Johannesburg, 31 Oct 2011
I have a fancy PC-based audio measurement system that I use on occasion to set up home theatre systems.
The problem with this system is that if I want to take it to a customer's home, I have to lug three large boxes around. The PC box, a box that holds the keyboard, mouse, a selection of audio cables, and a couple of high quality microphones, while box number three is usually my desktop monitor.
Trust me when I tell you that it is a pain to have to get behind my desktop PC to unplug the monitor and to have to thread its power and video cables through the small access hole at the rear of my desk.
What I need is an easy to use and set up monitor, and one that is easily transportable to boot.
Platinum Micro happens to have such a monitor, and it's called the AOC e1649Fwu, or USB monitor.
There are a few things that make this USB monitor a little different to other run of the mill 15.6-inch LCD monitors.
Its resolution of 1366x768 pixels is good, if not exciting; its claimed response time of 16ms is okay, but won't excite gamers; and in my opinion, its claimed dynamic contrast ratio of 20 000 000:1 is a thing of fantasy. By using a LED backlight, the monitor is eco-friendly, but LED backlighting isn't that new anymore.
What differentiates this monitor is that at 35.5mm, it is extremely slim and has a built-in adjustable hinge that lets users orient the monitor in either horizontal or vertical planes. When the hinge is folded flat against the monitor, the whole thing is small enough to simply slip into a laptop bag, and this makes the monitor a good mobile model.
The next and most innovative part of the monitor is the simple detail that the only cable a user needs to connect it to a computer or tablet is a USB cable. Admittedly, it is one of those USB cables that look conventional at one end, but has two connectors on the other. This single cable is far easier to pack than a power cable and VGA cable will ever be.
Monitor set up is practically as simple as plugging into to a USB port or preferably two ports.
I say two ports because when I used only one of the two USB connectors, the screen powered up, but there was a fair bit of screen flicker. Plugging in the second port of the supplied cable solved this. I'm going to assume that a single USB port simply cannot supply enough current to adequately power the monitor. The solution is to use both parts of the supplied cable.
The monitor is clever enough to know if it is being used in a horizontal mode or in vertical mode, and it will automatically adjust the on-screen image to fit.
When a user moves the monitor, it sends a little bit of code to the computer's graphics card to tell it to change the image layout. My anti-virus software saw this code as a virus, so stopped the auto-change from happening. I could, however, still change screen orientation manually, so this was no real issue for me, but it may be worth AOC looking into.
On the performance front, I was quite happy with the AOC USB monitor. It delivered good colour quality out of the box, was reasonably bright, and it did display decent contrast, even if this wasn't in reality close to the manufacturers claim. It was also pretty good to watching videos on, but there was just a little motion blur when things moved quickly across the screen. This was no worse than my laptop screen, though.
In summary
While it won't be a pro-photographer's monitor of choice, mainly as colour does drift quite a bit when one moves away from its central axis, I liked the portability and flexibility that the AOC e1649Fwu USB monitor brought to the party.
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