I use two and it's extremely handy for having two excel sheets open at the same time, or the forum on one and my work on the other

Two monitors, one landscape mode, one portrait.

Great for gaming (landscape for game, portrait for browser/Teamspeak/misc) and work as well (landscape for spreadsheets, portrait for page-viewing docs, e.g.)

When I worked on Film or Still studio sets, I ran dual 30" Cinema Displays on my Mac Pro towers. It was very efficient and fun to show off! I still use a 30 at home but it is not the same. Dual is better.

911boss has the best answer - count pixel width, divide by inches width to get pixels per linear inch, go with the best resolution. More detail, lower eyestrain, etc.

joel9507 has a good point about using each in different orientations. I have two at work, and both are always landscape though, so it's a personal choice.

Me at work:

At work I have triple 27" widescreens. I love it, but I need to recalibrate 2 of them and I'm lazy so I don't want to.

At home I have a 27" widescreen and a 19" box. It's not as much screen space as the work computer, but it's still pretty good.

When I redo my setup again, I'm going to do three 24" wide screen monitors, mounted to the wall, given the current price point and quality of that size. Now if 27's come down in price....

For inexpensive monitors, I find that 27 inches is a bit too coarse at normal desk distance. 1080P or HD sounds really good, but at arm's length a 27 inch monitor is too big as the pixels are so large. 24 inches seems to work better. Dell Ultra monitors are what I use at work, and I have four running all the time on a reasonably powerful graphics card.

Go double, or triple plus. Rest assured you will not regret it.

 
For certain situations, where several programs need to be seen simultaneously, I can see benefitting from dual or triple monitors. I have a big desk, and have tried dual (a 27" at 2560x1440, and a 24" at 1920x1200, the 24" in portrait mode).
 
However, in my case, not needing to see multiple programs at the same time, I find using a single large (not wide screen, but big screen) monitor to be the best, mainly because of OSX's ability to host multiple desktops on a single monitor (Mission Control). I maintain 5 desktops, each with its own set of programs, like one would do with multiple monitors. Switching desktops is a simple keystroke, or just click on the program icon on the Dock that you want to access. You can set your programs to open only on a certain desktop always, so even just opening one from scratch switches over to that desktop to open it. Desktop 1 is system monitoring, Activity Monitor, Console, and a terminal window. #2 is where I spend most of my time on the Internet, with email, browser, rss reader, and messages app. #3 is a file and remote system management, with the file manager (Path Finder), and 3 terminal windows, with ssh logins to 3 other machines, #4 stays blank most of the time, and is reserved as a palette for graphics programs to use the entire screen space, and #5 is my calendar, only.
 
I used to do this on a 30" at 2560x1600. Currently, I use a 32" at 3840x2160.
 
Desktop 1:

 
Desktop 2:

 
Desktop 3:

 

quote:

Originally posted by mcrimm:
I've got a pair of 24" Samsung. They are decent and they are inexpensive.

I should mention that I use a program called DisplayFusion to control my dual monitors. It works great to bounce things around.

https://www.displayfusion.com


Mike

Okay. You win. I had a coworker who had 6 arrayed.

At least two monitors are the way to go. What I can add to this conversation though is that since I have a laptop, I got rid of my regular monitors. My laptop is 15.6" and I got a second laptop monitor that is also 15.6" with the same resolution. They don't have their own power plugs. They just plug into USB 3.0 or USB-C ports.

It's good enough for home use and I have the ability to be portable with two screens also. I copied this set-up from some CPA auditors. It didn't dawn on me until I saw it that there were portable laptop monitors.

quote:

Originally posted by 46and2:

When I was a net admin I had an array of five... and they were all tube monitors. Didn't leave much desk space!

At work two 24", at home one 28" 144hz G-Sync montitor. I don't need dual monitors at home for checking email and the occasional game of Ghost Recon Wildlands.

^ oh that's not mine. I would like it, though.

I have 6 at work

Two.

quote:

Originally posted by rusbro:
If yes, IMO dual monitors are best because you can drag a window to a monitor and just click to maximize. With a single large display you have to position and resize the windows to your liking each time (unless there's as trick I don't know about).

With Windows 10 (and also on OS X using an addon) you can drag a window to the top edge of a monitor to maximize it to the whole screen, to one side edge of the screen to maximize it to that half of the screen, or to a corner to maximize it to that quarter of the screen. (This works even with multiple monitors - drag it gently to the edge between multiple monitors to do the maximize trick, drag it fast to move it past the edge to the other monitor.)

On Windows, for the half and quarter versions, you can then drag an interior edge of the window to move the "divider" between the halves/quarters of the screen. The OS X addon I'm using doesn't do that yet, just resizes individual windows.