“Do you see any flicker?” asked David Eisen, the guild’s research director, who, in the labor movement, is one of the best-informed people on VDTs.
I studied the white background.
“The little lines,” I said, “seem to be rolling into each other.”[[39]]
The machine’s regular operator also saw the roll but said the screen was comfortable, anyway.
The Guild machine, moreover, a Xerox 860, had the ability to revert to white letters against a black background, which would have eliminated the rolling. Would that all screens be as versatile, especially those used in many tasks or by people with different tastes.
No matter what the task, however, don’t get caught up in terminal fashion. Stress the basics. Are the characters, for instance, shaped well? How big? At least .12 inch and preferably .16? Is the dot matrix at least seven by nine? Harry Snyder at Virginia Polytechnic Institute found that seven-by-nine matrixes produced “significantly fewer errors” than when subjects worked with those that were five-by-seven. If you can’t find the information in a machine’s literature, you might use a magnifying glass to count the number of dots making up the maximum widths and heights of the characters. Trying the large “N” and several more letters on my Kay pro, I learned that dot matrix was a mere five by seven—the bare minimum for light use; for a writer it could be better.
You might also back off twenty inches to see if the dots merge almost completely into the letters and numbers. Eisen suggests looking for flaws like “flicker, character blurring at the edges of the screen, and adequate space between the characters and lines.”[[40]] Eisen obviously is looking at VDTs from the viewpoint of the union members. But unionists’ desire for comfort and ease of use often will overlap with employers’ desire for maximum productivity. Woe unto the employer who doesn’t take advantage of the overlap. In fact, Eisen’s observations here on keyboards and screens are within the ergonomics mainstream and shouldn’t be dismissed because of his affiliations.
“The two things you must remember,” sums up Waters, “are legibility and comfort. You may think at first that a five-by-seven matrix is fine. But after six months your eyes may say, ‘No, No!’—and you may get headaches and feel you need new glasses. Actually, you simply may need a better screen. You’ve just got to consider how often, long, and intensely you’ll be looking at the tube.”
When shopping around, you also should ask, “How many letters and numbers—how many columns—can fill the screen?”
For word processing you’ll normally want at least 80 columns across, the standard. Some screens, like that of the Victor 9000 microcomputer, can display 132, which can be just the ticket for spreadsheet aficionados with the right software.