iMovR EMMA Electric Monitor Arm Review

The highlights

• New electric monitor arm does what no traditional mechanical counterbalance arm can do, like lift up to six displays and 150 lbs of gear at once (with twelve possible combinations of monitors and/or laptop mounts)
• Unique ConstantFocus™ wrap-around design brings all displays to the same focal depth, eliminating focus lag and eye strain
• Straight up-down vertical movement eliminates the arcing motion inherent to mechanical monitor arms

The time has clearly come for electric monitor arms

⁣The EMMA electric monitor arm can handle countless configurations of displays and laptop holders, up to six screens and 150 lbs total weight.

The ergonomic monitor arm has been around for over 40 years and is adequate for most single and dual monitor applications where the displays are below a certain weight and size. They’re an especially essential device for eliminating neck strain for standing desk users, who need to adjust the height of their displays every time they switch from sitting to standing. But when it comes to moving a very large monitor such as some of today’s very wide and heavy panoramic curved displays—or more than two displays together—they quickly reach the limits of their mechanical counterbalance designs. 

That’s why iMovR created the new Emma electric monitor arm, to handle the size, weight, and a number of displays more commonly being used today. Hypertechnically, it is not the first electric monitor arm in existence—there are all sorts of very costly custom electric monitor lifts used in the “console” industry—but it is the first that has been made available to the average user at a consumer price point. 

The most capable monitor arm ever created

We’ve been writing monitor arm reviews for over a decade now, and can categorically state there’s never before been anything like the Emma in terms of the number of displays it can handle, the total weight it can handle, and the ability to wrap displays around the user in a way that eliminates focus lag and drastically reduces eye strain. 

With the ability to lift up to six displays with a brawny 150 lbs of lift capacity, the Emma stands in a class of its own. With twelve possible combinations of monitors and/or laptop mounts, the straight up-and-down motion of the Emma eliminates the “arcing motion” that mechanical arms suffer from, which makes it difficult to keep the displays centered on the workstation in both sitting and standing postures. 

The only monitor arm we’ve ever seen featuring ConstantFocus™

There are multi-display monitor arm systems out there with a slightly bent crossbar that can bring the outer displays a little closer to the user, but on such a shallow radius that your eyes are still forced to stop and refocus to see information in the outer zones clearly. 

Curved computer displays have the same limitation; even the most radically curved screens made today (1500R) would require the user to stand five feet away from the monitor to have equal focal depth at all points. That’s great for watching movies from the sofa, but a typical computer user is sitting only 20” – 25” from their screens.

With Its breakthrough ConstantFocus™ wrap-around design, the Emma keeps all of your displays at the same focal depth. This reduces strain on your eyes’ ciliary muscles and speeds your brain’s processing of visual information. For stock traders, dispatchers, gamers and other users who need to have the fastest hand-eye-brain coordination, no other single monitor arm can deliver the goods.

Read more about ways to combat Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) and why the EMMA is an ideal tool to do so.

12 Possible Configurations Is An Understatement

We had several months to test the Emma prototype on our own staff members’ workstations in all sorts of configurations—from triple 32” monitors on one row, to dual 39” panoramic displays mounted one above the other, a single giant 75” display, to literally 120 lbs of (6) displays mounted on two rows. 

We even got to test mixed setups of displays in both portrait and landscape mode, laptop holders, and cylinder-clamped mic booms, webcams and lights for the ultimate podcasting studio scenario. For the latter we found this great little accessory, the Manfrotto 035RL Super Clamp, that can be used to mount dozens of different accessories to the Emma’s center cylinder pole. (We found this works best when creating a two-row configuration of the Emma, using the top row’s cylinder to mount these accessories.)

Straight vertical pathway with no “arcing”

While the Emma can of course be used on any desk, it was created especially for standing desk users who want to keep their display(s) centered at all times, regardless of their posture and position. 

As we cover in great depths in our comprehensive round-up of monitor arm reviews, because our lower spines stretch out when we stand, to avoid neck strain we need to raise our monitors relative to our keyboard height each time we change postures. Virtually all other mechanical monitor mounts have an inherent arcing motion when raising or lowering the displays (with the one exception of Ergotron’s Trace Arm). That arcing motion results in the center point of our displays annoyingly shifting to the left or right compared to their position when we’re seated. 

Emma moves your monitors straight up and down, with no change in the center point or focal depth of your monitors. 

“Gesture Style” Digital Controller with Bluetooth

With Bluetooth built right in, the Emma is controlled with the same up/down gesture controller as is used on iMovR’s Lander Lite standing desks. At the moment this Linak Desk Control app is the only one that works with the Emma, though at least one more is coming soon. 

The Linak app is really designed for desk users, with features like a “health coach” that reminds you to change postures at intervals you can set for your own personal goals. But as far as controlling Emma goes it isn’t really necessary to run the app more than one time. While technically every setting on the Emma can be programmed through tiny hidden buttons on the gesture controller, it’s way easier to set up your new arm using the app. 

Setup through the app involves two things, really. The first is programming in your favorite heights for the display array for when you’re standing versus when you’re sitting. For most average stature people there’ll be about a 3”-4” difference between the two, which doesn’t like much but it can make a helluva difference in neck strain, so this is important to set properly. 

The second thing you’ll want to do is to click off on the liability waiver that lets you change the height of the display array with just a double-tap on the gesture controller. This saves you from having to keep your finger on the paddle the entire time the array is in motion. For UL approval in the US and Europe this liability waiver is required to allow users the freedom to “fire and forget”. 

A smartphone app for controlling both the desk and the monitor arm with a single tap for “SIT,” “STAND” or even “WALK” (i.e. for treadmill desk users), and other innovative features, will be released later in 2022 as an upgrade to iMovR’s Ergodynamics App. We can’t wait for that; imagine how cool it will be to tap WALK and have the desk automatically move to office treadmill height, the displays move to the perfect zero-neck-strain height, and the treadmill launch off at your preferred speed, all at once. 

The Emma’s linear actuator column is equipped with a PIEZO™ sensor for accurate and reliable anti-collision. You can also program the gesture controller to set a minimum and maximum height limit to prevent accidental collision with the desktop or the ceiling (an important safety feature if small children are around). Note this is the one setting you cannot program through the app, you have to use the handset to program it.

A Couple of Accessories Definitely Worth Noting

Emma’s standard VESA mounts can handle up to 20 lbs of weight each. iMovR does offer a Heavy Duty Support Collar that increases the weight lift capacity up to 25 lbs on the outer monitors, or 75 lbs on any center-mounted monitor. So that’s how you get to the 150 lbs maximum lift capacity spec (six displays weighing 25 lbs each). 

The other nice thing about the Support Collar is that it has a set screw to finely set the tilt angle of each display. When adding outer monitors weighing over 20 lbs to the ends of the beams—particularly if also bringing them forward to arc around the user (20” forward reach max)— this is helpful for removing the inevitable sagging of the ends of the extruded aluminum beams in two-row configurations. 

Strong as the aluminum beams are, they will twist forward just a bit under such a moment force, so these fine tilt angle adjustments are needed to get all the displays in your two-row array to stay precisely in the same plane and eliminate all gaps between the monitors. (We’ve seen specialty electric monitor arms in the console industry costing many times more than an Emma that lack this fine tuning feature.)

Another accessory made by iMovR that is noteworthy not just for Emma users, but for anyone mounting a very heavy display on any heavy duty monitor arm, is the Steel Reinforcement Plate. While iMovR’s own 3D-laminated and solid wood desktops are safe to use even with maximal loading of the Emma, it is important to note that most standing desks sold these days come from China, where desktop materials tend to be very cheap and could easily snap like a KitKat bar. The reinforcement plate is installed underneath such desktops, typically with Liquid Nails and screws, to strengthen the area where the Emma clamps to the back edge of the desk.

We’ve never seen installation instructions this good

We’ve had to install a lot of monitor arms over the years, even ones for six displays. Most of these come from China and include hard to read instructions; let’s just say it can be a frustrating process sometimes. It took us an hour once for our most experienced monitor arm reviewer to put together a mount for six displays, and only four of the six could be height-adjusted. So we were a little fearful of what a complex beast like an electric six-display monitor arm would be like to install.

iMovR already makes the widest range of mechanical counterbalance arms for standing desks, all of which we’ve reviewed (the Compass, TopView, ZipView and Tempo lines), and they set the gold standard for ease of installation. Most of them have not just clear printed instructions in highly-readable, full-color format, but they also have professionally produced installation videos the make an otherwise onerous job a pretty simple one for any user.

Assembling a monitor array this size takes a lot of steps, but ⁣iMovR’s exceptionally well prepared assembly videos and instruction manual make it relatively easy for non-professional installers.

With the Emma it’s clear that iMovR spent months on developing exceptionally clear installation manuals – with dedicated sections for each of the 12 possible configurations. So if you’re going to install 2 monitors on the top row and 2 monitors plus a laptop mount on the bottom row, you just go right to that page in the manual. Even more impressive is that they also produced 12 installation videos to go with the full-color printed manuals. There’s just an impressive level of attention to the customer experience in all of this, one we’ve never seen with any other monitor arm maker. And let’s face it, at this price point, you should expect nothing less.

We highly encourage anyone considering buying an Emma electric monitor arm to watch the installation video and other “pro tips” videos that you can find on the iMovR site so that you can plan ahead for things like getting extra-long power cords and video signal cables to allow for as much slack as you’ll need when raising the monitors up.

In terms of how much time to budget for installation, there’s the time to actually set up the arm, the time to mount all the monitors/laptops, the time to route all the cables the way you want them, and the time to precisely line up all the displays (especially for dual-row configurations). Our staff reviewers tried numerous installation configurations, and estimate that for the first-time user a good budget for all these things is 30 minutes for setting up the column and beams, and 10 minutes per VESA device. If the optional Heavy Duty Support Collars are installed budget another 5 minutes for each one of those.

Competition and alternative approaches

Way back in 2015 we reviewed the Bild electric monitor arm from Innovative Office Products (IOP), after seeing a prototype of it at the NeoCon office furniture show in Chicago. As we describe in greater detail in the review, this cool looking product unfortunately never saw the light of day. That was disappointing to learn after tested it for weeks in our labs, in all configurations up to a max of eight displays on two rows. Unfortunately they couldn’t quite get the product to work well enough and hit their price target, so the company management ultimately killed it. As a major manufacturer of premium monitor arms, IOP may have just been too early to market. Few people had the need for large display arrays in 2015 as compared to today, and monitors also didn’t get as wide and heavy back then as they do today. IOP saw a niche specialty market in things like command & control centers and radiology departments, but couldn’t have anticipated how common it would become for regular computer users to need a heavy-lifting electric arm.

While there are some electric standing desk converters that have built-in monitor arms, including IOP’s Winston-E and One-Touch converters, these aren’t quite the same thing. They’re also limited to dual or triple displays, and relatively small ones at that. There simply isn’t anything in the market today that is comparable to the Emma.

Of course the alternative, default approach to mounting numerous displays on a standing desk is to get numerous conventional monitor arms, or even combining single arms and dual arms in some fashion. But this gets very cumbersome once you get past two displays; if you need to adjust three or more displays up and down several times a day you’ll probably just live with the neck strain instead. And by that point you’ve really hit Emma’s sweet spot. Once you get to three or more displays it becomes a very cost effective solution, with features that you just can’t get with any combination of monitor arms.

Cable management

Cable management is always something to take into consideration when you’re adding this many displays and/or laptops to an ergonomic monitor arm. Cable guides along the beams and down the back of the EMMA’s lifting column make it easy to route the cable, but you may need to invest in some extra-long power and video cables to provide sufficient slack for the full height adjustment range of your setup. We recommend adding something like iMovR’s Tucker Cable Management Kit for organizing all the cables and transformer bricks underneath the desktop and reducing the number of power cables going down to the floor to just the one for the power strip.

EMMA’s special relationship with the iMovR Lander Executive Desk

Speaking of cable management… iMovR makes the most sophisticated (and expensive) standing desk in the world, the Lander Executive solid wood, which has all sorts of features you won’t find on any other desk, such as an 1800W custom “Executive Power Bus” that’s concealed inside an electronics compartment that runs the entire length of the back of the desk.

One of those special features is a special cut-out just for the EMMA monitor arm in the center of the desk, with just the right amount of room to accommodate the extra large edge clamp and all the power and video cables a power user might have.

Entirely designed and manufactured in the USA

Speaking directly with the product manager for the Emma at iMovR, we learned that this product has actually been in development for four years, the last of which was spent primarily on an exhaustive amount of load and stability testing. As our own lab testing verified, the design is really quite bulletproof. And it needs to be given the value of the equipment being lifted and all the safety considerations involved. (While there are certification standards for mechanical counterbalance monitor arms the Emma is bound to set the standard, once one is ever created, for electric monitor arms.) 

Unlike almost every monitor arm sold today, the Emma was entirely engineered and is entirely manufactured in the USA. It’s backed by a 5-year warranty and iMovR’s standard 100-day satisfaction guarantee.