Three
As you can probably tell, my three LCD monitors are all present and accounted for. And yeah, before you ask, it ROCKS!
One very interesting “problem” is that none of the monitors I received shipped with a DVI cable. I have no idea why that is — all of the smaller LCD monitors I saw last summer came out of the box with both VGA and DVI cables, but these bigger, high-dollar products came with just VGA.
But that’s not a problem, because while the first monitor was a nice Hanns-G, which I plugged in to the VGA output from my laptop docking station, the other two are even nicer — they’re ASUS VW223-B monitors with “EzLink” (ASUS’s feature name for DisplayLink’s technology).
I found the two monitors on clearance from NewEgg.com. They were $159 plus NJ sales tax, call it $175 each. Apparently part of the clearance was getting rid of the products entirely, since the products are now shown as “Deactivated Item” on NewEgg’s site.
The DisplayLink/EzLink technology is an on-the-fly compression mechanism that sends video requests (probably just re-encoding Direct-X requests, but it might be something different) over USB. I wondered how well that technology would perform, but I was planning on buying a USB/VGA adapter device and finding out. Well, no need.
Both of the ASUS monitors are plugged in to USB, since they didn’t include a DVI adapter and since my Hanns-G is already taking up the VGA output port. And they work swimmingly. Not only is the display nice, but you can watch videos and other streaming media over the USB connection. I will admit that my limited experiment, watching three (different) videos on three different monitors at the same time, seemed to show some “snow” in the video images of the ASUS (USB linked) monitors. I’m guessing that this is a compression artifact, with the drivers sacrificing video in factor of speed. If that’s true, they’re doing it exactly right. The result was kind of like watching a slightly imperfect broadcast (over-the-air) television signal: a little fuzz, and some salt/pepper, but the underlying picture was clear.
The DisplayLink drivers installed smoothly, and once installed the driver had no problem picking up when I plugged in the third monitor. That little Windows “de-dum” sound for a new USB device, and I could instantly extend the desktop one more time. The monitors can be controlled from the taskbar, including specifically a rotation option. Also, the monitors appear in the standard Windows Display control panel, so you can specify location and resolution.
As you can see in the above image, setting the rotation causes the correct data to be reflected back to windows. And you’ll have to take my word for it, but you can get a LOT of lines of code onto a 22″ monitor in portrait mode. Here’s the bottom of a Scite window, where the top of the window is showing top-of-file:
Yes, that’s 104 lines of source code on a single screen. Given that subroutines and methods are supposed to fit “on a single page,” I may have discovered the ultimate solution to all refactoring problems.
This is so cool!
One thing worth pointing out is that the monitors themselves do not support rotation. They come with the kind of cheap plastic stand that you would expect. Instead, I bought a third-party monitor stand from the Ergotech Group. They don’t have an on-line store, but rely on other vendors for retail sales. I found a bunch of places where I could choose to pay about a million dollars for that stand, and then I found PC Connection, where $250 seemed like a bargain.
All told, the monitors ($522) and the stand ($267) cost me $790. Sitting here, beginning to develop retinal cancer from the massive volume of monitor-light being blasted at my eyes, it was totally worth it.