I’ll never forget CES 2017. The year before I started at Digital Foundry, Razer stole the show with a triple-screen gaming laptop prototype called Project Valerie. Eight years on, I’m using a similar setup to spearhead Eurogamer’s deals coverage for Prime Day, and it’s every bit as fun and functional as I’d hoped back then.
This is the Monduo Pro Duo 16, a £600 accessory that clips onto 16-inch laptops like the MacBook Pro 16 and adds two further 16-inch displays, one on either side of the screen. We’ve covered portable displays at Digital Foundry for years, but Monduo have achieved some significant strides here, with a folding design that you could tuck into an average mid-sized backpack, an expanding design that allows for differently-sized host laptops and some genuinely decent specs.
Let’s look at those specs first: each of the two screens measures 16 inches, with a 2560×1600 resolution, 16:10 aspect ratio and a 144Hz refresh rate – though my 2021-era MBP seems to limit this to a fairly acceptable 120Hz instead. The monitor connects via USB-C, with two USB-C to USB-C cables in the box – and two extra Mini HDMI cables for older devices that can’t handle power and video over a single cable.
The end result isn’t quite as seamless as that Razer prototype, with cables visible between each monitor and the side of the MacBook, but it still leaves one free USB-C slot for me to connect a mouse. We’re not looking at a 4K resolution here either, not that I’d be able to connect two 4K displays at more than 60Hz anyway on this era of MacBook, but it still feels high quality enough to justify the faff and the asking price. These are IPS displays, so viewing angles are nice and wide, colour reproduction is accurate – if not quite MacBook Pro level – and that 120Hz refresh rate means everything feels snappy too.
The only real downside that I’ve noticed has been in terms of battery life – the normally incredible MacBook Pro dropped to less than 10 percent charge in a matter of hours, rather than comfortably lasting the day as it would with the single primary display by itself. However, that’s with two 16-inch screens maxed out in terms of resolution, refresh rate and brightness, and anywhere you’ll be putting out this particular setup is probably one that you can justify running a power cable to.
You’ll also want to make sure that you carefully detach the Monduo before putting your laptop away, as this is quite a bit of weight to subject to the MacBook’s hinge, even with a small support strut at the base of the unit. That said though, I found it easy enough to clip and unclip the unit, and it takes only a few minutes to do so each time – and probably less with practice. The screens fold into the body of the unit to protect them, with a cloth provided for each one, so you should feel reasonably confident tossing this into a backpack.
I’ve not yet had time to run my usual gamut of benchmarks on these monitors in terms of response time, colour accuracy or gamut, but Monduo claim a 95 coverage of the challenging DCI P3 colour space, and to the eye they don’t look at all out of character compared to the MacBook’s built-in display.
I also need to take a closer look at the Monduo app, which purports to synchronise brightness between the secondary displays and the main screen. This seems to work reliably enough, though I’m not sure if I prefer setting the brightness manually using the touch-sensitive buttons on the inner side of each screen, which allows access to your standard monitor-style OSD.
Overall though, it’s a positive first impression after a few days of use – and the closest I think you can get to that innovative Razer protoype all these years later.
If you’ve read this far, what would you like to know about the Monduo 16? What should I test? Let me know in the comments below.