Do all developers consider monitor quality (colors, not resolution) to be irrelevant?

Question

I especially hear it from those advocates of "business" notebooks manufactured by IBM/Lenovo, HP, Dell (maybe) that "business users do not need quality screens". They stick in the worst possible LCDs out there (even if with a high resolution) and dare to sell that crap. You can't even distinguish hue variations like light-yellow vs. light-grey.

I really miss it - do all of you agree color reproduction of a developer display is irrelevant, be it even a grayscale display it will do?

I understand most of developers work with text but... at times there is some design work to be done which is not doable on cheap LCDs.

And besides - wouldn't you enjoy fresh saturated colors even in a development environment? Bright cheerful icons on menus? Isn't it better to sit in a sunny office with green trees and flowers out of the window than in a garage with dark colors and weak artificial lighting?

P.S. Inspired by the topic about keyboards: Keyboard for programmers

The question about displays and developers really interests me since a very long time.

Answer 1

I'm a developer but being in webdev land i've picked up enough design stuff to be critical about it, so i mostly try to get samsung screens with a good colour range.

Answer 2

With a good monitor, you can adjust it to your likings.
Personally, I have a $700-Fujitsu Siemens monitor bought in (afaik) 2000, and a $340-BenQ bought in 2005, and I prefer coding on the first monitor, as I don't have to crank up the brightness (reducing headaches) and can still see everything I want to see (subpixelhinted 6 point fonts, subtle variations in syntax highlightings etc.).

Answer 3

Even though I don't need a high quality screen, I appreciate the difference, and like esnoeijs said, an occasion will arise where I'll need to critique some graphic design work where the quality monitor will make a difference.

Answer 4

At least one author would disagree. He ranked color accuracy on four notebooks:

1. Lenovo ThinkPad W700
2. IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T60
3. Dell Inspiron Mini 9
4. Apple late-2008 MacBook Pro 15 inch

Answer 5

Better quality color monitors can come in handy in a lot of ways. The first way that comes to mind is if you are using a code development tool that has the capability of highlighting keywords such as Zend does.

Answer 6

I'm less picky about the actual monitor I have and more picky that I have two monitors that are exactly the same model and use the same video connector.

As a web developer, it can be frustrating to have colors that don't match because one of your monitors is VGA and the other is DVI.

Answer 7

Possibly the sort of "business user" who works on invoices all day does not need a very good display, but anyone who works on anything whose appearance counts, from software developers to business users who need to make Powerpoint presentations, does.

Answer 8

I think, "developer" is too broad to give a precise answer.

• If you are a code-crafter of programs reading text emitting text, without the need to make some colors look nice, then yes, then you really can go with a monochrome screen. you need black as a background, white as the foreground and some reversing to highlight matching braces. In this particular case, I would value high resolutions far far more important than colors, since usually it is about seeing more code (and especially, more things about and around the current piece of code, like documentation, tests, a quick interpreter loop, some research paper, you name it).

• If you are a developer just learning a language and if you have an editor with syntax highlighting, then color is a massive, massive usability leap. I would not want to miss the ability to display keywords in a bright pink, strings in a brigt cyan and similar things (all on a black background)

• If you are a frontend-designer, then it is a completely different story. If you are a frontend designer, you will need a high quality display with good color display abilities. You do not need the best one possible, but your display should at least be able to display the colors your regular user will use, so you will not put in green, because you wanted blue and your users see yellow (or other nonsenses).

• if you use tools that require the use of colors in order to encode information, color is crucial, because you might be unable to see the additional information.

• ...

So, I think, most programmers do not need some ridiculous color displaying abilities, even though, most of the time, a good solid color display is helpful, because they need to work on some frontend or because they want to learn some language.

HTH, Tetha

Answer 9

If you are a hardcore terminal+vim user like me, they color quality and fidelity are almost irrelevant, except for the quality of blue (which I use in some situations, like directory names) which tends to be too faint to be seen on my black background. Nothing that cannot be fixed with some tinkering though, but I am used to blue.

That said, I actually have a couple of things to say about the new screen on the macbook unibody. The glossy finish is a real pain. So annoying. And the color fidelity is very low. I spent an evening trying to understand why on a gradient from light green to white I had a pinkish stripe. Turns out that the pink is an artifact of the macbook screen. Another screen does not show the issue. On the plus side, the LED backlight is very powerful and nice, making the colors very vibrant.

This to say that color fidelity is fundamental if you use color-intensive stuff like eclipse (which communicates a lot also through different shades of colors), and of course for web frontend development. If you just need a terminal and a vim running, I don't think color fidelity makes a real difference, once you have a comfortable setup with low reflections, and a good contrast.

Answer 10

I once spent half a day trying to add zebra striping to a table in my company's webapp that already had it because both my screen and QA's screen were unable to display the different colors of the zebra stripes (they rendered as the same color). Likewise, I once had my boss ask me to change the color of part of an icon, and to me it made the icon look like a uniform blue, but on his much better monitor, you could clearly see both shades of blue and it looked really nice... it was hard to make that edit without being able to see what I was doing.

I guess the developers in my company end up doing some design work in addition to real dev. I do spend most of my time in the shell though, so aside from the constant flickering that gives me headaches (yes, it's an LCD), a low-qual monitor is OK.

Answer 11

It depends what you're doing.

If you're dealing processing images, yes, a good "quality" monitor is important.. but equally (or more) important to have it set-up correctly and calibrated.

If you're doing web-design, having a decent monitor is important, but again only if it's setup correctly (contrast/brightness/colour-balance).

If you're just "writing code", having a monitor your eyes like is important, the colour replication isn't important. A monochrome monitor might be stretching it, syntax-highlighting is nice, but even vim and it's 16 colours is "enough"

The term quality is also a bit "it depends" also.. CRT's have far better colour replication than TFT's, but I wouldn't recommend them (I always found reading text on them difficult, and they are hard to find, bulky and generally deprecated now).

For web-design, pretty much any monitor will be fine as long as it's not a 10 year old CRT with a broken red cathode-tube.. Again, as long as it's set-up correctly, most monitors are capable of displaying colour "good enough"

For "writing code", I think size/resolution/number-of-screens is more important than colour replication, as shown by most answers to any of these questions

Answer 12

(note: it's been a few years since I've shopped for a monitor. this may be out of date)

I find it interesting that nobody has really defined "quality" yet, other than to say more vibrant colors. Generally, LCD panels fall into one of two tracks:

• Good color/image reproduction (S-IPS panels and similar)

• Good response time ( TN panels )

I consider SIPS and similar panels a must for development for one crucial reason: look angle. The image doesn't change colors or do other weird things as you angle to the screen changes. Very important for collaboration.

At the high end of this scale are monitors that are designed to perform will with color calibration. Most developers won't need anything this fancy.

TN panels are decent for gaming, movies, and other things featuring fast motion. They are optimized for pixel response time, and it's usually the main feature touted for these panels. Many cheaper panels are going to be of this variety.

In a monitor, I look for four things:

1. panel type (S-IPS or similar)
2. brightness (no more than 300cd/m2)
3. dot pitch (for good text, go with a small dot pitch: 0.27 is too big)
4. good contrast/ light leakage/ etc. (how black is black, and how uniform)

Although I love S-IPS panels, I must admit that any LCD monitor that can meet criteria 2-4 above would be a good choice, even if it's a cheaper TN panel.