The enduring image of a trading floor is a cacophonous gaggle of men yelling to buy and sell stocks and other securities.

But these days, trading floors are more likely to be dominated by batteries of screens — some desks are equipped with several different displays for a financial terminal, news alerts, tickers, instant messages, and Microsoft Excel.

"A lot of the employees even in large financial institutions are working on older monitors that can be over 5 years old," said Vinay Jayakumar, product marketing manager at Dell. "We looked at the trading floor and they were often using 19-inch monitors, in multiples of 4 or 8 or 12 smaller monitors."

So Dell wants to sell these firms much larger displays that can consolidate the wall of screens into one wall-sized screen — Dell sells monitors big as 49 inches from corner to corner. Any bigger, and the company considers them to be a "collaboration monitor" for mounting on a wall or in a conference room. A TV, basically.

Dell's not the only company that is now making larger and larger monitors. In fact, massive high-end panels were a major theme at CES, the annual Las Vegas trade show for consumer electronics that took place last week.

Acer, for example, announced a $2,999 55-inch monitor targeted at gamers. For office use, Lenovo revealed a 34-inch widescreen curved monitor priced at $799. While Apple didn't announce new monitors at CES, it released its first monitor in years in December: The $4,999, 32-inch Pro Display XDR...with a $1,000 stand sold separately. But that screen is basically a miniature compared to other new monitors.

These displays are expensive. Dell's 43-inch monitor, which I recently tried, will retail for $1,049, for instance. But the price could be justified by businesses if it makes high-value workers like traders more productive.

"Users understand the productivity gain by using high-res large screen monitor," Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa said. "In the meantime, large size monitors have become more affordable."

Another trend driving growing monitors? Laptops, which have become standard issue equipment for knowledge workers, have become much better at attaching to external monitors and docking stations, says Kitagawa.