Review of the DoubleSight DS-1500

For the past few days we've been playing with the DoubleSight DS-1500, a dual-screen monitor with two 15-inch LCD screens mounted side-by-side. Anyone who has visited Engadget HQ knows how much of a weakness we have for the whole dual-monitor thing, so of course something like this appealed to us immediately. Having all that extra real-estate (the DS-1500 gives you a full 2048x768 pixels of screen space to work with) definitely makes it easier to get get things done. DoubleSight didn't skimp on the quality of each display either (they probably could have gotten away with it), but each panel has contrast ratio of 400:1 and a decently wide viewing angle of 130 degrees. We wouldn't have minded the panels being a bit brighter, but they're about average for any 15-inch LCD you'd buy. We also didn't like the fact that you can't tilt the panels towards each other, which would make them a bit easier to look at.

The one big thing to keep in mind before buying a DS-1500 is whether you'll be actually use it. And by that, we don't mean whether or not you'll actually take advantage of having a second screen, we literally mean that you might not be able to plug a dual-screen monitor into your PC — the DS-1500 requires a PC with two VGA ports, or, if you buy a DVI adapter, one with both a VGA port and a DVI port. Since none of the five PCs we own has two VGA-out video ports (and we couldn't be bothered to track down a DVI adapter), we ended up hooking the DS-1500 up to both of our Media Center PCs. Maybe not what DoubleSight is going for, but it sure made it easy to work on both PCs at the same time.