// GLOSSARY
The terms, defined without the sales pitch
Every term below appears on a product listing somewhere in this niche. Each definition says what the term describes and, where relevant, whether it is worth paying attention to.
DISPLAY
- Adaptive sync
- A monitor varying its refresh rate to match the frame rate the graphics card is producing, removing tearing and stutter. FreeSync is the open implementation; G-Sync is NVIDIA proprietary. Frequently switched off by default in both the monitor menu and the driver.
- Grey-to-grey (GtG)
- A pixel response time measurement. The transition measured and the overdrive setting used are chosen by the manufacturer and need not be disclosed, so the figure is not comparable between brands.
- IPS
- In-plane switching. A panel technology holding colour and brightness consistently across viewing angles with clean fast transitions. Trades away contrast — black renders as dark grey rather than truly black.
- Local dimming
- Independently controlling the brightness of backlight zones behind different parts of the panel. Without it, an HDR badge on a monitor generally indicates a certification tier rather than a capability.
- Pixel density
- How many pixels occupy each inch of screen. It is the product of resolution and panel size together, and it — not resolution alone — decides whether text edges look crisp or slightly furred.
- VA
- Vertical alignment. A panel technology with substantially higher contrast than IPS, so dark scenes have real depth. Trades that against slower dark-to-light transitions, which appear as smearing in fast motion.
- VESA mount
- A standardised hole pattern on the back of a monitor for attaching an arm or wall mount. 100x100mm is the common desktop pattern, but it is not universal — check before buying an arm.
INPUT
- Claw grip
- A mouse grip where the palm heel rests on the rear of the mouse while the fingers arch above the buttons, leaving a gap under the middle of the hand. Wants a shorter body with a pronounced rear hump.
- DPI
- Dots per inch — how far the cursor moves per unit of physical mouse movement. Advertised ceilings of 26,000 and above are far past what anyone uses; most players sit between 400 and 1600 and adjust the rest in game settings.
- Fingertip grip
- A mouse grip where only the fingertips make contact and the palm floats clear entirely. Wants a small, flat, light body — tall shapes and thumb rests get in the way.
- Lift-off distance
- How far a mouse can be raised from the surface before its sensor stops tracking. A low figure means repositioning the mouse mid-sweep does not drag the cursor with it.
- Palm grip
- A mouse grip where the entire underside of the hand contacts the mouse including the palm heel, with fingers lying relatively flat. Wants a longer body with a tall, filled rear hump.
- Polling rate
- How often a mouse reports its position to the computer, in hertz. The step from 125Hz to 1000Hz was meaningful; the moves to 4000Hz and 8000Hz are measurable but very difficult to perceive.
AUDIO
- Clamp force
- How hard a headset presses the earcups against the sides of your head. Too much causes pressure headaches, particularly for glasses wearers; too little breaks the seal and the low frequencies go with it.
- Virtual surround
- Filtering applied to a stereo signal to mimic how sound changes arriving from different directions, so a two-driver headset implies height and depth. Based on a generic model of head and ear shape, so it works well for some people and not at all for others.
LIGHTING
- Bias lighting
- A light behind a screen illuminating the wall, raising the brightness of the surround so your pupils are not constantly adapting between a bright panel and a dark room. Should be neutral white and pointed away from the viewer.
- Colour temperature
- The warmth or coolness of white light, measured in kelvin. Household warm bulbs are around 2700K; daylight is around 5600K to 6500K. Mixing temperatures in one camera shot makes one of them look badly wrong.
- Key light
- The main light on a subject for the camera. Placed in front and 30 to 45 degrees off-axis, slightly above eye level and angled down, so the shadow gradient across the face reads as depth rather than flatness.
- RGBIC
- An LED strip with integrated control chips dividing it into independently addressable segments, so several colours can appear at once. Plain RGB shows a single colour across the whole run.
- Voltage drop
- Loss of voltage along the length of an LED strip as current travels through the copper traces, visible as dimming and a colour shift toward red at the far end. Feeding power from the middle of a long run halves the distance.
POWER
- Daisy-chaining
- Plugging one power strip into another. It defeats the current rating of both units and concentrates load at a single wall socket. Called out explicitly in fire-safety guidance and never appropriate.
- Joule rating
- The total surge energy a protector can absorb across its entire life, whether as one large event or hundreds of small ones. Once spent, the strip passes power but no longer protects. Higher is straightforwardly better.
- Power delivery (PD)
- A USB-C specification allowing higher power transfer, which is what lets a single cable carry video and charge a laptop. Check the wattage figure against what your machine needs under load, not at idle.
- Service loop
- Deliberate slack left at both ends of a cable run so the connection can be moved without re-routing anything. Mandatory on a height-adjustable desk, where cables must tolerate full vertical travel.
- Wall wart
- A bulky power adapter integrated into a plug body. Each one can block the adjacent one or two outlets on a strip, which is why outlet spacing matters more than outlet count on a desk full of them.
ERGONOMICS
- Static loading
- Holding a muscle at a fixed length under low tension for a long period. It fatigues differently from intermittent effort and is the mechanism behind most desk-related discomfort during long sessions.