01732 759725 15 magazine MONITORS monitors which measure ambient light levels and adjust screen brightness accordingly to reduce eye strain. Features such as these are becoming more important for business buyers who are increasingly aligning procurement decisions with ESG and employee wellbeing goals, for example by giving hybrid workers the same ergonomic features and high-quality flicker-free images in their home offices that they enjoy in corporate environments. As well as being good for monitor users, this focus can have a positive impact on total cost of ownership (TCO). For example, the Auto-EcoView feature on FlexScan monitors doesn’t just reduce eyestrain and provide a comfortable working environment but can also reduce energy consumption by as much as 50%. Similarly, EIZO’s EcoView Optimizer feature saves energy by automatically reducing backlight levels according to the content being viewed. Spend more, save more Hadden points out that EIZO has traditionally been successful in selling to large organisations that prioritise total cost of ownership (TCO) in procurement decisions and are prepared to spend a little more on high quality, energyefficient Japanese-made monitors that in the long run will save a lot more on energy costs and maintenance. “Many of our customers are large organisations that pay a lot of attention to the TCO of products. They look at things like power consumption, things like the length of warranty. They look at the cost of a failure.What does it cost the IT department to swap out a failed unit? They look at power consumption, recognising that if they can save a monitor settings with them from location to location. "One of the features on our FlexScan range is a piece of software called Screen InStyle, which contains a Colour Briefcase that you load on your laptop. This stores how you like to set up your monitor and when you take that laptop and plug it into another FlexScan monitor in a different location, it automatically applies your preferred settings. “If you like to run everything in sRGB mode but like to viewWord and Excel in our Paper Mode, which has a soft, sepialike tone that’s easier on the eyes, the software will change the settings on the monitor being used as soon as you open Word. If you then open Chrome, it will go back to sRGB mode because that’s the colour of the internet.” Ergonomics and wellbeing In addition to its productivity benefits, the single USB-C cable on FlexScan and ColorEdge monitors reduces desktop clutter, for example by removing the need for a separate (often less efficient) power supply for a laptop and by enabling the daisy-chaining of multiple monitors with a single cable between each one. This may sound trivial, but it has real benefits for users with limited desk space at home and is one of several ways in which EIZO monitors can contribute to the wellbeing of remote and hybrid workers. Others include the industry’s largest vertical movement to ensure a monitor can be set at the right height for any user, plus tilt and swivel adjustability; options to reduce blue-light levels; and Auto-EcoView sensors on EIZO FlexScan few watts on the monitor, they will be able to save even more on the aircon needed to cool offices.” In this context, a big attraction of EIZO monitors is that they come with a five-year warranty, rather than the industry standard 3-year term. In the case of ColorEdge monitors, this is an on-site warranty. “If your ColorEdge monitor fails, we will troubleshoot it and if there is a problem with the monitor, we will send an engineer out with a replacement monitor because for someone doing this quality of work it is probably their livelihood.We will take the unit away, repair it and then bring it back. It is phenomenally expensive to do and the only reason we can do it, with tens of thousands of units in the field, is because our monitors are so reliable.” Other attractions for corporate buyers, says Hadden, are the low levels of churn in EIZO’s product portfolio – “If you buy a 27in monitor today and you want to buy the same one two years later, you will be fine as we tend to turn our models over every 5 or 6 years” – and management software that lets administrators monitor settings and usage across an entire estate. Japanese build quality does cost a little more. However, Hadden is confident that as businesses consider the costs and benefits of supporting large numbers of hybrid workers they will see the value in taking a more considered approach to IT procurement and breaking the established technology cycle of ‘buying cheap and replacing often’. “Compared to the cost of the person on the seat in front of it, the cost of the monitor is negligible. Just making someone 1% more efficient and encouraging them to spend 1% more time at their desk is worth at least £1,000 in salary over the 5-year warranty period. And most monitors don’t cost anywhere near that,” he says. www.eizo.co.uk
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