Most people that use a laptop are limited to a single screen when travelling, however
there are quite a few portable monitors available these days like the T1332K from Magedok that
I’ve got here, so let’s find out just how good it is and help you decide if you’d
benefit from adding a secondary screen.
I think dual monitors are almost essential when at a desktop PC, at least for the work
I do, and although you can easily connect a regular monitor to a laptop at home, the
size makes it a little harder to travel with. Laptops are of course designed for portability
and travel, but most regular monitors are not, unless you’re willing to stick one
in a suitcase.
Lately I’ve seen quite a few external monitors like the T1332K that offer portability, it
basically looks like a tablet, so you can easily take it with you in a bag with a laptop
as it’s not too large or heavy.
This one comes with a stand that doubles as a protective cover too. It’s not connected
to the screen when you get it, after peeling off some plastic you can stick it to the back
of the monitor, and then use it to adjust between 4 different angles. Alternatively
you could instead use a sturdier third party stand like this one that can still be folded
up for portability.
This particular panel I’ve got here is a 13.3” 1440p 60Hz touchscreen, however they’ve
also got many smaller and larger options too, which also vary from 1080p, 1440p and 4K resolutions
or even 120Hz for gaming, so there are plenty of options available for whatever you’re
doing.
Setup was extremely easy, in my case I just connected the included Type-C cable to the
screen and my laptop and it was automatically powered on and ready to go. There are a few
different cables included though, the manual has useful diagrams outlining which cables
are needed based on what ports you’ve got available.
This model has two Type-C ports on the left, however the bottom one is only used to power
the screen if you’re using something like HDMI. It supports 45w power delivery passthrough
so you could charge your laptop over Type-C through the screen too, assuming of course
you’re powering the screen with an external source such as a power bank or AC adapter,
neither of which are included with the screen, and it doesn’t have it’s own battery either.
This could make it a little inconvenient depending on what I/O your laptop has, but yeah for
me I can literally just connect one Type-C cable and the screen gets power, display signal
and sound.
There’s also mini HDMI and a 3.5mm audio jack if you don’t want to use the speakers.
The two speakers are found over on the back near the top, and I found them to actually
sound pretty good, better when compared to most laptops at least, and they still got
loud enough at maximum volume.
There’s also a 75mm VESA mount on the back if you want to mount it to something, and
it comes with 4 screws for this.
Overall I thought the panel looked alright, I used the Spyder 5 to measure colour gamut
and got 83% of sRGB, 59% of NTSC, and 62% of AdobeRGB. The results are okish, fine for
gaming or basic tasks but I wouldn’t want to use it as a primary display for content
creation. I’m more than happy to use it for extra screen real estate off to the side,
but I’ll be sticking to doing stuff like editing on the laptop panel as it’s better
in my case.
Brightness wasn’t great just on the single cable from my laptop, getting to 224 nits.
If I gave it some extra power by connecting an AC adapter to the bottom Type-C port I
was able to boost this to 300 nits with a 560:1 contrast ratio, however this was still
below the 350 nits on the spec sheet.
The panel has a glossy finish, so that could be annoying or distracting depending on your
environment. There was only a little backlight bleed in my unit, no problems during normal
use, but that will vary between panels.
I found the touch screen functionality to work well enough, granted I don’t have much
experience with touch screens and don’t really have a use for this myself, I’d prefer
to not have it covered in fingerprints.
I also found the menu a bit difficult to navigate, it’s controlled with the 5 buttons on the
right near the top but it just didn’t feel intuitive to use, however there were a fair
number of customizations that could be made through the on screen display. These same
buttons are also used to power the screen on or off, adjust the volume, brightness,
or change the display input source.
A great secondary feature I’ve found with an external screen like this is that when
building a PC and I want to just quickly check its working, I can just connect this instead
of having to grab a larger monitor, so it’s also made my overall workflow a bit more convenient.
As it’s basically just a monitor, you could also use it for other things like consoles,
tablets or phones too, you’ll just probably need a power source.
You could even forget a laptop all together and just mount a NUC on the back with the
VESA mount and you’ve got yourself an extremely portable PC, so there are quite a few possibilities
with a product like this.
For what I’m actually using it for, which is basically video editing, it’s nice to
be able to bring extra screen space with me in my bag for not much extra space or weight.
I’ll take it with me to CES in January, so that should give it a pretty good work
out considering it takes me 24 hours to travel each way and I’ll be using it to make 10+
videos.
For updated prices check the links in the description, as prices will change over time.
At the moment it’s going for $229 USD, however it’s on sale. I can’t easily compare it
with other external screens as this is the first one I’ve used, but this doesn’t
sound too bad for a 1440p monitor that I can take with me to use with my laptop. There
are lots of options out there for portable monitors, I’ve even seen some 240Hz ones
for gaming.
So what do you think about the Magedok T1332K portable monitor, would you consider an external
screen like this? If so, I'm interested to hear what you’d use it for? Let me know
down in the comments, and if you’re new to the channel consider getting subscribed
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