Kensington teams with DisplayLink for USB Dual Monitor Adapter
While it hasn't gone so far as to take advantage of DisplayLink's wireless USB video card know-how, Kensington has turned to the company for some help with its new USB Dual Monitor Adapter, which should still get the job doe even it adds a bit more clutter to your desk. Somewhat notably, this one includes both VGA and DVI connectors, and it'll give you your choice of mirrored or extended desktops. Unfortunately (for some), you'll have to make do with a max 1440 x 1050 resolution on widescreen displays or 1280 x 1024 on standard monitors, but you will get full 32-bit color depth and promised " smooth DVD video playback," but as with most of these, Kensington makes no promises about gaming performance. If that's not too much of a compromise for you, you'll be able to grab one of these early in the second quarter of this year for an even $100.
Filed under: Displays, Peripherals
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Joe @ Jan 7th 2008 11:55AM
1440x1050 for a widescreen display? That makes no sense. The common resolutions in this neighborhood are 1680x1050 or 1440x900. The quoted resolution is actually extremely close to the 4:3 resolution of 1440x1080.
I wouldn't buy video hardware from a company that calls 1440x1050 widescreen.
David Stein @ Jun 5th 2008 5:20PM
Is it even possible to cram "smooth DVD playback" down a USB2 pipeline?
You've got a max *theoretical* throughput of 60Mbps, right?
1440 x 1050 x 32-bit output x 60Hz of data = 346Mbps... right? So, er, you'd need SIX dedicated USB2 connections working in parallel... right?
And that's presuming that the USB2 bandwidth isn't being shared by other devices that want to communicate... what happens if that DVD-quality video you want to stream is stored on a USB2 drive?
Now, it's entirely possible that this device is doing some kind of compression - e.g., if there's some kind of software on your machine that pushes (to the Kensington USB2 device) only the portions of the screen that have changed since the last update. That might compress it a lot... but at the expense of a *ton* of CPU usage, right? No wonder they make no promises about "gaming performance" - your CPU might redline just trying to evaluate what parts of the video image are to be sent to the Kensington device...
Look, this just doesn't make any technical sense, and it probably runs poorly. I'd love to read some hands-on reviews, but there aren't any... so... Caveat Emptor!