Review: Packed Pixels

Introduction

I first encountered Packed Pixels at Hack24, where my team managed to create a Massively Multiplayer Real World Zombie Game using Pusher, which incidentally came 2nd in the Pusher sponsored category.

The Build Up…

I was weak.

There was quite a buzz in the air after a discount was announced for Packed Pixels, due to their sponsorship of the Hack24 event. They sold it excellently and a fair few developers queued to see a glimpse of one in action.

After seeing how simple it was to setup and use, followed by the crowd of people imitating the Futrama Fry based meme of “take my money!”, I got swept up in the excitement and bought one.

Fine. Judge me. I bought a shiny thing.

I don’t do it often and as a Android developer the extra screen would come in handy, especially when implementing designs from the UX team. Yeah still convincing myself.

After a terrible PayPal based purchasing experience, where the card machine had all the consistency of Jelly being in the sun too long, I finally exchanged money for tech and I was away.

The Disappointment

I had seen it in action and it worked. I ran back to my laptop, on trial from work, used the really easy screen harness that takes all of a minute to adjust and seconds thereafter to fit.

I later tried the harness on my MacBook Air and loosen it a little as I was worried about putting excessive strain through such a thin screen. It uses an elastic band to keep the apparatus taught, which worked fine.

The machine I was using at the Hack had an HDMI out. This is where the trouble started.

It doesn’t work with HDMI out. My heart sunk. It only works with DisplayPort and Thunderbolt. Apparently after rushing back to Packed Pixel chap he told me of issues with HDMI to DisplayPort adapters.

It was useless to me. Not Good.

I gave it to my colleague, who had different connectivity. He loved it. Although at one point he wondered if it was an expensive Slack screen as at 2AM that is what it was reduced to.

OS Compatibility

Something I didn’t think I would type — it worked fine on Windows. The only adjustment was the scaling had to be adjusted due to the high resolution of the screen, that put quite a few laptop displays to shame.

Mac was a different story. It needs additional software to adjust the resolution. By default the resolution is so high you will need Farnsworth style glasses to read anything. After Hack24, the only option o resolve this was to use 3rd party software to alter the resolution, as the Packed Pixel is not an Apple display the options by default are limited.

Accessories

It comes with a handy neoprene bag, thunderbolt cable and a display port cable. It uses a harness to hold up to a maximum of 2 screens in either portrait or landscape & forward facing or rear facing.

The bag needs to be bigger. Its hard to fit everything in the provided bag. After explaining this to the chap from Packed Pixels he didn’t seem too convinced and was surprised people were using them to hold the harness, screen and cables.

This surprised me greatly.

Here is a bag to hold the screen but don’t put the rest of the items with it?

Seems a little like it had not been thought through properly. It’s early days however so this may change.