One monitor or two?

[Detonate]

I love my dual monitors, but dual monitors + wacom tablet = not as ideal as one monitor.

The problem is that the aspect ratio of the Wacom, will never be the same as two monitors.

You can restrict the wacom to a single monitor, so that the aspects can match up. But to me that kinda defeats dual monitors.

I have my photograph on one side, and all of my palettes on the second. But while working on the image, if I need a new tool, I can't 'pen' over to the second monitor. So I have to grab my mouse, mouse over, choose the new tool, then I can use the pen to edit.

Not so big of a deal if I knew every single photoshop keyboard shortcut. But I have to admit that editing on a single large monitor with a wacom seems more natural to me.

[all_purple2me]

I have 2 19" wide screen LCD's at work (of corse they are mine & not the company's). I use 2 seperate video cards because I normally do web design & I can have 2 different resolutions set up for previewing websites. I just have 1 19" LCD at home but have seriously thought about taking my pc from work home & making the company supply me with a computer at work :) (BTW small family company)

PS I love my dual monitors :D

[Wes]

Not much to say here other than what has already been said - dual monitors rock! Make sure that you get a dual-head card, but before you go shopping make sure that you know what kind of video slot you have on your motherboard. I don't know how old your machine is, but the very old ones would have VESA or EISA slots for the vid card. Newer ones (newer than 5-6 years old) would have AGP slots, but they're often rated for different speeds (2X, 4X, 8X). The newest machines (within the past 2 or 3 years or newer) have PCIe or PCIe-16 cards. Determine the kind of video slot on your motherboard and buy the appropriate card. You'll probably do just fine with a 128Mb card.

[NoLight]

2 is better than 1!!!

[billbunton]

On Windows, very few dual-head cards actually support two profiles. The newer ATIs supposedly do, though I haven't tried them. The Windows color powertoy supposedly enables support for profiles for both monitors on a dual-head card, but I could never get Photoshop to admit to both monitors. Of course, that really doesn't matter if you only want to use the second monitor for palettes and such, and don't care that it's not color managed properly. I run two cards in my Windows workstation because I sometimes have color-managed programs running displaying on both monitors.

[snakesat]

Once you go two you'll never go back.

[johnastovall]

Originally Posted by Detonate

I love my dual monitors, but dual monitors + wacom tablet = not as ideal as one monitor.

The problem is that the aspect ratio of the Wacom, will never be the same as two monitors.

You can restrict the wacom to a single monitor, so that the aspects can match up. But to me that kinda defeats dual monitors.

I have my photograph on one side, and all of my palettes on the second. But while working on the image, if I need a new tool, I can't 'pen' over to the second monitor. So I have to grab my mouse, mouse over, choose the new tool, then I can use the pen to edit.

Not so big of a deal if I knew every single photoshop keyboard shortcut. But I have to admit that editing on a single large monitor with a wacom seems more natural to me.

Now this is the ultimate monitor/tablet combination. Saw one of this in use at the Epson printing academy last January.

[Daniel Bates]

I wonder if you can run two of those at once....