We said in our preview of this week's VideoForum 2006 show that we were greatly looking forward to seeing Matrox's DualHead2Go - a gadget that allows a laptop to run two external monitors (plus the laptop's own screen), to make life easier when working with a typical multi-window video-editing or stills-editing app.
Well, it was one of the first things we checked out and, rather to our surprise, we weren't disappointed, even though we knew in advance that this is really just a clever cludge - the laptop's external connector puts out a single-monitor signal and the Matrox box splits it into two and passes it on.
Of course, the box relies on the laptop having a decent-spec graphics processor - but that's something, perhaps, it's not unreasonable to take for granted in a portable PC intended for serious editing of video or stills.
Feel the quality and see the width yourself by clicking on the image below to see it full size (3968x1080 pixels) - but, be warned, this is a 689KByte file and will take a while to come over if you've not got broadband. Actually, the quality is slightly better than you'll see, because we JPEG-compressed the original 3MByte BMP screengrab to keep the files size small!
If you don't mind an even bigger download, click instead on the second picture, which links to a 785KByte PNG version of somewhat better quality.
What you'll see in either pic, though, isn't what we saw when we took the grab. What we saw was three screens. The right-hand side of the grab - the stuff about Matrox's graphics-product range - was on the laptop's screen and the lefthand side (showing an editing session in Avid's Xpress Pro HD app) was split over two 17in LCD monitors. Lovely!
Oh, and look at the Display Properties window to the left. You'll see that the Matrox box is tricking the laptop into thinking that it's connected to a single 2048x768 monitor, rather than the two 1024x768 LCD panels that were actually used - the box itself takes that single output and then splits it and feeds it to the two attached screens.
Click on the pic below to see the 785KB PNG version - again full size at 3968x1080.
For more on VideoForum - which ends Thursday, Feb 9 - check out our show preview and keep an eye on the HEXUS.lifestyle front page.
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