Product on the right
This originally was going to be a video review showing me unboxing the monitor, connecting it, installing the drivers and then showing you how it works but then I thought how hard that actually would be hard and a boring video. If you are in a rush then here is the review summed up – it works very well as long as you are using the two USB cables provided.
So let’s get the technical stuff out of the way first. As you have read in the title this is a 21.5″ – 1920×1080 monitor that runs purely from a USB cable (it is a Y-spilt USB cable so actually uses two USB ports on your system) which is very light and allows you to easily add a second monitor to any system that uses a spare USB port.
The response time of the screen does seem to be around 5ms and overall works very well I have been able to have TVCatchUp, YouTube and Magix Movie Edit Professional loaded on it and I never really noticed any issues in terms of the refresh rate after I plugged both USB ports in (if you use one, you will notice it quickly). For the sake of having a fair review and seeing from experience a lot of people I know get second monitors are gamers; you will notice a slight delay if you are using this as the main monitor. That said I was able to play older games with no issues such as Command and Conquer and the issue only mainly came up with first-person shooter games.
When I originally researched about this monitor people kept talking about a colour issue and after using it for some time I can honestly say I can not see the issue people are commenting on so really I am unable to say. The next thing I will comment on is the monitor doesn’t come with any controls to change the brightness and settings like that but I have read there will be a firmware update for that coming “soon”.
The next thing is this monitor does not have any built-in audio but seeing most people will use this for a second monitor and that I doubt technically the bandwidth over the USB cable would also support audio, it is not a big problem.
And that is my review. If you are looking for a good second monitor to do things like office programs, emails, web browsing, videos and other light things then this monitor is perfect. If however, you have a spare VGA, DVI or HDMI port on your computer I would advise you to get a second monitor unless you have reason to run it over a USB cable like I did.
Overall I give it a 4/5 for the reasons and usage above. I will try and do a video review should I find out how.
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I’ll like to add to this review – I am still using this monitor to this day! It has been over seven years and it is still working flawlessly (excluding having to buy new cables for it but that was due to my desk).
I do stress however you can not use this monitor to play any games that will rely on your GPU. This is a perfect monitor for things your CPU can handle such as video, word processor and so on.
Another two years later and the monitor is still alive!
Although I am no longer using it on my main setup, I am using it on a secondary PC that has PuTTy running on it and it still does the job.