The continuing price plummet of 19-inch LCD screens means that many models are now available for little more than £100 - around a third of the price that they were a year or so ago. To compensate for this price crash, it's a good idea to buy three screens instead of one, and the TripleHead2Go is the reason why.
Just as we were starting to think that the legendary Canadian graphics company, Matrox, had disappeared off the mainstream map, it's back with a genuinely innovative and exciting device, which takes the video output of almost any graphics card and splits it three ways to feed three separate monitors. But rather than just giving you the same display three times over, it actually spreads your Windows desktop across all three screens, to envelop you in wraparound, surround-vision.
Smaller than a man's hand, the remarkably compact main unit contains a DC input for the separate power supply, a D-Sub video input, and three D-Sub outputs for feeding your three screens. Sadly, the TripleHead2Go isn't digital DVI compatible but we suspect the reason for this lies in the '2Go' part of its moniker.
This is because, with its small form factor and light weight, the Matrox is perfect for feeding from a laptop (most of which don't have a DVI output anyway) and, in our tests, we got great results running three screens as well as being able to view the laptop's own screen simultaneously. Besides, the 3,840x1,024 resolution enabled by the Matrox TripleHead2Go would require non-standard Dual-Link DVI, which is only featured on the most expensive graphics cards.
The device makes use of the DDC (Display Data Channel) to tell Windows graphics cards that a 3,840x1,024 display resolution is available. This stretches analog video to the limit, but the Matrox delivered very high quality results in our tests, with practically imperceptible video noise levels even when displaying very high frequency test charts.
The Matrox is hot property in the gaming world, but it offers equally big advantages on the business front. While we wouldn't recommend splitting a single window across three screens, no matter how thin your LCD bezels are, it's great being able to run different applications on each screen without having to switch between windowed applications. The TripleHead2Go really does give you the bigger picture. Matthew Richards