You can’t fit enough information on your monitor. The colors you see aren’t close enough to the printed results. You are constantly zooming and panning to see more of a drawing or photo. All of those situations mean you aren’t as productive as you could be. How much does that cost you each year? Think long and hard about that before reading further.

Today I’m going to tell you about the NEC PA301W 30-Inch LCD Panel. It is 30 inches diagonally and displays 2560 x 1600 pixels. That is a lot of information. I’ve been using a 30 inch panel for several years and I can tell you it helps my productivity dramatically to have so much screen real estate.

Theoretically it supports 30-bit per color (most RGB images are 24-bit). There isn’t any software that supports that level of color depth, but it does mean the monitor is capable of displaying a wider gamut of colors. It also has onboard support for the X-Rite i1D2 colorimeter. In short, you plug the colorimeter directly into a USB port on the monitor and it will automatically calibrate white point, brightness and the color tristimulus value.

Another cool feature is that you can rotate the display so that it runs in portrait orientation instead of landscape. Really want to see a lot? Get two, rotated in portrait mode, side-by-side and you have 3200 x 2560 pixels of screen real estate!

Now I ask you to think hard about how much it costs you each year. That’s because this professional monitor isn’t inexpensive. It sells for around $2300 and it is worth every penny. It might seem like a large outlay at first, but the increased productivity will cover that cost quickly.