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.