Touchscreen Monitors

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cvgd

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 20, 2011
Messages
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I'm looking to buy a touchscreen monitor to help with the development of iphone/android/windows8 apps. Any thoughts on which type of technology I should be looking for? Assume, for the moment, that price is no object.

3M M2256PW
http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/TouchSystems/TouchScreen/Solutions/MultiTouch/M2256PW/

Eizo T2351W
http://www.eizo.com/global/products/flexscan/t2351w/index.html
http://reviews.cnet.com/lcd-monitor...7-34845585.html?tag=cntv&tag=cntv#reviewPage1

Dell ST220T
http://accessories.dell.com/sna/pro...l.aspx?c=ca&l=en&s=dhs&cs=cadhs1&sku=320-1819

The 3M is an MVA panel with a capacitive overlay -- the overlay can obscure the screen and distort colors. The Eizo and Dell both appear to be optical, though Eizo is frequently identified as "optical infrared," which I'm not clear on. The Eizo is PVA, the Dell IPS. The 3M has 1680x1050 resolution, the other 1920x1080.

Any thoughts? Is there something else I should be looking at?

Edit: I forgot to add -- the 3M is 20 point multitouch, the other two are probably only 2 point. I'm pretty sure the optical technology they use requires more than two cameras for true multitouch.
 
I can not speak for the others, but the Dell is a great monitor, even without taking the touch into account.

The Dell's touch is decently accurate and fast, but the fact that it is optical and not capacitive is still very evident. You have to, for instance, come straight on with your finger and not hover closely over the screen with your hand.

The Dell's multitouch is 2-point, and it must be your primary display for touch to be enabled.

I would imagine that everything capacitive at the size you'd want for development would be quite expensive; be sure that you will need more than two points of touch for the apps you are creating before looking into those devices. Also, I can see why you would want a multitouch monitor for windows 8 development, but for anything on a phone or tablet, nothing beats having a sample device to test on.

I would also think that most people taking advantage of early windows 8 touch apps on a desktop will be using something like the Dell.
 
Thanks, Tesla.

The touch is really the main thing I'm taking into account, though I won't bother with a TN panel. I don't have any experience with touch monitors of this size, and am interested in reading about any experiences people have with the various options.

The 3M is the only projected capacitive display I was able to find that's already on the market, and it's $1500 for a 1680x1050 monitor with apparently middling picture quality. There are a couple of others, including a 2560x1440 IPS, in the works, but probably not available to consumers until mid next year.

The Eizo uses the same tech as the Dell; can you go into a bit more detail about its usefulness as a touch device? Is it pretty accurate as far as touch location? If you're somewhat careful with it, does it register many false positives or require multiple touches to get a register?

I have more sample devices than I can keep track of at the moment, but much of what I'm focused on now is just html5 UX and touch compatibility. It's just easier to work through it without having to leave my main development environment.

I suspect I'll probably start with the Dell or the Eizo and see how they work. I'm a little surprised by the scarcity of actual user-evaluations of the tech.
 
A lot of people buy the Dell to get a glossy, cheap, IPS screen. So many of the reviews you will find for the Dell are more focused on the display than the touch.

The Dell's touch works. It is definitely one of the better optical touch implementations. It is difficult to speak more on its usefulness as there are not many touch-enabled applications available for desktop PCs yet. I mostly use it for casual web browsing, and it works very well for this.

It is accurate, but not as accurate as capacitive screens. False positives are very, very rare in my use of it, but you do have some need for multiple touches from time to time when clicking, for instance, a small checkbox. Again, it is not all the time, but it will happen.

It is also sightly slower than capacitive screens. You do not notice this during normal desktop use, but if you planned to play a fast-paced touch game with it, you might notice some slight lag when compared to capacitive screens.
 
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