30-inches: too much screen?

I never thought I’d question it, but is 30-inches too much for one screen?

I’m a serious resolution and screen real estate hog, so I’ll let that sink in for a sec as I recount my week spent with a 30-incher I bought (and eventually sold) earlier this year. There’s no doubt that productivity goes up and stress goes down as you add more pixels to your desktop, and like many over the last ten years I’ve gone from 14 to 17 to 19-inch CRTs, to 20-inch LCDs, eventually to 24-inch, and more recently to 30-inches. I’m not going to get too into the Dell 3007WFP-HC itself — which is absolutely amazing, and has color rich enough to make your eyes ache (in a good way) — but I could barely believe it when I discovered a display size that was simply too large for me to use comfortably.

Oh sure, I could fill up that amount of resolution easily. And since I’m not a MacBook Air user, actually powering that many pixels wasn’t really a problem. It all came down to the six inch jump, which necessitated dramatic eye movements from distantly adjacent windows, and, eventually, constant neck adjustments to reduce the strain of said looking back and forth.

Part of me thinks I’m crazy though, because I’d love nothing more than a wall of 30-inchers to work on. Guess I’ll have to check out those new 27-inch models — too bad they only add size, and not pixels over the 24s.