ADD MORE SCREENS TO ANY LAPTOP!!! But it’s a bit Kwumsy….

One of the reasons I love Asus’ Zephyrus Duo machines so much is the second display – it lets you be so much more productive while still on the go. There are some drawbacks to that design though, like how the keyboard gets pushed down to the very edge of the machine, the trackpad gets squished into a corner, and of course the extortionate cost for a machine like that. It also requires you to buy that machine, replacing your current laptop that you might actually prefer. So what if you could retrofit more displays to your existing machine? That would be pretty great, right? Well enter the P2 S, a clamp-on dual screen attachment that fits most 13-16 inch laptops.

This thing features two fold out 12”, IPS, 60Hz displays with a quoted 220 nit peak brightness, 1000:1 contrast ratio, and actually in my testing are remarkably colour accurate with a delta E of well under 2 and cover a little over 100% of the sRGB spectrum, so genuinely impressive there. The key thing here has to be cost, so how much will this set you back? £460???? WHAT?? That’s as much as an entire budget laptop! Well it better be amazing for that price then…

I’ll start with compatibility. Physically this has a ratcheting mechanism that lets it clamp onto any laptop display. It has 6 total wedged rubber feet that grab your display so it won’t damage anything – although you’ll notice that the ratchet only grips the top side, so it can be a little loose at the bottom. As for the weight, it comes in at 3.3KG – or not far from twice the weight of this entire Asus Zephyrus G15. And that weight is all hanging on your thin display and hinge… Fantastic.

Now luckily they’ve thought about that, knowing a laptop hinge won’t hold all that weight, so they included an adjustable kickstand. That’s this thing, the thin twig that can slide out to adjust what height you want the arrangement to sit at, except the hinge at the top easily slips outwards rendering the stand pretty useless. It’s also only on one side which isn’t great for even support, meaning your display WILL twist itself, helping to shorten the lifespan of your primary display.

On the technical side, that’s honestly the more frustrating part. In theory, you can use this with a single USB C cable. It only wants a maximum of 15W of power – that’s what the US power brick that comes with this unit can output – so as long as you have that and DisplayPort Alt mode you should be all good. I said should because when I tried to use this on the Zephyrus G15, the best I could get was the right display to work about 10% of the time. After an hour of troubleshooting, I found it’s because this is an all AMD laptop, and it didn’t like pushing two display signals over a single port, and when I connected the second USB C cable to the other DisplayPort alt mode port it did detect, but it wouldn’t actually display anything. I then switched to the Zephyrus Duo – which yes means I have four total displays active here – and managed to get it working.

Once working, the first thing you will notice is just how dim the tiny 12” screens are. You can access the SEPARATE on screen menus using the + and – buttons at the top right, and turn up the brightness and the separate option for “backlight”, although make sure you don’t go too high or you’ll make the screens unusably blown out. I found the backlight at 100 and brightness at 50 worked the best. The next thing you’ll notice is just how small they are. Even with 100% scaling in Windows it’s hard to get much use out of them – sure you can stick a video up or a file explorer window, but for any actual work I’d struggle to use them for much.

If you are interested, I found the response times to be painfully slow. The average initial response time was 18.6ms, which admittedly is only just outside the 60Hz refresh rate window, but that doesn’t make it good. The panel is definitely using pulse width modulation to control the backlight brightness (even though it was set to 100%) as the light level fluctuates between frames as you can see on this graph. The bigger problem though, was the latency, where it took around 50ms for the display to display a new frame. That’s frankly an eternity – sure you won’t be gaming on these anyway but that kind of latency isn’t great.

Honestly, I’m struggling to work out who this is for. This isn’t useful while actually travelling – can you imagine cracking this thing out on a train or plane? No chance. So this is only for when you get to a desk… So why not just bring something like this? This is a 16” 1080p 60Hz touchscreen external display, and this one even has an internal battery that will keep it running for 6 hours at 250 nits! It won’t ruin your laptop’s main display or hinges, it’s so, so much lighter, thinner and easier to carry with you, it’s bigger and more practical, and so, so much cheaper too. Why buy this mess when you can buy a nice external display instead?

If you are dead-set on something like this, I’d still advise against this one as it could be done so much more elegantly. Why is it so damn heavy? Why do the fold out screens fold panel-out meaning you have to bring this faux leather carry case around too so you don’t wreck the panels? Why do they only fold out to barely past flat? This should be able to be a much tighter angle, especially with panels this small. Why are these cables so long? Who needs a full like 1.2m cable when these displays are literally strapped to the display? Why is the ratcheting mechanism only tight at the top, enough that the whole thing can fully slip off the display at the bottom? For nearly £500 I’d expect better. A lot better.