Guide
Monitor buying guide: How to find an all-round monitor for everyday use
by Jan Johannsen
Monitor buying guide: How to find a monitor for your home office
17.9.2020
Translation: machine translated
If you don't have a monitor, sooner or later you risk damaging your posture when working from home. However, finding the right monitor for your laptop is not difficult at all. You can read about what's important here.
If you pay attention to ergonomics, the right size and resolution, suitable connections and energy consumption, you can filter out a clear selection of suitable home office monitors from the large range on sale and find the best one for you. My recommendation for the filters:
- Ergonomics: anti-glare, height-adjustable, tiltable
- Size and resolution: 27 inch, WQHD resolution
- Connections: HDMI + USB-C
- Energy efficiency class: at least F (according to the new 2021 classes)
Reflective, mobile and big enough
Ergonomics are important as you will be sitting in front of the monitor for several hours every day. An unsuitable monitor can lead to back pain, tension or headaches due to poor posture in the long term. That's why your home office monitor should definitely be anti-glare so that you don't have to worry about reflections or "avoid" glare. It should also be height-adjustable and tiltable. Lateral rotation and a pivot function that allows you to turn the screen into portrait format are also nice, but not essential in my opinion.
In order to work well, you need to be able to see everything important on the monitor. 27 inches is not too big on the desk and a screen diagonal where you can easily open two programme windows next to each other to work with them in parallel. This is less convenient with smaller displays. At 27 inches, a Full HD resolution is not enough for me. A WQHD resolution with 2560×1440 pixels should be the best for this monitor size. It provides a recognisably better picture without increasing the costs too much - which would be the case with UHD (4K).
A curved monitor offers no advantages in the classic home office. They are more noticeable when playing games or editing photos and videos. And curved monitors are often more expensive in comparison.
HDMI and USB-C
Your monitor must of course match the connections on your computer. HDMI and USB-C are the two connections that cover the majority of computers. HDMI is currently still the standard for image transmission. With USB-C, you are well positioned for the future. This connection is becoming the new standard for image transmission. Apple is a pioneer in this area and only equips some of its MacBooks with a single USB-C port, which is used for image transmission and power supply at the same time.
As the monitor will be switched on for several hours a day, it's worth taking a look at the energy consumption. That's why I choose at least energy efficiency class "E", which has been in force since March 2021.
If I feed our filters with these specifications - anti-glare, height-adjustable, tiltable, 27 inches, WQHD, HDMI, USB-C and at least energy efficiency class A - these are currently the five most popular models from our range.
Do you need other connections or want an integrated webcam in the monitor? Then you can adjust the filters here.
When I was but a young student, I'd sit in my friend's living room with all my classmates and play on his SuperNES. Since then I've had the opportunity to test out all the newest technology for you. I've done reviews at Curved, Computer Bild and Netzwelt, and have now arrived at Galaxus.de.