Warning: My $40 monitor arm broke after 6 months - cheap vs quality comparison

I bought a budget monitor arm from Amazon for $40 and it worked fine for a while. But after 6 months the gas spring gave out and my monitor started slowly sinking every time I let go. My wife had a $150 Ergotron arm on her desk that she got 3 years ago and it still works perfectly. The difference is the internal mechanism quality and how they build the tension adjustment. Has anyone else had a budget arm fail on them like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

wyatt_fox682d ago

Oh man, the exact same thing happened to me. I grabbed a $35 Vivo arm off Amazon and it was great for about four months, then the tilt joint got loose and the monitor would just sag forward no matter how tight I cranked it. Tried tightening the hex bolt but stripped the cheap metal. Ended up buying a used Ergotron LX off Facebook marketplace for $60, and that thing is solid as a rock two years later. Did you end up replacing yours with something better?

eva_rivera2d ago

Wait, you stripped the hex bolt too? @wyatt_fox68, that's brutal but honestly not surprising. Those cheap arms feel like they're made of butter or something. I learned my lesson the hard way after two of them gave out in a year. You got lucky finding an Ergotron for sixty bucks on Marketplace, that's a steal. I ended up settling for a mid-range arm from a brand I can't even remember now, but it's held up okay so far. Still, I bet yours will outlast mine by years.