This $65 Idea Raised $2M on Kickstarter... - Mobile Pixels Geminos

two billion dollars though I guess they have a pretty solid pitch I mean this is my dual monitor setup without a geminos how could I have created a curved surface how could I ever eliminate the large gap between them might yet okay but while I can't help but mock mobile pixels promotional materials the geminos isn't just two monitors it comes with a cool ergonomic stand a webcam speakers and a charging dock making it legitimately an attractive and convenient package for anyone from graphic designers to content creators to Executives but just like anything attractive and convenient there are some serious downsides once you get into the meat of it we expected to be able to build a similar stacked monitor setup for our fraction of the cost but what we didn't expect was all the things that we would learn about displays and interfaces along the way we also didn't expect this sneaky segue to our sponsor Cisco if you're looking for a podcast that it Blends personal and professional conversations with Innovative guests from around the world look no further than Cisco techbeat you can join them to learn about the human side of Cisco technology hear about diverse Industries and stay up to date on Cisco's latest Innovations check out Cisco techbeat using the link in the video description monitor arms have existed since at least 1997 when Visa standardized the mounting holes that are found on the back of most modern flat panel displays but the geminosis party trick allows you to essentially flip the more common stacked configuration on its head going from an angled down top screen and a flat bottom screen to an angled up bottom screen with a flat top and that's an attractive proposition even if the rest of the package is a bit of a mixed bag it's 1080p that's good or at least okay but it's 60 hertz that's bad it's IPS that's good with a peak brightness of 250 nits that's bad there's a lot of i o on dock that's good but it uses trigger six for its one cable design instead of DisplayPort MST that's bad more on that later for now I really want to focus on this hinge combined with its easy fold up and go functionality this is undeniably cool but that doesn't mean it's practical most of the people we know both in and outside of our office don't use a stacked configuration mostly due to personal preference but when we show the geminos to our resident graphic designers they both Ood and odd over its capabilities and with the admittedly more expensive touchscreen option it could be pretty beneficial to keep a reference on top than use the bottom display as a surface to draw on wherever you may be then just fold it up and head out the door however both of them pointed out that if portability wasn't your top priority you could just put your favorite tablet on a stand on your desk for a much better drawing experience and for that matter if portability was your top priority an iPad is a lot lighter okay well what about our editors then two of them are already using stacked configurations in the traditional sense and they were pretty interested in the geminos however as soon as they learned about the pan channels capabilities they quickly change their minds with the biggest turn off being the BGR subpixel layout on the top monitor wait a second BGR okay let me explain the pixels in your display are made up of sub pixels most commonly red green and blue that blend together their individual light outputs to create the final color of the full pixel these sub pixels are so small that they're usually invisible to the naked eye so wait hold on if that's the case why does it matter what order they're in ah okay it's less of an issue today but early LCDs used low resolution panels that made text appear very blocky and stair Steppy so software techniques were developed to improve readability Microsoft clear type is probably the one you're most familiar with it works in much the same way as in-game anti-aliasing does by altering the light output on a sub pixel level rather than simply turning entire pixels on and off this Shades of Gray or at least least shades of color approach theoretically improves horizontal resolution by about 300 percent that is until your display uses a non-standard subpixel layout and everything goes to Absolute hell in a handbasket now clear type can be adjusted and tweaked but it's going to be really hard to get it perfect especially if you're the kind of person who's more sensitive to this sort of thing and if you're using an application that doesn't reference clear type for subpixel rendering you are going to have a super bad time but hold on a second why would it be only the top one that's BGR the bottom is RGB well that's because the top one isn't BGR mobile pixel simply rotated the panel 180 degrees which not only has these text issues but introduces other problems as well we showed the geminos to some of our game streamers in the office and while they thought it was a really cool way to both game and monitor chat and stream Health they were shocked at the high input latency on the top panel to be clear it's usable but since it requires an additional frame buffer to hold the most recent frame while it gets flipped around on the Fly you're getting an extra 16 milliseconds of latency why would they do this for the most classic of all reasons to save money you see it's possible to find panels that have thin bezels all around them but they're very expensive this approach allowed them to push cheaper panels closer together without having their giant chins in the way these are so large because they often contain the backlight as well as panel driver so then if you are going to game on this setup we would strongly recommend that you set the bottom screen as the primary display and play your games on that one instead though that's not really a great experience there's no height adjust in case you were wondering you can't take the whole thing and move it up most of their marketing materials make it seem like this is for Content creators and streamers so I've got my stream chat as well as my OBS on the bottom got my game on the top not gonna lie this is kind of awesome I can't adjust the angle too much without losing my framing for the well or can I out of height that would be comfortable the framing is pretty good oh that's something I didn't consider by the time this is in a comfortable position I do not have a lot of room to move my mouse unless I move quite far away and it's a 24 inch monitor it's not exactly big by today's standards it really doesn't look not bad it's not HDR and there's no ambient light because the lights coming from that side it looks pretty okay not the greatest IPS viewing angles I've ever seen but that's probably just a function of the low brightness hey Brandon yeah did we talk about pixel response times at all because these are not good oh man I can barely even track my Target this is really hard to be effective on the latency is super high yeah it's playable like I got a killer whatever like if I was playing single player it wouldn't bother me but this is this is not great I mean look if my target is stationary and just doesn't move at all like that what the heck is going on with this game this is a really awful gaming experience but it's not entirely bad out of the box we measured relatively accurate grayscale tracking and an average Delta e of just 2.4 for color accuracy and SDR which is pretty solid it seems to cover slightly less than the advertised 97 of the srgb color space that's annoying but not the end of the world and we can't quite hit the advertised 250 nits Peak brightness at least not in the more color accurate temperature of 6 500 Kelvin we did manage to get to 290 nits in srgb though so you'll have to choose between brightness and color accuracy as for consistency our top display had similar but slightly worse results than the bottom so while they don't perfectly match each other this is pretty common even if you buy two of the same monitor from a reputable brand however just being close to its spec doesn't make the experience great the biggest issue we encountered was the amount of glare we ran into especially with the bottom monitor slid down not only will overhead lights make it difficult to see but in some situations even the reflection of the top monitor cause problems now the easiest fix for this would be to just crank the knits and punch through the glare but it just doesn't get bright enough so the only option is to keep living in your cave with the curtains down I won't judge you just like I won't judge you if you don't buy one of our new circuit desk pads I won't judge I'll just be sad what I will judge though is mobile pixel's decision to go with trigger six instead of DisplayPort MST for their one cable solution to drive both monitors okay even the text looks crap I haven't talked about the speakers yet they're all in one go about as good as you could expect speakers that are rear firing to be why are they rear firing oh they're up firing um yeah they sound awful they they bounce off the bottom display and then they get lost back there somewhere is that the max volume you gotta be able to turn that on where is it [Music] there you go volume in there sorry no oh my God how are these not labeled that is terrible I don't care it doesn't get to be louder now because this is the worst whoa look at that Jello effect I love that the best part is that because it's refreshing bottom up it's particularly jarring because that's not where your mouse is going to be when you're dragging around the window so it doesn't feel like the window is delayed behind you it feels like the window's out ahead of you or something oh wow now we've got three different delays the top of this window the bottom of this window and the bottom display this is awful do I need to see worse than this okay fine we can see the banding what what test pattern do you want you guys insist on the test patterns I really don't need them to know it's bad though so white looks okay really but change to another color and I think it looks a lot worse um I will debate you okay let's look tell you what green or blue oh that one doesn't look too bad that's really bad wow that's fugly that's why I was saying the White's not too bad in comparison oh I think that's even worse than green yeah there's green there that's not even blue this is awful like what's the deal with this magic control Technologies released their first version of this Tech back in 2006 it was called trigger one and was essentially a USB 2.0 Graphics controller they've iterated on it over the years introducing newer versions of trigger with support for newer interfaces and higher resolution displays trigger 6 is the latest version that utilizes USB 3.0 and supports up to 4K dual displays and h.264 pretty impressive I mean using a USB a cable to run a display seems pretty cool at first but it does come with some problems many problems way more latency color banding frame skipping chroma sub sampling on all of these make for a markedly worse experience and it's clear that this is a solution that's meant to be used as more of a last resort we reached out to mobile pixels for comment but we didn't hear back before filming this video so our best guess as to why they went this route is to offer a better experience for Apple users since Apple stubbornly refuses to support running multiple displays over a single cable using DisplayPort MST for our part we'd recommend regardless of whether you're on PC or Mac that you stick to the dual HDMI inputs what makes the situation even worse though is that there's a hundred watts of power delivery via USBC on the dock so if they hadn't used trigger 6 this entire device absolutely could have been a true one cable solution just a USBC cable that plugs into your laptop and bada bing bada boom you're charging you're displaying three screens at once but thanks to Apple we're left with yet another expensive ecosystem product that adding insult to injury you don't really need I mean if it was Zero compromises the thousand dollar price point might even make sense but as it is I say if you want a lower screen get yourself another arm or just prop it up on some books unfortunate no matter what way we look at the mobile pixel geminos we just can't really recommend it even at this reduced price you're better off buying yourself a couple of Asus Pro arts or similar and an arm or a stand the pa-248qv for example is also 24 inch but it's 16 by 10 it's 75 Hertz it's also color accurate and it's 300 nits for just a hundred eighty dollars each at the time of writing you can then get a cheap arm and be up and running for under 500 bucks or I mean if you have this kind of budget anyway you could get something really nice that actually comes pretty close to the geminos in terms of usability like the LX vertical from ergotron it doesn't go quite as low and it's not as portable but it does offer a lot more versatility if your preferences or your needs change down the road all while coming in pretty close to the discounted price of 700 we're gonna have all these items linked down below just I can't believe they were trying to charge a thousand bucks for this thing and I can't believe I just knock up on you with this segue to today's sponsor that's right I just hack her system with crocodile Clips wait what yes that's how dangerous hackers are Lance you should know and if you don't you should check our sponsor thumbs up their YouTube channel shows you how cyber attacks work and teach you how to protect yourself so you don't lose your channel wink wink I wish I had more knowledge about cyber attacks check out one of the popular videos showing hackers assessing your data by clipping cocktail Clips on your RJ45 cable and that just in one scenario you see this drone isn't just creepy on Cone it's actually hacking his private information apparently the hackers use a technology called Mouse Jack and within a second your files are exposed go check out thumbs up with a link in the description make sure you comment and subscribe so you don't get hacked if you enjoyed this video this wasn't quite an all-in-one but maybe you would also enjoy the I game from colorful it was an all-in-one gaming computer that disappointed us as well

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,170,402

Keywords: Mobile Pixels, Geminos, Trigger 6, Trigger VI, Display, Monitor, Content Creator, Dual Monitor, Stacked Configuration, Stacked Monitors, Ergotron

Id: AXgUnbMAcOY

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 29 2023