- $2 million, 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, I yet... (crickets chirping)
- [Announcer] Mind the gap.
- 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 doc, 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.
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Monitor arms have existed since at least 1997
when VESA standardized the mounting holes that are found
on the back of most modern flat panel displays.
But the Geminos' 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 IO on the dock.
- That's good. - But it uses trigger six
for its one cabled design instead of display port MST.
- That's bad. - More on that later.
For now, I really wanna focus on this hinge, woo woo.
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 oohed and awed 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 panel's capabilities,
they quickly changed their minds
with the biggest turnoff 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 subpixels,
most commonly red, green
and blue that blend together their individual
light outputs to create the final color of the full pixel.
These subpixels are so small
that they're usually invisible to the naked eyes.
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 ClearType 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 subpixels level
rather than simply turning entire pixels on and off,
this shades of gray or at least shades of color approach
theoretically improves horizontal resolution by about 300%.
That is,
until your display uses a non-standard subpixels layout
and everything goes to absolute hell in a hand basket.
Now ClearType can be adjusted and tweaked
but it's gonna 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 ClearType for subpixels 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 bezzles 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, oh, or can I,
at a height that would be comfortable.
The framing is pretty good.
Ooh, 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
'cause the light's 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? - [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.
- [Plouffe] Playable?
- Yeah, it's playable like I got a kill or whatever.
Like if I was playing single player,
it wouldn't bother me, but 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 gray scale 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
in its peak brightness, at least not in the more
color accurate temperature of 6,500 Kelvin.
We did manage to get to 290 units 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 nits 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 display port 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...
- [Computer] Page for all in one go.
- About as good as you could expect
speakers that are rear firing to be
why are they rear firing?
- [Plouffe] No, they're up firing.
- [Linus] Oh, they're up firing up.
- [Plouffe] Yeah. - Yeah, they sound awful.
They bounce off the bottom display
and then they get lost back there somewhere.
Hey Nintendo.
- [Plouffe] Yeah, you sound so bad.
- Is that the max volume?
You gotta be able to turn that up.
Sorry, where is it?
- [Announcer] On the front, it's like touch screen.
- [Plouffe] OSD.
- Ah, boo.
- [Brandon] There you go.
Is volume in there, it's not touch screen?
- [Linus] So you, no.
Oh my god, these are not-
- [Brandon] Middle button to go to the next setting.
- 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 gonna 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 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.
- I will debate you.
Okay, let's look, tell you what.
- White, green or blue.
Oh, that one doesn't look too bad.
That's really bad.
- Wow, that's fugly. - Yeah.
That's why I was saying the white's not too bad
in comparison.
- Ooh, I think that's even worse than green.
- Yeah. 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 six is the latest version that utilizes USB 3.0
and supports up to 4K dual displays and H264.
Pretty impressive.
I mean, using a USBA 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,
and 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 display Port 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 this situation even worse,
though, is that there's a hundred watts
of power delivery of via USBC on the dock.
So if they hadn't used Trigger six,
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 thousands dollars 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.
Unfortunately, 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 PA248QV, 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 $180 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 can't believe they were trying to
charge a thousand bucks for this thing
and I can't believe I just snuck up on you with this segue
to today's sponsor.
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- If you enjoyed this video, this wasn't quite an all-in-one
but maybe you would also enjoy the eye game from Colorful.
It was an all-in-one gaming computer
that disappointed us as well.