“We’ve found that for the average tech-savvy computer user, three monitors is really the sweet spot,” said Jason Slaughter, senior product manager at DisplayLink. “With this solution, we’re delivering the powerful productivity gains that result from multi-monitor computing without compromising the Windows Vista experience.”
At my meeting with DisplayLink Wednesday morning, Slaughter showed off the Vista Aero cd interface support in DisplayLink’s family of network display seminconductors. It was an awesome sight, I must admit, particularly as I imagined the multi-monitor potential for IT scenarios. Imagine sitting at your desk, troubleshooting five user desktops on separate screens, all simultaneously manageable. Slaughter said, “You’re expanding your desktop real estate. You can have an open document in front of you, your email off to the left, and the Internet off to the right.”
Slaughter walked me through a demonstration of the DisplayLink-enabled products, including USB displays, notebook docking stations and display adapters from IOGEAR, Kensington, Samsung, and Toshiba. He showed me the pure plug-and-play simplicity of the DisplayLink philosophy, easily connecting docking stations with multi-monitor setups through the use of the ubiquitous USB port. I watched the gorgeous Aero interface burst onto multiple screens. “You can add as many as six displays over a single USB connector,” Slaughter said. “The beauty is that USB is all over the place! It’s a ubiquitous standard.”
Another practical application of the DisplayLink solution is home media. It delivers high-quality images, including 32-bit color images and smooth DVD video playback. Interactivity with mouse and keyboard is quick and responsive, and the solution supports monitor resolutions as high as 1600 x 1200 (Ultra eXtended Graphics Array--UXGA) and 1680 x 1050 (Widescreen Super Extended Graphics Array--WSXGA+).
DisplayLink’s solutions combine a Virtual Graphics Card (VGC) software driver for Windows XP and Windows Vista on the host computer and DisplayLink’s DL-120 and DL-160 Hardware Rendering Engine (HRE) chips that are embedded in displays, projectors, notebook docks, adapters and other display systems to convert the compressed video information into pixels for the display. The solution uses a lossless compression algorithm to transmit graphics across a wide range of standard wired and wireless network interfaces.
For more information, check out the DisplayLink Web site.
