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Ask Slashdot: Portable High-Resolution External Displays?
First time accepted submitter paragonc writes "I am a software engineer who works remotely. I'm amazingly lucky to live in Austin, Texas where I have access to multiple high quality co-working facilities within biking distance. While these places are great for networking and establishing a rhythm to daily life, not having a permanent desk forces me to pack my gear in and out each day. This means i pack light. My current Go Bag includes a 13.3 inch MacBook pro, and an iPad running avatron Air Display. This has worked well, but i'm sorely missing having a real high resolution external monitor. I've looked at a few of the USB powered external displays, but the resolution seems to only hit 1366 X 768. I'd be curious if slashdotters have any tricks up their sleeves on how to implement a high resolution portable external displays."
I have been facing the same problem, and have just accepted the fact I either will have to buy the "smallest" retail display that has at least 1080p (like a 19 or 20"), or custom make something. I have been looking at using an ipad 3/4 LCD connected to a small board and using the displayport on my Macbook air.
I bought a panel off ebay for around $60 USD and am looking at a either a pre-made board at http://dp2retina.rozsnyo.com/ or seeing if someone makes a board for less money. The ipad 3/4 display is eDP so the boards are pretty simple. Then its just making a case for it, which is the hardest part for me!
I keep the monitors in two oversized suite cases. The trick is to get foam padding that fits the suite case and the monitors.
I found a place that cuts the form. I went with my suite case and monitor and they cut everything just right.
The form cost me about $200. The suite case is about $300 (each).
I've been all of the world with the monitors. My only issue is that international airlines only allow one bag
and the cost of check a heavy second bag can be equal to the cost of flying business class. So my solution
is to fly business class.
I don't think you would be so crazy to travel with a 27" monitor but the short answer is you should get custom form made so you can travel with any monitor you like.
The thing is... he is not looking for an USB powered adapter, but actually for an entire USB powered display.
As he seems to be looking for a replacement of his iPad as an external monitor, I suspect that he is looking at something like 1080p and somewhat larger, maybe the size of his macbook pro.
The only thing that comes to mind for me is the old, ridiculous ThinkPad W700ds with the built-in second screen.
WTF is a 'real high resolution' monitor for you and what do you consider 'portable'.
While he should have been more explicit, it is obvious that what he wants is more vertical lines of text on screen and more characters per line. High resolution displays like retina screens are great for images and crisper text, but they don't actually help fit more text on a screen. The new MacBook Pro Retina may have 2880 x 1800 resolution, but for software enginers it isn't much better than a 1440x900 screen because it doesn't fit more text (at a readable size) than this smaller resolution.
For someone like myself who is used to working on either two 27" 2560 x 1440 monitors at work or a 30" 2560x1600 + 24" 1920x1200 monitor at home, the removal of the macbook pro 17" laptop left a big hole in the marketplace for 'high text density' laptops. If someons starts making a 1920x1200 laptop again along with a 1200 vertical resolution portable external monitor, they would have my business.
Since I won't need a new laptop for a couple years, I am really hoping that a 17" Retina display laptop comes out by 2015. That would be essentially the same thing as the old 17" macbook.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Buy a retina 15" macbook pro?
Buy a chromebook pixel?
Do you live under a rock?
Don't be an ass. He said he was a software developer, so it is doubtful that the nicer images you get from a retina display mean much to him. A 2880x1800 resolution on a 15" monitor is basically somewhere between a 1440x900 and 1920x1080 as far as reading text goes. That is worse than laptops that have been on the market for at least the past 10 years (I had a 1600x1200 laptop in 2002).
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I took it to mean an "extra" external monitor.
It is still a retarded question. He has a MacBook. MacBooks have Thunderbolt. There are adapters for Thunderbolt -> DVI, Thunderbolt ->VGA, Thunderbolt -> HDMI. Which means he can use pretty much any monitor in existence. The only thing that determines whether it is "portable" or not, is the size of his backpack. So basically his question is: "Can someone tell me how big my backpack is?"
I have a 13" Retina Display MacBook Pro using Retina DisplayMenu that gets me up to 2560x1600 plus AirDisplay streaming to my iPad as a second 2048x1536 monitor. While there is a slight delay when working on the iPad, it is a great place to put the extra windows that are not graphic intensive (terminal windows, word processors) or I need to see but not use regularly (control panels, toolbars). It is an incredible amount of screen real estate in such a small package.
It is still a retarded question. He has a MacBook. MacBooks have Thunderbolt. There are adapters for Thunderbolt -> DVI, Thunderbolt ->VGA, Thunderbolt -> HDMI. Which means he can use pretty much any monitor in existence. The only thing that determines whether it is "portable" or not, is the size of his backpack. So basically his question is: "Can someone tell me how big my backpack is?"
Are one of the people who correct someone for saying it is 3:00pm by saying it is actually 2:59pm?
A 27" Thunderbolt Display is obviously not what he means about portable. People can technically transport houses to new locations, so I don't think that simply being able to lift and move a desktop monitor is enough to qualify it as portable.
I am fairly confident that by portable, he means he wants it to fit in a large laptop bag along with a laptop, a few papers/books, and likely a tablet. A convenient stand would also likely be a requirement, or the ability for it to flip open like a laptop. Being powered by USB would be nice, but probably not a requirement.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
A larger basket for the bike
Exactly. He also mentioned "biking" to locations and I can't think of a lot of monitors I'd like to bungee to a bike frame... unless said bike had a really nice softail. Laptops will take a bit of shaking, monitors, not really. I do see a 5.8 pound, 22" ( 1920 x 1080) LED/LCD unit under $130.
http://us.aoc.com/monitor_displays/e2251fwu
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If you're comfortable with hardware you could pick up an iPad LCD screen ( around $60 on ebay ) and add a display port connection to it, the only outstanding issue is an enclosure but access to a 3d printer could solve that.
http://hackaday.com/2013/04/22/connect-a-retina-display-to-a-regular-computer/
I'll take my guess at what the OP is asking. He refers to USB-powered displays, but complains that they are too low-res. They really are a great idea and I could see a bunch of uses for them.
Here is a 16" USB-powered display, which combines a DisplayLink USB display adapter with a flat-panel LCD display. The problem is that its pixel resolution is only 1366 x 768, which is pretty low density for that panel size. It's like a typical entry-level 15.6" laptop panel. If you look at 15.6" laptops, they start at 1366x768, then as you move up the model range, the pixel res goes up to 1600x900, then further up, 1920x1080 is about as high as it goes at this size.
I suspect that the OP would like a product just like this display, but with a 1600x900 or 1080P display panel like those used on higher-end laptops. This would totally make sense, but some quick searches didn't turn anything like this up on Amazon. So his real question is if anybody knows of one of these types of displays that has a higher-res panel. Personally, I'd consider one of these as well for on-site video editing.
There is a similar 21" USB-powered display which does run 1080P but it's up to the OP as to whether he still considers that portable or not.
It looks like you now have a new company idea. Assuming the market for one of these is anything other than minuscule for whatever price point you are able to hit while building them in China or Japan, assuming you can drive something of that resolution from USB power in the first place. Personally, given the proce differential between "retina: and "non-retina" devices, all other things being equal, I think that these would be of limited use for everyone except professional video editors or the idle rich.
If you are actually serious about needing the external display space for something other than field video editing, then you have picked the wrong coworking space, since plenty of them have pluggable displays available, and some of them even have cable vending machines, in case you are lacking the necessary cable to hook up to your laptop.
For the Austin area, I know of at least Conjunctured is one company that has so-called "community monitors", but they are first come, first serve, so if you wanted one there, you'd need to get there pretty early to claim one before they were all spoken for already.
DisplayLink sells ~$90 USB to HDMI/DVI 2048x1152 adapters.
And you just hit the big issue of portability: it's not resolution as much as overall size of the screen that's the most important factor.
So what the original poster is looking for is a huge screen that is somehow still portable... and until we have foldable/rollable screens, that's always going to be a trade-off.
"This has worked well, but i'm sorely missing having a real high resolution external monitor. I've looked at a few of the USB powered external displays, but the resolution seems to only hit 1366 X 768."
What do the co-working facilities offer in the way of office facilities? If they are cubes, then you'll have to go with a LCD display. If you have an option of an office where you can close the windows and dim the lights, then a small digital projector might work.
My opinion is that the best option would be to see if each facility has a locker area where you can store the display. Then buy a display for each facility that you use on a regular basis. This would be a much better option than lugging a LCD display back and forth on your bike.
Aren't there all kinds of cheap 1080p projectors on the market? I got one from Costco a few years ago for about $900. Use it to play Xbox mostly, but somehow it's still working on the original bulb, and is still plenty bright when projecting onto a 9 foot wide screen.
A projector is often smaller than a monitor, and your screen size is only limited by your available wall dimensions.
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I dont' know about you, but the last time I was writing code - Friday - I had eight source code windows open, and was referring to four of them simultaneously. And that excludes the windows for the compiler and reference materials.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Why does everyone forget that you can use the native resolution of an rMBP with the addition of a simple 3rd-party app?
Of all the things I do on a computer, software development has been the major reason for multiple monitor setups. I can think of no other single reason to use multiple displays greater than that of development. It surprises me how many people assume that developers only need one screen because of their shortsighted vision that a developer is "just showing text so therefore must not need a fancy set of displays."
On top of that, some of they guys at work have been moving to Macbooks for their development machines and I can't figure out why they'd want to lug around thunderbolt adapters and everything else to plug in multiple screens when they had a perfectly capable docking station with their Dell laptop previously. Why don't Macs have docking ports?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
IF you could get them. Finding such equipment in a strange town in a country you don't know and in a language you don't speak more than a few words of, can take a significant chunk of your time.
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You're saying that 17" 1920x1200 is good enough but 18.5" 1920x1080 is not? Sorry, that's silly.
Why is that silly? 1920x1200 has 200 extra vertical pixels, meaning quite a bit more vertical room for text. Considering most development environments probably lose around 300-400 pixels to toolbars, debug windows, etc., that is around a 15% increase in vertical screen size for your actual code.
I agree that a 18.5" 1920x1080 screen is very readable but it loses significant screen real estate that some laptop owners have enjoyed for over 10 years.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke