Innovative Office Products’ Bild Monitor Mount Review
- Lab tested
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Overview
| Review Summary |
The Bild monitor mount was a great concept that IOP just couldn’t pull off with its usual success. At the end of the day it’s an expensive way to mount a large number of monitors with no height adjustment possible, making it a “monitor mount,” not an “ergonomic monitor arm.” Unless you need more than 6 monitors there are better solutions out there for a lot less money. |
|---|---|
| Best Use |
When you need to mount up to 8 displays, but don’t need vertical height adjustment on the fly (i.e. not ideal for sit-stand desk users) |
| MSRP / List Price | $454 |
| Street Price |
$454 minimum configuration when it was last visible (depending on vendor and sales) |
| Warranty |
10 years |
| Weight Capacity |
Each heavy duty VESA “tilter” can support up to 30 lbs. |
| Maximum Monitor Size |
24″ in the 3-across and 4-across configuration |
| Number of Monitors Supported |
2 – 8 |
| Typical Assembly Time |
Extensive; depends on the number of monitors being attached (from 2 to 8) |
| Competition | Compare to Other Top-Rated Monitor Arms |
| Where to buy |
Buy 4+ Display Monitor Arms on Amazon |
Rating
| Ease of Assembly | |
|---|---|
| Stability | |
| Customer Experience | |
| Quality and Aesthetics | |
| Ergonomics | |
| Innovation | |
| Value | |
| Positives | If you really need multiple rows of monitors and aren't concerned with vertical height adjustability when switching from sitting to standing, Bild is one of the only monitor arms out there that can handle up to 8 monitors. |
| Negatives | No vertical height adjustment ever since Innovative Office Products cancelled the electric version of this Bild monitor mount. Outer monitors can sag due to low machining tolerances of the plastic parts that insert between the aluminum extrusion arms, requiring a heavy VESA offset adapter to be added to the outermost joints. |
Bottom Line
The Magnificent Eight
Bild is a highly customizable monitor mount system from Innovative Office Products, the same people who brought us the Winston with its ingenious hand brake and the Winston-E, one of the first electric standing desk converters (and certainly one of the most expensive). Following are the results of several months of testing out the Bild system in our review labs.
The first thing anyone is bound to notice about the Bild is the sheer number of monitors the system can support. This monitor arm system can easily scale from supporting a minimum of two to a maximum of eight LCD displays (the website says it’ll support up to 16 monitors but there’s no way to order such a product, nor any specs provided on configurations greater than eight).
Most of us don’t need that many screens, but certain kinds of users like command-and-control operators, gamers, day traders, music composers, network operations managers and software developers frequently require four or more monitors.
Complete Modularity
The Bild, as the name implies, is a modular system that you can configure in almost any permutation of 1-4 monitors on the bottom row, and another 1-4 monitors on the optional top row. What’s more, the same Bild system is modifiable after installation, so you can add or remove extenders to increase or decrease the amount of monitors it holds according to your needs, should they change over time.
But the choice doesn’t end there. Bild can be ordered to accommodate monitors ranging from as small as 19″ to as wide as 24″ when placing them three-across or four-across on a row. In the two-across configuration each monitor can be up to 30″ wide. The key to the flexibility in monitor widths is the sliding “tilters” that are set up for both 75mm and 100mm VESA mounting.
The entire Bild “Christmas tree” can be mounted through a grommet hole, at the back edge of the desk through the use of a C-clamp, or into a rail system.
Electric Bild Has Been Cancelled
There was at one point a motorized Bild monitor arm system that could adjust the height of your monitors up to ten inches with the touch of a button. However, IOP killed the product years ago due to its astronomical price resulting in zero customer interest. This is unfortunate but it’s a story we see from time to time where a product design team is given an impossible list of feature requests from the marketing team, only to find that the end result is an extraordinarily expensive solution that no one will pay for.
According to company representatives, given the woes that beset the company after the Covid-19 pandemic (like most of the “contract commercial” office furniture manufacturers in the industry) we don’t expect this electric monitor arm system to ever be revived.
In the meantime iMovR has released their electric EMMA monitor arm, supporting up to six displays and/or laptop holders. It can lift up to 150 lbs of gear and keep all the displays at an identical focal depth.
An Odd Mix of High-Precision and Low-Precision Parts
There is one very significant flaw in the design of this system, which is not a dealbreaker for all but definitely something worth notice. The precisely-machined, extruded aluminum bars are connected by a plastic joint that is very sloppily machined. The result is that the outer monitors droop significantly.
IOP’s solved this problem by virtue of adding a heavy, metal “offset” mechanism to insert between the VESA mounts and outer displays. This offset plate allows you to dial up the elevation on the outer monitors to make them level with the inner monitors, but it adds even more weight and isn’t a perfect solution. So if you’re really going to build an 8 monitor system (or put 4 monitors on either the upper or lower row) it may offend your OCD tendencies if you really insist on a perfectly horizontal alignment of all the displays.
Last but not least, Bild includes cable clips that snap into place where you need them. These clips allow you to guide monitor cable along the arm and down the column so you can keep your work space neat and organized.
Assembly
You can check out the installation manual here. And definitely check out this video of the Bild assembly process to get a good idea of how it goes together. It is a bit outdated in that is still discusses the electric version of the Bild, but the mounting componentry has not changed.
One thing that some users would really like to do is to angle the outer monitors more aggressively in order to maintain the same focal depth on all monitors. This would reduce eye strain and eliminate refocusing time. Alas, the Bild architecture does not allow such aggressive angles.
The Bild system is designed and produced in the USA from globally-sourced components.
The Takeaway
IOP (Innovative Office Products) is a great design house, making some of the nicest monitor arms out there. The Bild system is impressive in many ways, but for our readers the lack of the promised electrically-adjustable version is a major disappointment. That said, if you really have eight monitors and you’re really scanning them all, the ergonomic issue of not having height adjustability becomes somewhat moot. Ergonomic issues stem from fixing your gaze too high, too low, or too far to the left or right. But if your head is on a swivel all day you’re not as likely to get a sore neck.
The main frustration for customers who want to buy a Bild is actually buying it. The company does not sell this product online, and quoting must be requested from a registered IOP dealer. The dealers aren’t very familiar with this product since it is so specialized, so expect a long turnaround time on getting pricing, placing your order and receiving the product. And if you’re looking to buy only one unit, as opposed to a bulk order, you may not even get a call back from one of these enterprise-focused contract furniture dealers.
The direct competition to the Bild that actually did make it to market in 2022 is the new iMovR EMMA Multi-Monitor Arm, which can support up to six displays or 150 lbs of VESA mounted equipment. The EMMA also has a unique feature called ConstantFocus that allows you to place all your screens at the exact same focal depth, which the Bild and other lesser monitor mounts cannot do.
Sign up for our free newsletter to learn as soon as we have completed our reviews of these new contenders. In the meantime be sure to check out all the other monitor arm options in our comprehensive round-up of The Best Monitor Arms for Standing Desk.
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