When you need to look good in severe conditions, industrial monitors get the nod. Like their pedestrian desktop cousins, industrial monitors come in LCD, flat-screen, and CRT variations. But don’t look for the heavy metal at Costco. Industrial monitors are rough and tough enough to ward off dust, water, external icing, and other extreme conditions.

Industrial monitors are available from Allen-Bradley (Rockwell), Ann Arbor Technologies, Daisy Data, Dolch, Hope, Ikey, Kontron, Omni Vision, Planar, and a number of other manufacturers. They’re available in panel-mount and rack-mount variations, a good many with touch-screen options.

Need to outshine the sun? A number of models are designed for outdoor use and other brightly lit situations.

Extreme environments call for rugged hardware. Type 4 units are manufactured for indoor or outdoor applications “to provide a degree of protection against falling dirt, rain, sleet, snow, windblown dust, splashing water, and hose-directed water; and that will be undamaged by the external formation of ice …” Type 4X takes it up a notch by specifying “American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) Type 304 stainless steel, polymerics, or materials with equivalent corrosion resistance.” (After all, rust never sleeps.)

When it comes to heavy-duty industrial monitors, you’ll be hard pressed to find one tougher than Dolch’s SafTTouch 4X. As its name implies, The SafTTouch 4X is “a completely sealed NEMA 4X rated display, with a multi-gasketed bezel and a touch screen operation immune to cuts, scratches, gouges and wear of the touch surface.” This bad boy is engineered “for continuous reliable performance in extreme NEMA 4X/IP 66 hose-down environments.”

Hose-down … now that’s tough!

NOTES: (1) Internal icing and condensation are other factors to consider when purchasing an industrial monitor. You’ll have to go above and beyond the specs to handle these conditions. (2) The National Electrical Manufacturers Association does not do any testing or certification on industrial monitors. That’s left up to the manufacturer.

[tags]industrial monitors[/tags]