The wonderful $99 USB monitor review: you have one day left to read this
Earlier in March, I wrote about a $99 USB-powered monitor from AOC that caught my attention, because I am always looking for an effective way to mobilize the multi-display setup I have in my home office.
I've been using the screen for about two weeks now, and I'd like to share my results with you, and maybe you'll consider picking up one in the last 24 hours that they're still on sale. Heck, maybe you'll even pay full price for one. I'm sure stranger things have happened...
Let's start this review with a mental exercise: Imagine you're standing in a crowded place, such as a busy airport or train station, or an urban area buzzing with people for some popular public event.
You have a notebook PC with a fully charged battery and a mobile broadband card which you need to open up and start using.
What do you do? Do you just plop down right where you're standing and crack open your computer as human traffic swirls around you?
If you said "yes," you might want to get your head examined. Nobody does that. People who need to use a physical keyboard of any sort will gravitate to the following places in order of preference:
1) A desk or table
2) A bench or ledge
3) A free-standing chair or stool
4) The ground next to a wall
5) Everywhere else
Do not believe the stock photographs of young women wistfully using their PC while lying on their stomachs in the middle of lush green fields. If there is not a raised horizontal surface in front of someone using a notebook, there is almost always a vertical surface behind them. It could be a beach chair, it could be a goddamn bale of hay.
This is a lie.
With that being said, a smaller subset of these locations would be conducive to pulling out and setting up an external monitor for extended screen real estate, so in truth, a mobile dual-monitor environment is kind of a silly thing. Over the course of the month, I have come to terms with this silliness.
Whatever, I'm sticking with it. So if you're going to be carrying around an extra screen for those occasions where you can plop down and comfortably set one up, it should have four qualities: simplicity, ruggedness, lightness, and tolerance to wide variations in ambient light.
I give the AOC E1649FWU a passing grade in all of these categories.
Simplicity: The swiveling stand on the back of the display easily pops out, and you have to plug its USB cable into kind of an awkward position in a recess under the stand. The display was instantly recognized when plugged into a Windows 7 PC, but required additional drivers to be downloaded from DisplayLink on a Mac running OS X Lion.
Once plugged in, that's pretty much it, there are no buttons on the display anywhere, and all your settings (orientation, resolution, color management, etc.) have to be changed through your Windows Display menu. It isn't very customizable, but it is very simple.
Ruggedness: It would be completely inaccurate to call this display "rugged." It would be more accurate to say that "It's not a cheap piece of crap." The chassis is made of solid plastic without any weak spots in the construction, which is good, but it's mostly hollow, which is unnerving.
I could see the plastic getting crushed or cracked without an excess of effort. If this display got knocked off the table, for example, it would most likely be lights out. Still, because it is not cheaply made, it gets a passing grade for ruggedness. It will just require its own protective sleeve or case when you take it along with you, and won't sustain much abuse beyond repeatedly setting it up and breaking it down.
Lightness: This is where the display gets an A+. At 14.8 x 9.3 x 1.4", the total weight of the unit is only 2.3 lbs (1.06 kg.) With such a light weight, it's really no burden to add it to your laptop bag.
Tolerance to variations in ambient light: Sadly, I do not carry around a spectrometer, so I can't give you the most scientific assessment of how this display performs, but I can tell you that it is super bright when you want it to be, but the tradeoff is that it can sometimes be extremely reflective, especially in portrait mode with a dark background. If you plan to use this display for coding or composing documents in portrait mode, use dark text on a light background. It will cut down reflections significantly.
For $99, it's acceptable all around. You've got one day left seek it out!
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