Displays: Go Wide, Get Bright, Sell More

Yes, desktop LCDs remain largely a commodity market, and an afterthought for most IT buyers, but by staying abreast of the latest technology trends, solution providers can gain the tech advantage.

Think Big

Whether you're reselling desktop displays or large-format public displays, bigger is better in 2007. On the desktop-display front (where displays range in size from 15 inches to 30 inches), 19-inch displays are predicted to dethrone 17-inch monitors this year as the predominant size of choice, according to market-research firm iSuppli. And vendors will continue to push that trend upward, unveiling a raft of new 19-inch-plus desktop displays this winter.

Expect to see bigger screen sizes in the large-display market as well, such as NEC's 57-inch MultiSync LCD5710—one of the largest commercial LCDs available on the market. The $15,000 LCD5710, which is targeted at the digital-signage space, boasts a resolution of 1,920-by-1,080, a contrast ratio of 900-to-1 and a horizontal and vertical viewing angle of 178 degrees.

Here, though, we'll be focusing on trends in the market for desktop displays ranging from 15 to 30 inches.

Go Wide

Widescreen desktop monitors are expected to gain greater traction this year, particularly in the SOHO market.

This trend is being fueled largely by display manufacturers, which can save money at manufacturing fabs by cutting desktop-display panels in the same wide format as LCD TV panels.

While it's difficult to demonstrate a strong productivity case for moving users to widescreen displays, that could change with the release of Microsoft's Vista operating system. Anticipating the industry shift toward widescreen displays, Microsoft designed the Premium version of Vista with user-interface features that take advantage of wide-format screens.

With Vista Premium, for example, a standing gadget bar with calendar, clock and weather information would be permanently displayed off to the side of a widescreen display—taking advantage of the extra horizontal real estate—instead of in a task bar on a square screen where users have to roll their mouse over the bar to get information. Analysts predict the new OS could further propel widescreen sales as prices continue to drop.

So far, larger businesses have been slower to adopt widescreen monitors than their smaller counterparts. That's partly because of ergonomics; corporate buyers require at least about 10.6 inches of viewable screen area (the amount available on a traditional 17-inch monitor with a 4-to-3 aspect ratio or on a 20-inch widescreen monitor), says Rhoda Alexander, an analyst at iSuppli. As prices of those larger widescreen displays start to come down, corporate buy-in of widescreen monitors could increase.

Bigger and wider form factors allow for higher revenue—and sometimes higher margins. But there are other trends in the desktop display market that could boost VARs' bottom lines.

NEXT: How to sell more

The use of multiple displays isn't just for niche vertical applications such as financial trading anymore.

"There's absolutely more mainstream usage of multiple displays," Alexander says. "We expected to see monitor sales fall off because desktop sales were impacted by the ascendancy of notebooks. But monitor sales are still moving along, and one of the reasons is the use of multiple displays. People are finding these displays affordable and are getting an increase in productivity by having multiple displays."

In 2003, a study conducted by NEC, ATI Technologies and the University of Utah, titled "Productivity and Multi-Screen Displays," found that multimonitor setups increased errorless productivity by 18 percent. While the productivity gains from multimonitor configurations have been little disputed, cost has been a big barrier for many years. LCD prices, though, have now fallen to a level where it can pay off to outfit some employees with multiple monitors. And many desktop PCs now include dual outputs for multiple monitors as a standard feature.

VARs can tap into this trend a couple of ways. For one, they can boost revenue by selling additional displays. But they can also bring in higher margins by selling multimonitor stands, arms and wall mounts geared at improving productivity and ergonomics.

Ergotron, a vendor based in St. Paul, Minn., offers the LX Dual and Triple Display Lift Stands. The latter allows users to mount up to three displays on a single base and use their fingertips to simultaneously adjust the height of displays, rotate display screens into portrait or landscape mode, and tilt them forward or backward. The devices, which range in price from $200 to $600, help alleviate end-user back and neck strain.

"No one sits in the same position for 8 hours, so it's great to have the flexibility of moving the monitor," says Scott Gray, product marketing manager for commercial displays at Hewlett-Packard. "Once you try it, you never go back. It's one of those things that becomes more popular as people try it."

Ergotron also sells multimonitor and single monitor stands and carts specifically designed for vertical markets such as health care and education. For example, the company offers different mounting solutions for integrating displays, notebooks and tablet PCs into hospital rooms, operating rooms and nurses' stations. Ergotron also makes carts and podiums designed for educators, and the vendor is designing a low-cost "sit-stand" desk that would allow students to sit or stand and still have access to their computers, as research has shown that periodic standing in classroom settings can improve learning.

NEXT: Product watch

Some of the displays now hitting the market demonstrate how technology improvements continue to change the criteria for which displays should be compared.

Solution providers cited response time as one of the top three most important characteristics when selecting displays (after price and resolution) in the 2006 VARBusiness State of Technology survey.

As the industry has migrated from CRT-based monitors to LCDs, slower response times have been one of end users' main complaints. But it's now becoming a less relevant metric, especially for the commercial market, as almost all new LCDs have response times suitable for the mainstream commercial market. Most new displays have a response times of 8 milliseconds or less.

Contrast ratio is another metric that has long been a product differentiator. LCD vendors have made great technological strides in recent years, and most of today's monitors have contrast ratios that are acceptable for office use.

"The perception is still out there that quality improves with a higher contrast ratio, but the human eye can't differentiate much beyond 500-to-1, 1,000-to-1 and 1,500-to-1," HP's Gray says. "It's just a number."

Color quality is another way to differentiate between displays, and LCDs have also improved significantly in this area, now featuring higher percentages of the National Television System Committee's color gamut. HP's new 30-inch widescreen LCD, the HP LP3065, is a case in point, demonstrating 92 percent of NTSC's range.

Some vendors are even introducing displays with more than 100 percent of the color gamut by using LED back-light unit, or BLU, technology instead of traditional cold cathode fluorescent lamps, or CCFLs.

For example, Samsung last month started shipping the SyncMaster XL20, which reaches 114 percent of the NTSC color gamut. At roughly $2,000, this LED-based display is pricey, and it's generally geared for users in photography, publishing, gaming and engineering.

LED-based displays are more costly because all of the bulbs have to come from the same batch to ensure color consistency—an obstacle that hampers manufacturing speed and, therefore, drives up costs. But if the manufacturing process evolves, LED monitors could become a compelling alternative to CCFLs, as they provide better color quality and are more environmentally friendly.

NEXT: The Vista impact

Some display vendors are touting Microsoft Vista compatibility as a differentiating feature, so it's important to note a few key differences between a Vista Basic-capable monitor and a Vista Premium-capable one.

While Microsoft originally planned for both versions of Vista to support the Display Data Channel Command Interface (DDC/CI) standard, now only the Premium version requires DDC/CI support. The standard, which facilitates two-way communications between host computers and displays, lets IT managers track and control display assets on a network more easily. Those specs may change in future service packs, and many vendors are already including DDC/CI support in their displays.

"That's one thing we've been really pushing for," says Stan Swiderski, senior product development engineer at NEC.

Another difference between the Vista Basic and Premium specs is support for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), the Intel-developed standard that allows encrypted high-definition video content to be displayed. This will be more of a differentiator for large public displays and the emerging class of multifunction displays that combine elements of both computer screens and TVs.

"The biggest feature in Vista for displays is HDCP," Swiderski says. "For a standard desktop display, it's not a big deal. But for digital signage, it's more important."

Another feature that was originally planned for inclusion in Vista is 10-bit lookup tables instead of 8-bit. The former would help improve a monitor's color quality. Stay tuned: Sources say 10-bit lookup is planned for Vista Service Pack 2.