Let's get those picnic baskets...

Who invented the TV? Yogi bear wasn't it? What was the point? What was there to watch back then?

These questions don't bother me too greatly. However, I sometimes need to take a quick step back from the daily tussle at work and think about how silly we're being. My latest acquisition is a pair of flatscreen monitors - nothing too flashy, just two 17" 1024x768 screens. I have two because I need to work on a large number of things concurrently and one single screen is not enough (especially if you need to place large things side by side). I chose LCD screens because I have not got the desk space to use the cheaper CRT ones.

However, the flatscreen monitor is something which makes everyone coo. People have been making remarks about my new set up (about how it's quite flash and potentially related to my position as IT manager - namely I can buy myself whatever I choose). We even had a group of people gathered around a wide-angle flatscreen today, marvelling at how the picture doesn't get quite as bad as normal flatscreens when you move around. It seems that the flatscreen monitor has the novelty value of the first TVs. I don't understand our fascination with moving pictures and I don't really see the advantage of these LCD panels, outside of:

• Size
• Clarity (if set up correctly - though CRTs can match for clarity)
• Anti-glare properties
• Gamma curve (images look cleaner than a monitor usually does)

Ok, so that's a lot of advantages. However, people seem to be taken with this technology beyond the logical reasons I've given. For example, I ordered a 15" TFT screen today for someone to use on their desk at home to provide the image of their laptop. The laptop has its own 15" TFT screen, which works at a higher resolution and will give a better image, but the user insisted that they needed an extra screen... Why? because it's sexy!

So we get these toys and we look at them and coo at them and then realise that staring at any monitor for a long period is still going to give us a headache, if not from the reproduction of the image, then certainly from the content itself... Windows error boxes can be so demoralising!

01 November 2001
Ashley Frieze