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PC Posture?

Chuck(G)

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Jan 11, 2007
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Pacific Northwest, USA
For the last few years, I've been using an NEC monitor with a stand that allows for screen height adjustment over a wide range (as well as being able to turn the display 90 degrees for an extra-tall portrait view). It's always been adjusted so that I'm looking straight ahead while sitting erect (good posture). I was working on another system today so I grabbed a couple of regular consumer-level 22" widescreen monitors to use. It's been driving me crazy.

While it's true that you can tilt the monitor so that you can look down at it, there's no height adjustment! If I wanted a vertical screen at eye level when I'm sitting with my back straight, I'd have to raise the monitor nearly 8 inches (20 cm) off the table top.

This is exactly the reason that I hate notebook computers. If I position the unit so the screen allows me to sit upright, looking straight ahead, the keyboard has me typing at the level of my shoulders.

So it got me to wonder what everyone else does to maintain good posture. Any suggestions?

It seems that ergonomics in modern computing is dead.
 
I use a fully adjustable chair and a fully adjustable keyboard slider/tray and a trackball so I just adjust myself to the correct height/angle for my monitor since it has little in the way of adjustment.

The fully adjustable keyboard sliders are pretty pricey. I was lucky and found the bulk of one at goodwill for a few bucks and found the manufacturer and got them to send me the missing track piece at a good price.

It wasn't until very recently that I started wearing glasses and realized how terribly unergonomic laptops are since I now have to tilt my had down to look at them.

That's all at home. At my shop I just stuck a box under the monitor in the back to raise it to the right height...
 
I use an Acco computer workstation, a huge heavy hunk of iron and wood from the 80s. I can adjust the height of the table (it rises or falls on a pair of chain-coupled threaded rods) and the keyboard tilt is fully adjustable. It'll hold a small elephant without sagging. But it does nothing for the monitor. My chair is a Steelcase ergonomic adjustable chair.

Ideal posture is feet flat on the floor with the lap parallel to the floor (basic seat height adjustment), erect spine, neck straight, not tilted. About all I can think of is to pile a bunch of stuff under the monitor to achieve the latter.
 
I have to use a laptop all day for school (on it now) and I've found that even if I look down, placing the laptop out in front of me so it's not in my face helps reduce the discomfort of using it actually on my lap, or trying to shove it through my chest to use it.

I do have an oddball Dell at home though that has swivel, display rotation and height adjustment, and it's one of my favorite monitors as you can sit it on a desk, sit it on top of a computer, wherever, and keep the same height.
 
It certainly used to be recommended that the monitor be head level with you so you aren't bending your neck and your back should be straight. Then of course the say to look away from the computer screen every so often and others go on to suggest a physical stretching exercise every hour or two. However someone recently mentioned some (horribly unergonomic IMHO) suggested that he saw somewhere about a monitor that was effectively upside down and leaning back on it's mount so it's almost like a table top display but at an angle. Apparently he saw this at some other company and it was suggested that your eyes move but not your neck so it was good according to whoever tried it there. I disagree but it was odd to see or hear anything other than the old posture you'd find in most computer manuals and user guides.
 
One of my workplaces for a time insisted that all monitors should be mounted on cantilevered arms so that they could hover above the desktop at any height and many angles. I think it was an insurance thing to avoid OH&S claims. Within a year or two, most people had stopped using them and sat their monitors on the desktop. Probably it was the old problem of too much choice introducing its own stress factors. With infinite choice, you can never be sure you have made the correct one.

Later the organisation gave up and just issued laminated diagrams of suggested best posture. They indicated looking down at the monitor at about 30degrees, chair height to have thighs parallel to the floor, keyboard height to have forearms roughly parallel to the desktop.

Later advice suggests that there is no such thing as a perfect working posture, because the key to avoiding repetitive strain injuries is to VARY posture with some frequency - eg sitting back with keyboard on lap for a time, then forward with keyboard on desk, changing chair height a little if feeling cramped, leaning forward, leaning back...

I agree with Chuck about the constraints of the laptop form factor. When forced to use one for travelling purposes, I always carry an external mouse and sometimes a roll-up keyboard so I can vary working posture.

The small screens of modern touchscreen devices also limit the ability to display broad context for the item that is in current focus. I consider it intellectually limiting. The point of a broadsheet, or a large screen, is that you can find things that you weren't looking for - this is the original meaning and value of "browsing". The commercial imperatives now push us toward targetted "searching" which is of more value to advertiser profiling.

I fear the next generation of mini-touchscreen users will end up as myopic hunchbacks with short attention spans.

Rick
 
The only LCD monitors I have seen with adjustable height are usually the ones that can flip to portrait mode (so they can clear the desk). This feature is usually limited to more expensive workstation class monitors, not the cheaper consumer line. The nice thing about LCDs is that they all seem to have a VESA standard mount on them so you can connect another stand/mount that meets your needs.
 
My 24-inch HP monitor is a cheap one, but its height is adjustable. In fact I believe all the different types of monitors we have in the office are a) cheap, and b) have adjustable height. I carefully adjust mine so that I look almost straight forward, possibly a tiny bit downwards at the center of the screen when I sit in a relaxed, slightly backwards-leaning position.

-Tor
 
My 24-inch HP monitor is a cheap one, but its height is adjustable. In fact I believe all the different types of monitors we have in the office are a) cheap, and b) have adjustable height. I carefully adjust mine so that I look almost straight forward, possibly a tiny bit downwards at the center of the screen when I sit in a relaxed, slightly backwards-leaning position.

The Scandanavian countries have always had a tradition of ergonomics. I remember that the Tandberg/Norsk Data terminals were designed with ergonomic comfort in mind. I'd be surprised if you didn't have workplace legislation somewhere that mandated some sort of ergonomic accomodation. Most countries don't.
 
You may be right - didn't think of that. Maybe the monitor models sold here are delivered with a monitor stand that would be extra elsewhere. Funny you should mention Tandberg/Norsk Data terminals.. when I started working full time as a young man I worked with Norsk Data models of Tandberg terminals.. ergonomical, of course. And ergonomic accomodations pay off, I've been in front of a computer screen for 31 years now, with no pain anywhere, no back problems (I picked my own perfect office chair back in 1986, and I'm still using it - got it fixed up as new a few years ago), no shoulder- or neck problems, which boils down to an employee in his fifties with zero sick leave days for that kind of problems :)

-Tor
 
For the better part of a year, I had the use of a "loaned for evaluation" Tandberg terminal. I loved it and would have seriously harmed anyone who tried to take it from me. Everyone else was using ADDS, Perkin-Elmer, a late Beehive VT100 model, and a few others I don't recall. They were garbage compared with the Tandberg.

I'm sitting in front of a 5:4 aspect ratio 20" NEC LCD, circa 2000. The usable screen area is huge compared to the 22" wide-screen models that I have--and the height is adjustable (it has 5 BNCs on the back and will do sync-on-green or any other type of composite sync).

Where does one find such stuff now? I hate widescreen monitors.
 
Where does one find such stuff now? I hate widescreen monitors.

IMO, you didn't go high enough (size and price). When I moved on from a 20" 4:3 Trinitron I chose a professional-grade 24" widescreen HP monitor ($750 at the time). 22" widescreen was too small.

The 24" pro monitors are 16:10 instead of 16:9 so you get 1920x1200 native which is just enough for me to be happy. The pro monitors have multiple inputs; mine can take composite, Y/C, component, VGA, HDMI, DVI, and Displayport (and some are multiples of each, ie. I have two HDMI and two DVI connectors). I expect I'll have this monitor until it dies (3+ years and so far so good). The stand that came with it has a height adjustment as well as a 90-degree rotation (but no autosense of rotation; I have to rotate the operating system's graphics/desktop via my graphics card control panel before I rotate the monitor physically in the real world).

When I eventually move on, it will be to nothing less than a 27" 2560x1440 or 2560x1600, or three 1920x1080 monitors, whichever is cheaper.

I still have my trinitron, as well as a few other tubes. Pro LCDs are good but they're not perfect; mine can't sync properly to extreme video trickery delivered over the VGA port (stuff that works on a fixed-frequency monitor but confuses auto-sync models).
 
I hate widescreen monitors.

I thought I did too, because the shop demos are always irritating action movies or other pointless graphics selected by marketing staff. But at my last monitor upgrade I realised how useful it is to have two documents open side by side at good resolution - the sort of thing people used to need dual monitors for. I never use it for widescreen movies or games, just not interested. Less clutter than dual monitors.

Rick
 
I like widescreen too, for the same reason: I like to keep two pages of editor windows side-by-side. Great when programming, which is what I do. That's why (when away from the office) I prefer to work on my very very old laptop instead of the new fancy one - the old one has a 1400x1050 display.

The problem with wide screen displays isn't the wide screen, it's that sometimes it goes with low vertical height/resolution, which means that I can't get an A4-shaped page on the display at a font size I can read. This makes most modern laptops useless to me, they have very wide, but very low screens. It doesn't help to be able to see two pages side-by-side if I lose vertical real estate. It's like they're meant simply as glorified movie viewers. Glossy horribly reflecting screens too, many of them. What a waste. As far as I'm concerned those laptops could as well be delivered without keyboards and just a buttton for starting the video. They're certainly no good for programmers.

My 24-inch HP office monitor is great though. It's only that I should have requested it many years earlier, those last years before I got it I had been moving closer and closer to the old screen and developed vision problems due to that (I now require prism glasses to keep my stereoscopic vision at distance. I must add that it was always a latent possibility due to uneven vision between the eyes. But working for so long close to the screen triggered it). The 24-inch I can keep at the distance I used (with smaller screens) a couple of decades back. (I've never been keen on working with dual displays, although some of my colleagues do. It bothers me and takes me out of the "flow", which is the death to programmers. For those for whom two or three screens work well I guess that's a valuable option.)

If I'm replacing this monitor I'll go for the 30" HP model, it's quite similar but has 2.5K pixels horizontal resolution I think - my 24" is 1920x1200 IIRC. Well, around there anyway. I'm not after the resolution though, the size is what's important, so that I can keep it at a good distance.
 
A useful link:

http://daleswanson.org/things/screensize.htm

It's apparent that 4:3 and 5:4 aspect ratios give the most bang for the diagonal--inch buck. It's worth noting that a 20" 5:4 monitor has about the same area as a 24" 16:10 widescreen model.

I don't need the extra width of a widescreen, although a 17:22 (i.e. tall) monitor would be a plus (same ratio as a US letter size sheet). That's pretty close to 16:22, or a 5:4 monitor turned on its side.

I prefer using two monitors--one right in front of me and one off to the side, a bit lower that I can consult from time to time. Staring dead ahead at all times seems like punishment to me.
 
Eh, I'm not communicating well today. :(

Key in 20" 5:4 at the top, then go to the second (bottom) section of the screen. Check under 16:10 monitor for equivalent height: 23.57. I've already said that I don't care about width, given that most things I work with are taller than they are wide.

For that 24" 16:10 monitor, why not take the same area and go extreme wide-screen? 50"x5" ? Think of all the work you'd get done... :)
 
The 24" pro monitors are 16:10 instead of 16:9 so you get 1920x1200 native which is just enough for me to be happy. The pro monitors have multiple inputs; mine can take composite, Y/C, component, VGA, HDMI, DVI, and Displayport (and some are multiples of each, ie. I have two HDMI and two DVI connectors). I expect I'll have this monitor until it dies (3+ years and so far so good). The stand that came with it has a height adjustment as well as a 90-degree rotation (but no autosense of rotation; I have to rotate the operating system's graphics/desktop via my graphics card control panel before I rotate the monitor physically in the real world).

HP LP2475w? I got one on my desk right now. Sadly its now discontinued and the LED back-lit replacement model doesn't have all the extra ports. HDTV ruined computer displays. Now it is impossible to find a good 16:10 LCD or anything outside of that crappy 1366x768 (aka: 720p, why isn't this 1280x720?) or 1920x1080 resolutions. I don't find 16:9 "tall" enough for computer use. Plus 16:10 allows controls on full screen 16:9 video to rest outside of the video instead of overlaying it. There is also less pillarboxing for 4:3 content.
 
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