Soma Split Seat Chair

I finally got my chair. It was going to come in fairly quickly, but then it was delayed because there was an unexpected back order on seat shells. It does have a lot of adjustments. You can move the arms up/down, in/out, and do a 360-degree rotation on the arm pads, which comes in handy. I can't actually lower the arms enough to get close to my keyboard tray, so that's pretty annoying.

The seat of course goes up and down, but it doesn't actually go down as far as I need it to. The fancy "dynamic ergokinetic split seat" seems to add a lot of height to the seat. I can slide the seat backwards and forwards, which is cool, but doesn't actually seem to affect anything. The back rest also goes up and down, and tilts forward/back. The problem is that because the seat is so high, so far away from the base of the vertical bar for the back rest, the actual back rest itself is way too low, and even raised to its full hight, it's too short.

The seat itself also tilts. You can have it in free-rocking position (a feature that comes standard on most chairs but cost $55 for this one), or you can lock it at a certain tilt. It's supposed to be some fancy "SomaComfort" seat, but it's really pretty uncomfortable. I have no idea why anyone would find it comfortable. 

The only good thing about it besides the flexibility of the arms is that because of the split seat, I can actually use my tripod with it and get my machine as close to my body as I want to. It's really nice not having my machine sliding away from me all the time.

I called the Soma rep as soon as I got the chair. I figured it would be a pretty easy fix to send down a back rest with a longer bar. For some reason he wanted me to wait practically an entire month so he could bring the part here himself, so now I've got to wait until September 18th to find out if the taller back rest actually helps or not.

I don't feel like it's a chair that's worth $800, but it would also cost $300 to send it back, so there's that to consider. It doesn't make my back hurt any more than my other chairs, and it's nice not having to swap out chairs depending on what activity I'm doing. But I definitely feel like my body took a beating at the end of the day, especially my "seat."