Monitor makers – VESA please I beg you!

Posted by admin on February 6th, 2013

Most of my posts about gaming have been console or retro based but I do own a gaming PC which I’ve built up myself.  Recently I started looking at monitors to improve my PC gaming experience as I am using the PC for gaming regularly at the moment and not just on and off.  (Blame Minecraft, Terraria and Legend of Grimrock amongst others).

There are quite a lot of relatively cheap good quality monitors about these days and I am currently wondering about setting up a two (or maybe three) monitor set up at home.  I’m used to a multi monitor setup at work but the monitors I use are expensive, professional ones rather than the cheaper consumer ones. One of the reasons that the consumer monitors seem to be cheaper is their lack of quality stands; I see the point in this it’s a good way to shave money off the cost without affecting the user experience too much.

What gets me though is that a lot of these monitors do not have a VESA mount. This means that you can’t buy a better stand or worse set up a row of monitors for a multi-monitor configuration unless you are happy to use the wobbly stands provided by the manufacturer. Lots of these monitors seem aimed at gamers as well and I’d think gamers more likely to use a spearate stand or multi arm mount for their monitors.

Let me give you an example and please don’t think I’m picking on LG, there are monitors from Samsung and Viewsonic with the same kinds of issues. Take a look at the LG IPS237L monitor this does not have a VESA mount it does however have a minimalist bezel which would be ideal for a multi-monitor set up. So this monitor looks like it’s been designed to run in a mult-monitor setup but is only capable of being supported by the stand provided which is not adjustable actually making it nearly completely useless. To me it looks as though the LG IPS234L monitor is the same panel but with a larger bezel and VESA so maybe it’s a design problem with these thin monitors but it still doesn’t make sense to me.

Anyway the lesson here is if you want a new monitor and are expecting them all to have VESA support then double check your specs.

And monitor manufacturers please, please, please include VESA support just so that the consumer has options.