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the spud or spontaneous pop-up display

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was billed as a godsend for all manner of situations a high-resolution

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battery-powered portable display for

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watching movies on the train sharing presentations with colleagues and being

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more productive with your small screen laptop

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so then in november 2016 i backed it on kickstarter and now

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two and a half years later i am among the first to get my hands onto rovia's

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high resolution portable monitor

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dear spud backer we finally delivered it

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yay accessories including an hdmi cable usb

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type-c cable wall wart and north american power plug

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finally the spud itself

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so uh let's find out if this was a good idea

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i think the best way to tackle a product like this is to go through the

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manufacturer's selling points one at a time so we'll start with what

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exactly it is it's a 24 inch display

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that collapses and expands like a

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ruggedized umbrella well i'm not familiar with the term

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ruggedized umbrella but

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i i guess it might be something a little bit like this so sure

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and the display area is comfortably 24

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inches which arovia points out is 23

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times larger than a smartphone screen although i don't know how well those

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numbers hold up now that iphones don't look like this anymore their point does

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still stand though if you're watching a movie this is a lot bigger than this

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that said as i'm always reminding my wife there's more life than size so

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let's go ahead and fire it up and have a look at the performance

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so to get it connected we've got a single hdmi input

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the type c here is actually only for charging that's not a separate input

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we've got our power button which we hold down for four seconds

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until it flashes that'll turn it on you can see we've got about 75 percent

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battery it does have integrated speakers apparently so there's our volume up and

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volume down we've got a brightness control wheel and a usb 5 volt output

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down here we've got an exhaust vent so it is actively cooled i can actually

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feel the fan blowing in my face right now as well as an intake and then this

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is our focus knob and then we've got one of those little threaded inserts for

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throwing it on like a little tripod or something like that so theoretically it

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should now be working actually all right there we go

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huh

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i kind of wish i could see what you guys are seeing because

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from my perspective i am pretty disappointed by the brightness in person

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but i don't know how exactly the camera is capturing it

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uh david how would you how would you say how representative would you say the

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experience is like brighter on the camera

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looks brighter on camera than in real life oh

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all right like to put this in perspective ladies and gentlemen

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here i'm going to turn my lcd all the way down to mega ultra power saving how

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do they compare now maybe it can go brighter still because like here's where

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i would normally use this thing i'd say

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let's turn it up a little bit i'm going to crank it those colors though

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like it's clearly purple and like on the chrome logo

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there's no distinction between the white circle around the blue dot in the middle

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and the yellow part of the wheel like nothing here let's put something

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white on the screen you'd think given the

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specs of the projector and the distance of the screen are known quantities that

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they would have been able to get the image a little bit closer to the edge

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like there's not uh there's not really a way that i could conceivably get it to

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stick out further so i could get a bigger image out of it

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i'm going gonna try and adjust the focus though that's kind of rough actually

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so you can see the focus right dead center is actually not bad

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but there is a lot of blur up in the corners

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and even i'd say anywhere outside about a

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sort of four inch diameter circle in the middle is

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noticeably blurry materials quality seems all right for the most part though

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this is a nice lightweight but durable feeling fabric

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this is kind of floppy i actually initially thought that maybe this was

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some kind of stand or something because it's got like

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this bend in here but i couldn't find any meaningful way to

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to prop it up on it so it seems like this is basically

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how it mounts

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so the thing is what really intrigued me

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and probably a lot of the nearly 2

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000 spud backers was the prospect of using this thing

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as a high resolution secondary display for a laptop when

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they're working on the go so kind of kind of like this

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which i guess brings us perfectly to our

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next selling point use it everywhere

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all right so watching movies

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well my main issue with that is visual fidelity

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very loosey-goosey use of the term high

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resolution is something that i think they could have done a better job of

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it's only 720p and unfortunately no

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amount of tinkering with the focus style off-camera managed to fix the issue that

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i was having with focus so no matter what we load up on it it just doesn't

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look good using it outside actually yeah i could kind of see that

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but i'm also pretty sure that they did some fairly aggressive color grading in

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this promotional video because from our experience you're going to be using it

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around dusk or later for sales

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presentations yeah i could see this fitting pretty

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nicely into a briefcase or something like that

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that is as long as there isn't already a tv or a projector in the meeting room that

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you're heading into and then for cooking again yeah i could

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kind of see that as long as you've got the counter space as for the coffee shop

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sure having a big screen display there might be nice but i really don't know if

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you want to be that guy i think overall

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you guys can kind of see where i'm going with this

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most places truth be told just don't

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have like a convenient

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four square feet of space to plop down a

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fully deployed spud like at two pounds

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it's obviously a lot lighter than an old tube style crt monitor

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but it's nearly the same size

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bringing us to portability which i think

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is probably the spud's most compelling

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selling point because here's the thing all of my convenience and

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image quality complaints aside if i absolutely

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needed a large green display in any of

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those situations this really is my only option

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is what i would have said if in the last two and a half years

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since i backed the thing we hadn't seen a veritable explosion

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of portable battery-powered lcds

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now i'm not saying that the spud doesn't do

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some things well it's way bigger than any portable

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display on the market even that four thousand dollar one from asus

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and the material that a rovia sourced for the projection screen is spectacular

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like check this out i wish they made never iron shirts out of this stuff

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because it's just like it's actually kind of amazing

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the inclusion of a healthy integrated battery and a usb port for a chromecast

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or something like that that's a great feature and the overall fit and finish

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of the thing just is surprisingly good for

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a kickstarted product the thing is i just

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don't really understand who this thing is for

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like on the one hand they seem to be going after the the like elegance crowd

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with the whole size of a book thing in the marketing

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but here's my issue with that hold on let me just get this

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fold it down here we go um saying to me that this is the size of

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a book is kind of like saying that a truck is about the size of a car

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like yes this is a lot more like a book than it

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is like a full tower computer

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but this is a pretty big book and a folded spud

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is more than double its size by volume now as for the

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practicality crowd well i think those folks are probably buying

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pocket projectors for 50 bucks on aliexpress

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and pointing them out a pillowcase propped up on a couple of sticks when they go

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camping for myself though none of that is really the main problem

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for me the issue comes down to the price

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if this thing was 99 bucks at the

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walmart i'd be like heck yeah that's basically camping accessory territory

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but at the nearly 400 us dollars that i paid for this

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i would take the trade-off in size any day of the week and go with

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something like this chinese portable monitor i mean if it's not big enough

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then all i have to do is sit a little closer or pick it up and hold it since

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it's so lightweight and the form factor is so much like a tablet also since the

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resolution isn't straight out of 2005

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almost no matter how close i get to it actually no matter how close i get to it

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it's still going to look a lot better than the spud

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sorry spud you're just potato image quality

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i can't believe i didn't think of that joke until now so thanks for watching

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guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit

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like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we

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featured at the link in the video description uh maybe we'll also throw in a link for

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like more practical portable monitors asus has one that's about the same price

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this one's actually cheaper um also linked in the description is our

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merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which

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you should totally join