the spud or spontaneous pop-up display
was billed as a godsend for all manner of situations a high-resolution
battery-powered portable display for
watching movies on the train sharing presentations with colleagues and being
more productive with your small screen laptop
so then in november 2016 i backed it on kickstarter and now
two and a half years later i am among the first to get my hands onto rovia's
high resolution portable monitor
dear spud backer we finally delivered it
yay accessories including an hdmi cable usb
type-c cable wall wart and north american power plug
finally the spud itself
so uh let's find out if this was a good idea
i think the best way to tackle a product like this is to go through the
manufacturer's selling points one at a time so we'll start with what
exactly it is it's a 24 inch display
that collapses and expands like a
ruggedized umbrella well i'm not familiar with the term
ruggedized umbrella but
i i guess it might be something a little bit like this so sure
and the display area is comfortably 24
inches which arovia points out is 23
times larger than a smartphone screen although i don't know how well those
numbers hold up now that iphones don't look like this anymore their point does
still stand though if you're watching a movie this is a lot bigger than this
that said as i'm always reminding my wife there's more life than size so
let's go ahead and fire it up and have a look at the performance
so to get it connected we've got a single hdmi input
the type c here is actually only for charging that's not a separate input
we've got our power button which we hold down for four seconds
until it flashes that'll turn it on you can see we've got about 75 percent
battery it does have integrated speakers apparently so there's our volume up and
volume down we've got a brightness control wheel and a usb 5 volt output
down here we've got an exhaust vent so it is actively cooled i can actually
feel the fan blowing in my face right now as well as an intake and then this
is our focus knob and then we've got one of those little threaded inserts for
throwing it on like a little tripod or something like that so theoretically it
should now be working actually all right there we go
huh
i kind of wish i could see what you guys are seeing because
from my perspective i am pretty disappointed by the brightness in person
but i don't know how exactly the camera is capturing it
uh david how would you how would you say how representative would you say the
experience is like brighter on the camera
looks brighter on camera than in real life oh
all right like to put this in perspective ladies and gentlemen
here i'm going to turn my lcd all the way down to mega ultra power saving how
do they compare now maybe it can go brighter still because like here's where
i would normally use this thing i'd say
let's turn it up a little bit i'm going to crank it those colors though
like it's clearly purple and like on the chrome logo
there's no distinction between the white circle around the blue dot in the middle
and the yellow part of the wheel like nothing here let's put something
white on the screen you'd think given the
specs of the projector and the distance of the screen are known quantities that
they would have been able to get the image a little bit closer to the edge
like there's not uh there's not really a way that i could conceivably get it to
stick out further so i could get a bigger image out of it
i'm going gonna try and adjust the focus though that's kind of rough actually
so you can see the focus right dead center is actually not bad
but there is a lot of blur up in the corners
and even i'd say anywhere outside about a
sort of four inch diameter circle in the middle is
noticeably blurry materials quality seems all right for the most part though
this is a nice lightweight but durable feeling fabric
this is kind of floppy i actually initially thought that maybe this was
some kind of stand or something because it's got like
this bend in here but i couldn't find any meaningful way to
to prop it up on it so it seems like this is basically
how it mounts
so the thing is what really intrigued me
and probably a lot of the nearly 2
000 spud backers was the prospect of using this thing
as a high resolution secondary display for a laptop when
they're working on the go so kind of kind of like this
which i guess brings us perfectly to our
next selling point use it everywhere
all right so watching movies
well my main issue with that is visual fidelity
very loosey-goosey use of the term high
resolution is something that i think they could have done a better job of
it's only 720p and unfortunately no
amount of tinkering with the focus style off-camera managed to fix the issue that
i was having with focus so no matter what we load up on it it just doesn't
look good using it outside actually yeah i could kind of see that
but i'm also pretty sure that they did some fairly aggressive color grading in
this promotional video because from our experience you're going to be using it
around dusk or later for sales
presentations yeah i could see this fitting pretty
nicely into a briefcase or something like that
that is as long as there isn't already a tv or a projector in the meeting room that
you're heading into and then for cooking again yeah i could
kind of see that as long as you've got the counter space as for the coffee shop
sure having a big screen display there might be nice but i really don't know if
you want to be that guy i think overall
you guys can kind of see where i'm going with this
most places truth be told just don't
have like a convenient
four square feet of space to plop down a
fully deployed spud like at two pounds
it's obviously a lot lighter than an old tube style crt monitor
but it's nearly the same size
bringing us to portability which i think
is probably the spud's most compelling
selling point because here's the thing all of my convenience and
image quality complaints aside if i absolutely
needed a large green display in any of
those situations this really is my only option
is what i would have said if in the last two and a half years
since i backed the thing we hadn't seen a veritable explosion
of portable battery-powered lcds
now i'm not saying that the spud doesn't do
some things well it's way bigger than any portable
display on the market even that four thousand dollar one from asus
and the material that a rovia sourced for the projection screen is spectacular
like check this out i wish they made never iron shirts out of this stuff
because it's just like it's actually kind of amazing
the inclusion of a healthy integrated battery and a usb port for a chromecast
or something like that that's a great feature and the overall fit and finish
of the thing just is surprisingly good for
a kickstarted product the thing is i just
don't really understand who this thing is for
like on the one hand they seem to be going after the the like elegance crowd
with the whole size of a book thing in the marketing
but here's my issue with that hold on let me just get this
fold it down here we go um saying to me that this is the size of
a book is kind of like saying that a truck is about the size of a car
like yes this is a lot more like a book than it
is like a full tower computer
but this is a pretty big book and a folded spud
is more than double its size by volume now as for the
practicality crowd well i think those folks are probably buying
pocket projectors for 50 bucks on aliexpress
and pointing them out a pillowcase propped up on a couple of sticks when they go
camping for myself though none of that is really the main problem
for me the issue comes down to the price
if this thing was 99 bucks at the
walmart i'd be like heck yeah that's basically camping accessory territory
but at the nearly 400 us dollars that i paid for this
i would take the trade-off in size any day of the week and go with
something like this chinese portable monitor i mean if it's not big enough
then all i have to do is sit a little closer or pick it up and hold it since
it's so lightweight and the form factor is so much like a tablet also since the
resolution isn't straight out of 2005
almost no matter how close i get to it actually no matter how close i get to it
it's still going to look a lot better than the spud
sorry spud you're just potato image quality
i can't believe i didn't think of that joke until now so thanks for watching
guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit
like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we
featured at the link in the video description uh maybe we'll also throw in a link for
like more practical portable monitors asus has one that's about the same price
this one's actually cheaper um also linked in the description is our
merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which
you should totally join