- USB powered, no additional power required
- Fully integrated into Windows and MAC OSX display control panel
- Easy plug and play installation with Microsoft WHQL signed drivers
- Supports resolutions upto 2048x1152 and 1080P
- Mirror or extend in any direction
ORIGINAL REVIEW: A little background and history: My stock trading multi-monitor setup has 3 monitors: the center 24" widescreen monitor is 1920x1200, and the secondary monitors on either side are 19" widescreens (1440x900). One of the side monitors is rotated +90 degrees and the other rotated -90 degrees to portrait mode. My desktop PC had a built-in video driver. In my first attempt to build a triple monitor system, I naively installed a dual output ATI video card, thinking I could use those two outputs in conjunction with my existing internal video to acheive a triple monitor output. I was disappointed to discover that the ATI card disabled the internal video card, so I was left with a dual monitor system. I lived with that for a while, but found that the ATI card frequently "forgot" which monitor was the primary monitor, "forgot" that one monitor was rotated to portrait mode, and even "forgot" that there were two monitors. I would turn on the PC to discover that the primary monitor display was rotated 90 degrees and the secondary monitor had no display, so I would have to tilt my head sideways while I tried to reset all the parameters to my preferred settings. The saved settings file seemed very unreliable.
Still wanting 3 displays, I finally ponied up almost $800 for a Matrox quad monitor display card. What a disaster. The available resolution settings did not accomodate widescreens, and certainly did not accomodate having one or more screens rotated. Each pair of the four outputs had to be the same resolution, and you could not control placement of the primary screen between the secondary screens, in terms of the mouse movement.
As I continued to research multi-monitor displays, I finally discovered USB multimonitor display adaptors. I purchased the Diamond BVU195 rather than some less expensive alternatives for several reasons: It supported a higher resolution than many other products, and it offered Vista compatibility. (The cheaper Diamond BVU160 is identical in every specification except is not certified for Vista and Windows 7. I do wonder if this is an artificial price difference. If anybody has successfully installed the BVU160 on a Vista system, I'd like to hear about it. The BVU195 Vista driver is available as a free download from the Diamond website, and I have a suspicion that you may be able to purchase the cheaper BVU160 hardware and download the BVU195 Vista driver for it. However, I HAVE NOT TESTED THIS, so it's buyer beware if you attempt this.)
Anyway, I bought two of the BVU195 and installed them in my desktop, to drive the smaller secondary displays that sit right and left of my primary display. My primary display is driven by the video built into my desktop, while the secondary displays are driven by the two BVU195 plugged into two USB ports. Installation and setup was far easier and faster than with the earlier ATI and Matrox experiments. The BVU195 coexists perfectly with the pre-existing on-board video driver. I was very pleased to discover that I can independantly and easily control the resolution, rotation, and placement of each secondary monitor in relation to the primary monitor. If I want, I can place the secondary monitors above or below the primary monitor, or both on one side, and the mouse arrow will flow from one screen to the next in the expected fashion.
I was so pleased by the experience that I gave a presentation on this setup to my local stock trading Meetup group. I was able to easily demonstrate setting up the multi-monitor display on a PC desktop, a PC laptop, and a Macintosh laptop. At one point of the presentation, I was driving a 46" LCD TV at 1900x1080p, a 24" monitor at 1920x1200, and a 19" monitor in portrait mode at 900x1440. Since then, two other traders in the group have purchased the BVU195 for use in a dual monitor PC system and a MacIntosh triple monitor system. Neither of those traders is "computer savvy," but they had no problems installing and configuring the BVU195.
The BVU195 video driver operates under the DisplayLink specification, which allows a maximum of 6 USB video drivers to be attached to your system. If your existing system has a single output video card built in, then the maximum total number of displays is 7. Most laptops have a built-in dual video driver, so with a laptop you will probably have a maximum of 8 displays possible. However, driving that many displays with a laptop, I'd recommend a USB expansion hub with independant power supply to drive that many BVU195s. I haven't tested the BVU195 when driven through a USB expansion hub, but I'd anticipate no problem.
I'm very pleased that I can easily expand the system to more and more monitors over time.
One limitation of any USB video driver is the speed and graphics processing power is not suitable for high-end gaming. USB video drivers such as the BVU195 do not contain an independant graphics processor nor an independant graphics memory cache. Therefore, it does not do a good job rendering textures and rapid movement in some video games. It's also not recommended for watching movies from DVD, particularly Blu-Ray.
My only negative comment about the BVU195: I've noticed that about every 30 to 45 minutes, the screens driven by the BVU195 will momentarily go blank for about 1 second. My two stock trading friends with the same device are reporting the same behavior on PCs and MacIntosh. In my house, I've had the BVU195 plugged into 3 different computers, one of which is XP based while the other two are Vista, and I see the same occasional blinking on all monitors driven by the BVU195, regardless of the computer or operating system, so I would assume this behavior is common to all installations. It's not an important negative issue for me, but I see other reviewers have reported the same behavior, so you should expect it also in your system. Another fault that occurs about once per week: One of the monitors will begin to display a solid color screen, changing from red to green to blue about one second for each color and continuing to do so, until I turn the monitor off and back on again. Again, it happens so seldom that it has not affected my usage of the BVU195, but it's definitely something to be aware of in making your choice. I havn't seen this particular bug reported by other reviewers.
It's only those three bugs: blinking off, blinking through colors and lack of gaming speed that causes me to give this product a 3 for performance. However, for applications like stock trading that have relatively slow changing displays using primary colors (no textures) I think the BVU195 is really a great solution because it's expandable, configurable, reliable, easy to use, easy to install and coexists with pre-existing video hardware. It's most important feature to me is the ability to independantly configure every individual monitor.
If you choose one of the less expensive USB multi-monitor drivers that are available, just make sure it meets your requirements for operating system and maximum resolution. Those particular specifications seem to be a determining factor of price.
Buy Diamond BVU195 HD USB 2.0 to VGA / DVI / HDMI Adapter (DisplayLink DL-195 Chipset) Now
Before buying this product I read all of the reviews. Nervous about getting this device for my Mac Mini I dove in and ordered it. It came in a timely manner. It is small. Great. It is easy to set up, just plug it in. Great. But when I turned my monitor on. Nothing. Yikes.... Another Mac person who bought this product warned that there were not any MAC drivers on the CD that came with the device, or on the Diamond website. Check. He is right. That is still true as of this review (9-30-10). But being like a pit bull with the Internet, I knew I could probably figure it out which is why I ordered it anyway. I figured I would give it a try being somewhat optimistic in general.The other reviewer was definitely correct. BUT..... here is the great news! when I opened the device I noticed that printed directly on the device was the company name "Display Link." Aha! They might have the drivers. Sure enough. The drivers were there on their website. Here is the url for the MAC drivers. I downloaded it and voila! My monitor came on. I was thrilled. So alas, like many new devices these days the hardware company makes one thing, and the software is developed by another company. So wonderful Mac User, don't despair. The product is there. Its a great little product. Without the USB adapter there would be no way I could run two screens on my mac mini. My mini is about 3 years old so it only has one port for a monitor. I use the screens for Pro Tools and recording music in my home studio and the device is working great!!! Good luck!EDIT 2/1/11:
The fix, suggested to me by the manufacturer, consists of turning off automatic graphics switching on the newer MBP models. This option is found under SYSTEM PREFERENCES > ENERGY SAVER > AUTOMATIC GRAPHICS SWITCHING. Uncheck the box (at the top left of the window) to turn this feature off. You will consume more battery power, but the computer will be stable using this USB video adapter. I haven't tried running the beta driver from Diamond, etc...
This solution works, but I don't like the lack of support from Diamond. Best of luck.
ORIGINAL ENTRY:
I just spent my entire weekend trying to fix a disaster caused by the Diamond BVU195 and/or the DisplayLink software. I had been running one 24" Dell external monitor at my desk from the mini-display port, but I wanted a second external monitor. I went ahead and purchased everything I needed -a dual arm mount and another 24" Dell, along with the Diamond BVU195.
I should mention that I'm running all this on a very new, mid-2010 model MacBook Pro with 10.6.4 and the recent (8/20/2010) graphics update.
After installing everything ran smoothly on the dual external monitors. It was very nice to have the additional screen space to work with. Leaving that evening, I put my computer to sleep, disconnected the cables, packed it up, and went home. The next morning, I was using my MBP at home without any external monitors. Everything seemed to be working fine for a number of hours.
However, while quitting out of a program, the screen went black, and then became stuck on a snow pattern (after restart, it was locked on a light blue screen similar to the screen seen during start-up). I cursed, fiddled, called apple care, and essentially did everything I could think. In the end, I made an appointment at the Genius Bar for help. I worked with a pretty smart guy for the better part of an hour. We discovered that, on restart, when the screen locks blue, doing a "blind logoout" ("Control-Shift-Q," then "Return" -blind because you can't see what you're doing) will bring you to the login screen. Everything worked after this except the screen would lock blue on start-up. So, in order to make my MBP work properly, all I had to do was start up, wait for the screen to lock blue, Control-Shift-Q, hit return, and re-log in. For some reason, this bypassed whatever was causing the screen to lock up.
The genius bar guy's suggestion was that I restore my system from a time machine back-up. So, I spent my entire evening and all of last night driving to my office, getting the system restore discs and my time machine drive, and restoring from a time machine backup. I selected the most recent time machine backup prior to the crash -as suggested by the genius bar buy. Because everything had worked fine between installation of the DisplayLink driver and the graphics crash, neither of us thought (naive in hindsight) that the DisplayLink software could have had anything to do with it...
On restart after the restore had finished, I was still having the same problem. After reading a recent comment to an article on the-gadgeteer titled "Diamond USB Display Adapter Pro Review" (this: ), I immediately uninstalled the DisplayLink software. It looks like that solved the problem.
Apparently, there is a fatal conflict between the new graphics-switching routine on the new Core i5 and i7 MacBook Pros and the DisplayLink driver software, resulting in a very frustrating graphics crash. Diamond/DisplayLink seem to acknowledge an issue (), but their sole fix is to suggest you disable automatic graphics switching, which isn't really a solution.
I absolutely would not recommend this product.
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As of this writing, the displaylink driver required to use this device in OS X (snow leopard) does not work with the 2010 macbook pro. This problem appears to be related to the automatic GPU switching technology in the new macbook pros. What happens is that the adapter will work fine until you restart without an external monitor attached. If the dock was assigned to any monitor except the laptop's main display, at restart the display becomes scrambled. The only way to resolve it is to boot up in safe mode (hold down the shift key after the startup tone) and uninstall the driver. If the system was shut down with the dock assigned to the main laptop's display, the next time the machine is restarted without the external display there is still some strange behavior. This behavior involves a brief flickering in the screen each time the system switches graphics mode, and the inability to change your wallpaper (which is really strange!). The bottom line is that the drivers aren't working for the 2010 macbook pros.The displaylink forum is currently very active with people complaining about the apparent lack of effort put forth by displaylink to resolve this problem. This may or may not be a valid gripe, but what is for certain is that displaylink has not been actively communicating in forums regarding this issue. The only real solution is to install the drivers when you want to use the usb adapter (which requires a reboot) and uninstall them before you restart without the adapter attached. This is not an acceptable solution.
I would not recommend this product for OS X users on the 2010 macbook pro until the drivers are fixed. When (or if) the driver issues are resolved, I'll post an update.
-2/11/11 Update --
According to the Displaylink Mac forum, DisplayLink is working on refresh of the Mac driver. The ETA is supposed to be sometime in the next 6+ months. So, bottom line is that there is still not a good driver, but that may change later this year. I'll try to update this review when (or if) it is released.
-8/12/11 Update --
Good news! Since the last post I've upgraded my 2010 MacBook Pro to Lion. I also decided to try out the newest displaylink driver (1.7 beta 3). I was pleasantly surprised that it worked! No problems at all. I can no longer recreate the "scrambled" screen that I was seeing previously. I've upgraded my rating from 2 to 4 stars. I docked the product 1 star for having a poor OS X driver when I originally purchased it.
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After having various PC laptops die once a year for the last 10 years, I finally made the shift from PC to Mac. I did a lot of research before committing and my final sticking point was how to get my dual monitors running on Mac. I went in to an Apple store and was surprised to discover that they had no "Apple Approved" products that would do the job. When prompted for after market products that are not made by Apple, the staff informed me that they're not allowed to recommend any non-Apple products and thus they could tell me nothing more! I did some more online research and heard of 2 products that might do the job. This being one of them. I went to Apple.com and initiated a chat session with sales to find out what they thought of the BVU195 and was again stonewalled as it is not an Apple product. They basically said, "we have no solution for you and we can make no other recommendations. You can not get dual monitors working with the MacBook Pro." Whatever!So, after reading a bunch of reviews from other users, I decided to get the Mac and give the BVU195 a go. I plugged the USB cable in to see if it would work on its own, but no such luck. And just like everyone else says here, no Mac drivers are included in the box. The Diamond website offers a link to the drivers, but they're in .exe format...which Macs can't open! So, I then did a search on Google for the SW creator "displaylink" and was glad to see that "Mac Software" was one of the choices straight from Google. I clicked on it, downloaded the driver and let it restart my computer when it was done installing.
Upon restarting, both of my monitors worked perfectly! One via the Diamond USB display adapter and and one via a Mini DisplayPort to DVI-I Female Adapter for Mac (which sells for 27 cents here on Amazon). With the MacBook Pro laptop open, I had 3 full screens running. I closed the lid and let it all go to sleep. I then moved my fingers over the wireless trackpad I bought and it started up perfectly. Now I've got 2 independent monitors going, just like how I had it on my PC :-)
I haven't had to adjust the Energy Saver mode within System Preferences yet (as another reviewer recommended), but will update my review if it does indeed become necessary.
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