HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort are irrelevant

IF YOU WERE TO ask industry execs what they think of 2008 and the battle of standards for displaying pictures on screen, vast majority would consider only Display Port and HDMI as relevant players.

However, an alternative for these standards has been present on the market for quite some time, and you would be surprised that probably every computer on the market or the one you own has the display connector for the future.

Following our article about the Samsung SyncMaster 940ux a while ago, a certain Euro bank ordered no less than 5000 displays, and after a while, both Samsung and LG now have monitors with DisplayLink logic inside.

The tech also works if you have regular displays, but you need to get an extender box from companies such as Kensington, available as docking bays or just a small USB-DVI adapter. DisplayLink works as a part of Windows update process, or just driver install.

This would be a regular multimonitor usage model on trade shows, if not for one small fact

A really cool feature is the fact that display spanning works with no problems on Intel Extreme Graphics, yet alone on discrete graphics cards such as ATI Radeon or Nvidia GeForce ones. In the demo on the stand, a Lenovo StinkPad notebook was running an extension screen via USB to Samsung's SyncMaster 940ux, but the cute part was Dell's XPS machine with GeForce Go 7950 GTX. This notebook was displaying 1920x1200 resolution on its display, and two 1680x1050 resolutions on spanking new LG monitors. To add things to boot, three HD videos (WMV-HD, Imax documentaries) were spanned across displays, mixing between each other. There were no visible framedrops, and all of this was connected with a single USB cable going from a laptop to the left 20" display, and the left display had a USB cable going straight into the right 20" one. Quite impressive, and as a comment went: "It took us 10 years to go from Plug and Pray to Plug and Play, but now it works".

Those connectors coming from the monitor are power and USB. The USB sticks work if a monitor has a USB hub.

2.3MPix + 1.76MPix times two = almost six million pixels running over a regular, $2 USB cable.

The guys and gals from DisplayLink told us that they have great expectations from upcoming USB 3.0, since the bandwidth is expanding from the current 480 Mbps (60MB/s) to a massive 4.8 Gbps (600 MB/s). With this kind of bandwidth, there is no doubt that daisy-chaining a FullHD signal on six monitors is quite in the realms of possibility. Can you imagine running three displays at 2560x1600 each, with nothing in between sans the USB cable?

Expect sparks to fly with the upcoming DisplayLink supporting 2008 models from Samsung and LG - and some other hotshots that we were asked not to mention here. The launch of USB 3.0 is of course, expected either at CES 2008 in Las Vegas or at CeBIT 2008 in Han(g)over. µ