own 30-in. LCD monitor later this month at an estimated US$1,999, said Andy Weis, a product marketing manager at Samsung. The company has not done any specific research on productivity increases tied to larger screens, he said.