apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I assume bending your neck back is ergonomically worse than looking to the side. Neither is good...but I think the side glance is less likely to make you sore...

At work, I have two 22" screens side by side and mounted horizontally, but at home, I have my two 22" screens side by side and mounted vertically, not horizontally. Each setup is appropriate for what I do at each location. I can't see any situation where having 2 horizontal screens mounted on top of each other being appropriate, unless desk space is a severe problem.

I'm all for changing it up, but our eyes are side by side and we have a much wider field of vision left to right vs top to bottom. If you're trying to see as much as possible, side to side is the way to go.

Top to bottom is good if you want to have some info/content nearby yet not bothering you when you don't want to see it.

I've always preferred the vertical setup for dual monitors. Since most of what we use computer wise is oriented vertically (as in almost everything is vertical scrolling and not horizontal scrolling), I think it's important to have vertical space if you want it. There's almost no time that I feel like I need to be able to stretch things horizontally. So all the things I'd do with horizontal dual monitors could be done with vertical dual monitors. But not vice versa. Unfortunately, most multi-monitor wallpapers are set up for horizontal.

Personally, there isn't much neck strain from looking up and down. I generally stick reference stuff on the second monitor. Or things like Winamp that are running but I don't need to interact with often. You can really only concentrate on one thing well at once. So I'm really only glancing at it every once in a while. Not to mention, it's worse ergonomically to not be moving at all. Certainly there is good posture. But you should definitely be moving and stretching from that position.

I've seen these a few times with financial analysts and those working in the scientific community (oh, and some avid flight sim gamers), but I'd think for the most part it would be a neck strainer with long term use.

Seriously, unless you hold your head only a few inches from your computer monitor to look at it, you hardly have to move your head at all to switch to looking at the other monitor. The angle change is just not that great.

If you're doing that, I think you have other problems that you should probably sort out first.

I use this setup in the recording studio so there is less obstruction to the speakers at my left and right.