Widescreen Waveforms

Invest in a widescreen monitor to do your printed circuit board, parts and assembly design, and when analyzing waveforms in digital design. It will save you massive amounts of frustration!

Last updated February 2019

Through high school, I never had a monitor. I was always just working with the 15″ screen of my laptop. I needed it for writing essays and creating presentations so I didn’t need the extra screen real estate. Once I got to college, that quickly changed. Trying to do design and analyze waveforms were a little tricky on a small screen. Plus, I’d have to constantly switch back and forth between the software application I was working in and the lab assignment I was following along with.

widescreen monitor resting on a work bench

It was pretty difficult for me to determine which monitor to get because there are so many metrics. You have LCD (liquid crystal display) or LED (light emitting diode), resolution, frame rate, aspect ratio, response time, brightness, and viewing angle. I might be missing some but these are the common ones. Oh, I forgot to mention, there are also tons of manufacturers to choose from too – LG, Samsung, Acer, Dell, and HP to name a few. For my first monitor I went with the best deal that I could find during the Black Friday sale. It was a 27″ Acer with a 16:9 aspect ratio so it wasn’t the widescreen yet. It did what I needed it to do. I could more easily analyze digital waveforms, create schematics where I didn’t have to make them extremely small and zoom all the way, and model parts and assemblies in CAD software. Have you ever tried to explode the view of your assembly and it’d go out of the screen, but then you zoomed out and couldn’t even see the contours? Yeah, me too, it was frustrating. This monitor was the ticket.

I studied electrical and computer engineering where I did digital design quite a bit. If you’ve ever done that, you know all the nuances that come with trying to debug your design. Or trying to analyze signals at different clock edges or making sure an active-high signal triggers another signal. I didn’t so much need the length of the monitor, but more the width. I’d be able to see more of the signal and didn’t have to constantly move the horizontal scroll bar back and forth, which started to get annoying. I started looking into widescreen monitors and came across a LG 29″ widescreen which had a 21:9 aspect ratio. This was a game-changer for me and certainly decreased the time I spent debugging the designs.

It’s also great to use for video editing. You can view more of the video clip and make edits more quickly. I can’t wait to get a desktop and hookup three widescreen monitors! Model parts on one, video edit on the other, and do digital design on the third. Sounds like major productivity to me.

What did we learn?

  • If you’re doing any type of design, invest in a monitor. It doesn’t necessarily have to be widescreen.
  • Having a monitor increases productivity since it allows you to have multiple windows up at one time and you don’t have to constantly switch back and forth.
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