A wide-wide screen

A lot of offices now sport at least one staff member with two monitors.

They’re using one screen for work and the other to keep an eye on the markets or social media, or using two screens for faster image or video editing.

Over the past year or so, an alternative has emerged: the double-wide monitor.

One of these babies landed at NBR Towers yesterday: the 34-inch CF791.

As well as being super-wide, the  CF791 is gently curved.

The curved TV craze left me cold. Sure it can be immersive if you’re sitting front-and-centre. But unless you're the person sitting in the sweet spot, and reasonably close, it just looks odd. Of course, in the workstation environment, you’re always in the money seat, so it makes a lot more sense.

The  CF791 s doublewide screen has a number of practical advantages in single screen mode. I immediately took advantage of its width for a superwide Tweetdeck display. And games will love it for the peripheral vision (and the 100MHz refresh rate). But a more productive worker could also use it for editing a wide image,or viewing a large spreadsheet without having to horizontally scroll.

It’s also easily large enough that you can position two browser windows (or any app windows side-by-side). There are also split screen and picture-in-picture modes (note: your graphics card will also have to support those features), and support for displaying feeds from two different devices.

And, not wanting to gush, but it just looks totally cool. It’s more impressive in real life than pictures. If you get one, people will stop at your workstation to covet it. You can’t say that about much desktop hardware these days. Certainly, it got quite the reaction when I tweeted a pic.

Above & below: Old school squinter: NBR content director Hamish Coleman-Ross's twin-monitor setup.

Cons? There are three HDMI jacks, Display Port and USB connectivity options. But, to be picky, there’s no jack for the new kid on the block, USB C.+

It's so freaking wide, it can be hard to angle it so light doesn't reflect of some part of the screen.

The 21:9 ratio means you get horizontal black bars when you play most video content (which is usually made for 16:9 widescreen TVs; some movies are shot at 21:9).

And although it's super-wide, you still don't get quite the onscreen real-estate from most twin-monitor setups (though on the upside, as NBR View supremo Hamish Coleman-Ross notes, a display like the  CF791 eliminates the dead space between two screens).

And at 3440 x 1440, it’s not quite 4K, or Ultra High Definition. Yet streaming the Netflix in HD it still looked great; unless you’ve got wolf’s eyes, you won’t spot the difference between HD and UHD on a 34-inch display (most pundits say you need a 55-inch or 60-inch screen to see the benefit of 4K).

Below: the CF791:

Most apps, for work or play, will automatically reformat to fit the double-wide screen. But not so for most video. There's also plenty of room to shuffle windows around the display, or to choose its split screen or picture-in-picture options.

I’ll be using the  CF791 for a bit, so I’ll let you know how it goes in day-to-day office life.

As I type, PB Technology is selling it for $1549, Noel Leeming for $1349. See full tech specs here.

Super Simon.