Asus ZenBook Duo 14 & Pro Duo 15 OLED Showcase – The Ultimate Laptop(s)
First off, I like to make it clear up front that this video is sponsored by Asus, and in it I get to take a look at both of these incredible machines. This one is the ZenBook Duo 14, the UX482 model, and the other is the ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED, the UX582. They are both dual screen laptops with an impressive amount of horsepower and are billed as “the laptop of tomorrow” and just looking at them, you can see why.
Let’s start with the smaller of the two, the 14” model. It’s meant to be a great option for pretty much anyone who’s looking for a premium machine with a bit of extra screen space. If you use a laptop for work, especially working from home or on the go, this is the perfect machine for it! Despite having dual displays, it’s still the same 14” form factor you’d get in a regular machine, and still just as light at around 1.6KG. That makes it easy to take with you in your backpack and be able to work wherever you are.
The bigger brother, the 15” Pro model is a bit more of a powerhouse. It’s an NVIDIA Studio machine with an RTX 3070, and either an Intel i7-10875H or i9-10980HK, plus as the name suggests a 15.6” 4K OLED display that covers up to 100% of the DCI P3 spectrum, is Pantone validated and is even a touchscreen with stylus support. Being a more powerful, and slightly larger machine, the Pro 15 does have a touch more size and weight to it, although not by that much. It weighs 2.3KG and is still an insane 2.15cm thick.
One feature both of these models share is their secondary ScreenPad Plus displays. Asus moved the trackpad over to the right and the keyboard down, so they could fit these full width displays. The resolution matches the primary display, so on the ZenBook Duo 14 the ScreenPad Plus is a 1920×515 resolution, but on the ZenBook Pro Duo 15 it runs at 3840×1100. Both models use an IPS panel for the ScreenPad, alongside both being touchscreens and both having stylus support.
The ScreenPads use Asus’ ErgoLift AAS+ hinge meaning not only does the whole laptop lift off of the surface it’s sitting on for better cooling, but the display lifts up too making it easier to see, more comfortable to be writing or drawing on and means the internals get cooled even better as Asus hid the air intakes under the ScreenPad so it will always be drawing in fresh and cool air.
Now, you might be thinking, what would you use a second screen like this for? Well, on the Duo 14 I can see this being the perfect machine for a student. You can have your notes or work document open, and using the ScreenXpert tool have it pinned to the bottom display. You can snap it to take up half the screen, and pin spotify to the other half, then you have the main screen free to have one or maybe two windows for researching or reading from, like notes from your teachers and research papers or articles.
Or maybe it’s your work laptop, well then you can have your emails open on one side of the ScreenPad, Slack or Teams open on the other, and your main work up on the primary display. It can even make video calls easier as you can have the call open on the big screen, but have your notes or emails up on the ScreenPad so you can easily refer to them without having to hide or minimise the call window.
If, like me, you spend most of your life in a video editing program like Premiere, that’s where the Pro 15 comes in. This absolute beast has plenty of power to edit the 4K videos you see on the channel, and the ScreenPad makes editing on the go so much easier. You can set it up how you like, but for me having the timeline on the bottom display, my output monitor up on the right, and my source monitor, effects controls and footage bins on the left makes editing so much better. You can scrub through the timeline even with your finger, and the stunning colour accuracy of the primary display’s OLED panel really stands out. It comes out of the box with a DeltaE of less than 2, or as close to perfect as the human eye can detect, so I’d say that’s pretty good.
If you are willing to forgo moving the timeline down, the Pro Duo 15 has another trick up its sleeve. If you open the ScreenXpert 2 app tray with the button on the left of the ScreenPad, you can launch the customisable control panel. This hooks into a number of different applications and lets you control a load of settings in the program. You can add or remove the buttons, dials and sliders as you like, and control what you want them to do. In Premiere for example you can set it so you have a large dial on the left that will scrub through the timeline, a button to trim to the playhead, one to export the sequence and a slider to control the overall volume. It puts all your functions and tools all in one place, right in front of you, which is really useful.
If photo editing is more your thing, the control panel supports Photoshop and Lightroom Classic so all of your HSL dials, brush sizes and effects can all be arranged how you like. One added bonus of the Pro model is the included stylus in the box, so you can brush on a gentle shadow or just straight up draw instead.
Of course, since this model rocks an RTX 3070 if you do want to fire up a game on your lunch break it’s got plenty of power there. I’ve got it set to 1080p high settings in Cyberpunk and it’s perfectly playable, you can even enable ray tracing if you’d like. Thanks to the second screen, you can even have your emails or messaging client open while you game. As you might expect, gaming isn’t the main focus of a machine like this, but it’s great to see the versatility to power through games in the evening, but edit videos or even 3D model the next day. You can even use the NVIDIA GeForce Experience program to switch between their Studio and Game Ready drivers, so if you know you’ll be away from work for a little while and will want to have a better gaming experience you can swap them over, then when you get back to work you can switch back to the Studio drivers!
So, if you are looking for your next laptop, whether it’s an on-the-go office machine, or a productivity monster, you might want to consider a ZenBook Duo. I genuinely enjoy having the extra display especially while on the go, and for my sort of work the Pro Duo 15 with its stunning OLED would be my pick. I’ll leave links to both of them in the description below for you to check out.
