Do all developers consider the quality of the monitor (color, not resolution) irrelevant?

Question

I especially hear from those proponents of "business laptops" manufactured by IBM / Lenovo, HP, Dell (possibly) that "business users don't need high-quality screens." They hold onto the worst possible LCDs (even with high resolution) and dare to sell that shit. You cannot even distinguish between shades such as light yellow or light gray.

I really miss him - all of you agree that the color rendition of the developer's display does not matter, even if it is displayed in shades of gray, what will it do?

I understand that most developers work with text, but ... sometimes there is some design work that does not work on cheap LCDs.

And besides, don’t you like fresh saturated colors even in the development environment? Bright funny menu icons? Isn’t it better to sit in a sunny office with green trees and flowers from a window than in a garage with dark colors and low artificial light?

PS Inspired by the Keyboard Theme: Keyboard for Programmers

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

Answer 1

Despite the fact that I do not need a high-quality screen, I appreciate the difference, and, as esnoeijs said, there will be a case when I will need to criticize some graphic works in which the quality monitor will make a difference.

Answer 2

I think the “developer” is too broad to give an exact answer.

• If you are a code developer reading text with text without the need for a beautiful color, then yes, then you can really go with a monochrome screen. you need a black background, white as the foreground, and the other, on the contrary, to highlight the corresponding curly braces. In this particular case, I would appreciate high resolutions much more important than colors, since usually it is about viewing more code (and especially things around the current part of the code, such as documentation, tests, quick interpreter cycle, some research , you name it).

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

• If you are a front-end designer, then this is a completely different story. If you are an interface designer, you will need a high-quality display with good color display capabilities. You don't need the best, but your display should at least be able to display colors that your average user will use, so you won't turn green because you need blue, and your users see yellow (or other nonsense).

• If you use tools that require the use of colors to encode information, color is crucial because you will not be able to see additional information.

• ...

So, I think most programmers don’t need any ridiculous color display capabilities, although in most cases a good solid color display is useful because they need to work on some kind of interface or because they want to learn some language.

NTN, Tetha

Answer 3

Better quality color monitors can come in handy in many ways. The first way that comes to mind is to use a code development tool that can highlight keywords such as Zend.

Answer 4

I once spent half a day trying to add a zebra stripe to a table in my webapp company, which already had this, because both my screen and QA screen were not able to display the different colors of the zebra strips (they were displayed as the same color). Similarly, once I asked my boss to change the color of a part of the icon, and for me he made the icon look like a blue shape, but on his much better monitor you could clearly see both shades of blue, and it looked really nice ... it was hard to do it editing, not being able to see what I'm doing.

I think the developers at my company end up doing some design work in addition to the real developers. I spend most of my time in the shell, though, since aside from the constant flickering that gives me headaches (yes, this is an LCD), a low-quality monitor is fine.

Answer 5

I am a developer, but while in webdev land, I collected enough material for the design to criticize it, so I mainly try to get samsung screens with a good color range.

Answer 6

With a good monitor, you can customize it as you wish.
Personally, I have a monitor worth $ 700 Fujitsu Siemens, bought in (afaik) 2000, and bought in 2005 $ 340-BenQ, and I prefer the coding on the first monitor, since I do not need to check the brightness (reducing headaches) and that's it can still see everything that I want to see (sub-pixel 6-dot fonts, subtle variations in syntax highlighting, etc.).

Answer 7

At least one author will not agree . He appreciated the color accuracy on four laptops:

• Lenovo ThinkPad W700
• IBM / Lenovo ThinkPad T60
• Dell Inspiron Mini 9
• Apple at the end of 2008 MacBook Pro 15 inches

Answer 8

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

As a web developer, it can be difficult to colorize colors that do not match because one of your monitors is VGA and the other is DVI.

Answer 9

It is possible that a “business user” who works on accounts all day does not need a very good display, but anyone who works on anything whose appearance matters, from software developers to business users who must make presentations Powerpoint does.

Answer 10

If you are a user of hardcore terminal + vim, like me, the quality and fidelity of the color are almost irrelevant, except for the quality of blue (which I use in some situations, for example, directory names), which is usually too weak to be visible on my black background. Nothing that can be fixed with some masters, though, but I'm used to blue.

However, I actually have a few things to say about the new screen on an unicody macbook. Glossy finish is a real pain. So annoying. And the color accuracy is very low. I spent the evening trying to understand why I had a pinkish streak on the gradient from light green to white. Turns out pink is a macbook screen artifact. The other screen does not show the problem. On the plus side, the LED backlight is very powerful and pleasant, which makes the colors very vibrant.

This suggests that color reproduction is fundamental if you use intense colors such as eclipse (which also conveys many different shades of colors) and, of course, to develop a web interface. If you just need a terminal and vim works, I don’t think that color accuracy is real if you have a convenient setting with low reflections and good contrast.

Answer 11

(note: several years have passed since I made purchases for the monitor, this may be outdated)

I'm curious that no one has yet defined "quality", except to say brighter colors. As a rule, LCD panels are divided into one of two tracks:

• Good color / image reproduction (S-IPS panels, etc.)

• Good response time (TN panels)

I believe that SIPS and similar panels are necessary for development for one important reason: look at the corner. The image does not change colors or do other strange things as you approach the screens. It is very important for cooperation.

At the top end of this cabinet are monitors that are designed to perform color calibration. Most developers will not need anything.

TN panels are suitable for games, movies and other things with fast movement. They are optimized for pixel response times, and this is usually the main function designed for these panels. Many cheaper panels will have this look.

On the monitor, I am looking for four things:

• panel type (S-IPS or similar)
• brightness (no more than 300 cd / m2)
• Point pitch (for good text, pitch with small dot pitch: 0.27 too large)
• good contrast / light leakage / etc. (as black is black, and as homogeneous)

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

Answer 12

It depends on what you do.

If you are involved in image processing, yes, a good quality monitor is important, but equally (or more) it is important to properly configure and calibrate it.

If you are engaged in web design, it is important to have a decent monitor, but again, only if it is configured correctly (contrast / brightness / color balance).

If you are just “writing code,” it’s important to have a monitor that looks like your eyes, color replication is not important. A monochrome monitor can stretch it, syntax highlighting is good, but even vim and 16 colors are “enough”

The term “quality” is also slightly “dependent on”. · CRT has much better color replication than TFT, but I would not recommend them (I always thought that reading text on them is difficult and difficult to find, cumbersome and currently not recommended).

For web design, almost any monitor will be perfect if it is not a 10-year-old CRT with a broken red cathode tube. Again, as long as it is configured correctly, most monitors are capable of displaying the color "reasonably good"

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