What is the Best Lamp for Desks with Multiple Monitors?

Multi-monitor setups have become a key asset in the quest to improve workplace productivity. Workers are able to focus on more tasks at a time, make fewer mistakes, and have improved focus. But with a larger work area, what is the best way to ensure proper lighting?

While there are hundreds of desk lamps that are available today, most are made for decorative or basic lighting functions. These lamps can produce uneven lighting on the desk, and often are awkward to properly position. Worse, they can shine on the screen – creating unhealthy monitor glare. For desks and workstations with multiple monitors, you need effective lighting that is designed to increase your productivity for your specific environment.

With monitor and laptop screens getting bigger and less expensive every year, a balanced arm (or floating arm) desk lamp is the ideal solution to enable the light to reach around or over the monitor to properly light your workspace. These multi-jointed marvels can hover, twist, and turn to accommodate nearly any workspace and have been a favorite of architects for years.

Desk lamps designed for a traditional paper workspace often spread light everywhere on the desk, potentially creating unwanted monitor glare. With a multi-monitor workspace, this can be annoying, and in some cases, unhealthy for the eyes. Monitor glare impacts contrast, readability, and color perception as well as being distracting – exactly what you don’t want in a productive environment.

While a typical consumer can choose from among hundreds of different types of desk lamps, we are going to stack up three highly popular commercial desk lamp models that are available from major lighting brands, are available worldwide, and represent industrial design leadership. These three are:

This iconic lamp has been seen in dozens of television shows and movies since its debut in 1986. The 25-inch height and 30-inch arm design enables it to be easily moved anywhere on a workspace, and the lamp has a heavy base, solid engineering, and is a proven quality product installed in thousands of companies.

This lamp has two key drawbacks for use in a multi-monitor setup. First, the cone that guides the light can make it difficult to cover a wide area on the desk without generating monitor glare. Secondly, the halogen light included on the lamp provides quality, constant light – but uses a 72-watt halogen bulb that consumes more energy and generates more heat than an LED light.

Introduced in 2006, the Z-Bar lamp from Koncept was one of the first minimalist designs that leveraged the unique qualities of LED lighting to create a highly flexible desk lamp that put out a large amount of light. It has multiple dimming levels, and can change color temperature to either warm or cool lighting.

Like the Tolomeo lamp, the Z-Bar was designed for general desk use, where the light is cast in a uniform pattern around the desk, creating the opportunity for monitor glare.

The BenQ e-Reading lamp also has some unique features that create a healthier environment for the eyes.

Many LED desk lamps use lower quality LED components that turn on and off rapidly to give the appearance of an incandescent lamp. The BenQ e-Reading lamp use ZeroFlicker LEDs – which act just like an incandescent lamp by producing steady light output that is easy on the eyes, promoting a productive and efficient work environment.

For many people who work near windows, the amount of ambient light fluctuates throughout the day and evening. The e-Reading light has an intelligent sensor that will automatically adjust the light levels depending on the amount of ambient light coming into the room – enabling a perfect working environment whenever – or where ever you are working.

LED desk lamps enable a variety of choices in light, which can be used from day to night under different circumstances. An LED desk lamp that provides a wide area of light without creating monitor glare not only makes the eyes more comfortable, but also greatly improves the efficiency of work and reading. Check out BenQ’s e-Reading LED desk lamp series that offers a wider, safer and more comfortable reading experience for screen and traditional reading.