Gadgetory

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 on to row vias 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 let's find out if this was a good idea private Internet access that's exactly what you'll get with PIAA a safe and protected IP and it's got loads of other features as well check it out at the link in the video description I think the best way to tackle a product like this is to go through the manufacturers 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 guess it might be something a little bit like this oh sure and the display area is comfortably 24 inches which are oviya 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 to 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 see here is actually only for charging that's not a separate input we've got our power button which we hold down for 4 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 I kind of wish I could see what you guys are seeing cuz from my perspective I am pretty disappointed by the brightness in person but I don't know how exactly the camera is capturing it David how would you how would you say how representative would you say the experience is like it looks brighter on camera than in real life alright like to put this in perspective ladies and gentlemen here I'm gonna turn my lcd all the way down to mega ultra power saving how do they compare now maybe it can go brighter still cuz like here's where I would normally use this thing I'd say let's turn it up a little bit you 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 but they would have been able to get the image a little bit closer to the edge like there's not 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 gonna try to adjust the focus though that's kind of rough actually so you can see the focus of right dead center is actually not bad but there's 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 alright 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 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 ROV is 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 dial 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 merely the same size bringing us to portability which i think is probably the spuds most compelling selling point because here's the thing all of my convenience and image quality complaints aside if I absolutely needed a large screen 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 the soos and the material that our oviya sourced for the projection screen is spectacular like check this out I wish they may have never ironed shirts out of this stuff because it's just 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 kick-started 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 be 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 folded down here we go 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 after nearly four hundred 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 do you have any idea what happens at your front door well ring is on a mission to reduce crime in your neighborhood with their 1080p HD resolution 160 degree video doorbells they've got night vision an adjustable motion sensor two-way audio so you can talk to whoever's at the front door and of course their Wi-Fi capable so you can always check what's going on wherever you are your ring doorbell is powered by an 8 to 24 volt AC doorbell circuit and/or the battery bank it's compatible with iOS Android Mac and Windows and the video doorbell kit includes their video doorbell to a spotlight cam and a solar security sign so buy it now at ring comm slash ltte we're gonna have that linked below 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 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 also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which should totally join