Monitor Mounts

This is where a catalogue earns its keep, because monitor arms photograph almost identically and fail for four specific reasons. The first is arm count: six of these take one screen, nine take two, three take three, and no amount of goodwill makes a two-arm stand hold a third. The second is diagonal, which runs from a 27 inch ceiling on one triple mount to 49 inches on the two ultrawide arms.

The third is weight per arm, and it is the one that gets ignored. Ratings here run from 17.6 to 37.4 pounds. A 27 inch office monitor is usually 10 to 14 pounds without its stand and any arm here will hold it. A 32 inch curved panel or a 34 inch ultrawide is often 20 to 25 pounds, which rules out more than half the section. The rating is per arm, not per mount, so a dual arm rated at 19.8 pounds holds two 19.8 pound screens rather than one 39.6 pound one.

The fourth is how it attaches to the world. Most of these clamp to the back edge of the desk; several will alternatively bolt through a grommet hole; two are free-standing stands that need no fixing at all and are the only option on a glass desk or a desk you are not allowed to drill. That last group is also the answer for anyone with a desktop thicker than a clamp can open to.

Underneath all four sits the VESA pattern, which is the bolt spacing on the back of the screen. Most of these take 75 by 75 and 100 by 100 millimetres and fit almost anything. A handful take only one of the two, and those are noted on every product page in this section, because it is the single failure that cannot be worked around after the box is open.