[garyrichardson]

I declare BS. I'm sitting on my couch looking at my 55" TV right now. I can not contemplate a work environment where three 55" monitors would be usable for coding. You'd spend way too much time swivelling your head back and forth at any distance that text would be reasonable to read. Either that, or you have the monitors so far away that it's like using 30" monitors at low res.

In a NOC? Maybe. Day trader? Possibly. Not someone using a computer with the information density of source code.

[yantis]

Distance is 3 1/2 feet for the front monitor and 3 feet for the side monitors but with a bit more angle on the sides. Also, worth noting for me I find I use the left and middle one 90% of the time and the 3rd one is mostly for dashboards and email etc. I would assume that is probably very similar any any multi monitor setup.

I am trying to relate to your comment on your 55" TV. I guess the best way I can explain it is If its like any other TV out there it has a resolution of 1920x1080 at 1080p. So if you tried to do any work at any distance it would be useless like you stated above. As a thought experiment take your TV and chop it into four sections and take your TVs resolution and put it in one of those squares. That is what 3840x2160 resolution is like. Its any easy way to remember 4K as 4 times your 1080p resolution (though it really means 4K as in 4000). Hopefully that helps explain it better. If not just let me know.

[garyrichardson]

First up, my initial comment was a bit harsh. Sorry. Should have been phrased more like a question.

Here's what I was imagining: I've worked with 30" monitors in the past and I found that there was a trade off between what I could view at one time vs panning my eyes around. I can entirely take in a 15" mbp at about arms length, but I have to move my head slightly to see from bottom corner to opposite top corner on a 30".

I'm guessing a 55" inch screen is about the size of 12 mbp screens in a 3x4 block (based on the size of my 55" tv). At about 3' away I would only ever be able to see about 1/3 max. Multiple that by 2 screens and my chin would swivel from shoulder to shoulder to see two of them.

More screen real estate is better in general, I just can't imagine it's comfortable to work with so much space I need to move around to see it all.

[yantis]

That makes sense. I don't think I really swivel that much as I just slightly turn my head which gives me basically two monitors of screen. So basically I have my main screen which is full view. I turn my head slightly to the left and I see half the left screen. Same goes with the right.

The other half of the screen on both the left and right sides are used for less common things like email, dashboards , etc (though most of my right side is used for that too.. its a lot of space hehe).

So in reality you may have three big screens but you are really only using two without actually swiveling your head (one + half + half).

If I want to use the far half on either of the side monitors I do tilt (which is why they mostly have static stuff).

Though for everything you need to kind of break it up in sections because your eyes are moving around a lot if you are trying to do stuff with the whole screen (ie: if you play a game its harder because you have to keep looking at the four corners to get all the info), but for programming and other stuff you might use a split screen or triple split and just be working on X file in a part of the screen.