Few in the office furniture industry sell monitors, but nearly all office furniture companies sell monitor arms. For the most successful companies, it’s rare to complete an office furniture project without them. For very good reason, the Video Electronics Standard Association (VESA) provide a standard fixing spacing for monitors known as the flat display mounting interface (FDMI) standard. Monitors with the correct fixing points are usually known as VESA compliant and the mounting point on monitor arms as the VESA plate. This mounting interface standard is a victory for consumers requiring cross compatibility.
The VESA standard defines dimensions of a display’s four-hole attachment interface and the screws used to fit those holes. This normally means the hole pattern is centred on a display’s back with either a 100 x 100mm or 75 x 75mm mounting hole pattern, using M4 screws.
However, recently manufacturers such as Samsung and Acer have left VESA fixings off some of their new designs. Assumedly this is to slightly reduce their production costs. This is an annoyance to the consumer, particularly if they’ve ordered an office full of them before discovering there is no way to fix them to the monitor arms they have bought without expensive and clumsy adaptors. If you’re specifying monitor arms, be sure to check your customer has VESA compliant monitors, or if not yet purchased, warn them to choose compliant monitors.
Some manufacturers e.g. Asus, AOC, LG and Dell often include VESA even when their standard mount isn’t attached to the VESA fixings, but a visual check is one way to be sure. Even when monitors are compliant companies rarely advertise VESA compatibility due to licensing costs, so find out for certain by requesting the model number from your client and checking images online. Firstly check for four equally spaced holes in the back, but beware they are sometimes under another cover, so if not visible a call to the manufacturer in question is the only definitive answer.