extra wide

What kind of display do you have at work and at home? I find these ergonomics fascinating, since your monitor is akin on the wheels on your car or your stereo's speakers; it's the main interface between the machine and what the machine works against.

At home I share 1 13" laptop. The screen a little bit small but fine for its intended purpose. I will say that if you're in the market for a laptop that you will use for more than Office-type or web browsing applications, splurge and get it with a screen that has a decent off-axis viewing angle. We watch a lot of DVDs on the laptop, and it's narrow viewing angle is limiting.

At home I also have a beautiful 21" trinitron CRT display for my desktops. What more can I say, this is what I was pining over 10 years ago. Accurate, bright colors, with detailed resolution. Plus it doesn't have to deal with the ClearView-type font dithering that most LCDs are sensitive to. The only downside is that it sucks about 120 watts of power and is HUGE.

Finally, my work displays. I started with a 19" Viewsonic CRT - Fabulous monitor. Then moved to a 17" LCD, this was a step backwards because of the reduced resolution, and as I recall, going from a curved screen to a flat screen was a little funky on my eyes for the first few days. I also remember that the LCD screen was too bright. This made it a little bit difficult working in a dim environment because the screen was blaring in your face. Next came an upgrade to a 19" LCD. Now we hit the sweet spot! The 19" had a fine amount of resolution (2 documents side by side in Frame), good color accuracy, and showed precise text once I got the hang of Clearview. I was happy.

But wait - so then the paradigm shifts when I got a 24" HUUUGE wide screen LCD display at work. At first I was blown away - our home TV is 19", and this screen feels much larger than my 21" CRT. I'm going to make this long story short:
For the way I work, a widescreen is overkill. I work very linearly, I don't need to see or refer to 5-10 different pieces of information at once. I generally write a document straight through, edit images one at a time. There are few dynamic dependencies. I'll contrast this with when I was coding or designing websites, where you need to refer to several windows of information at once.

The split screen feature in MS word is great for viewing two parts of a document simultaneously, but that's the most I've ever needed. Now I can have 2 frame documents side by side, but at almost 100% for each. This is nice, but unnecessary. Further, there's the potential to have too much visual information, such that it can be distracting.

Do any other TWs out there use wide screen or multiple monitor set ups effectively, for the TWing part of their job? I can see for content management or designing a help system, it could be useful, but for the straight task of writing and editing text, I'm completely unconvinced.