I did it, 738 in. Sq of screen space
I had been thinking of buying a Matrox Tripple Head 2go for a while now. This little box lets me take one video input (VGA or DVI/HDMI) and split it into 3 DVI outs. Even better it only runs off USB power, I love not having a power cord for it. This box is a great idea if you have a laptop like me, and you only have a single extra monitor hookup. If you work all days on computers. More screen space directly turns into better productivity.
So when I found that the I could get the HP 2408h from www.buy.com for $200 and free shipping, I picked up three of these 24″ monsters. I had to wait two weeks for them to show up, but they arrived and they work great. This gave me a total of 738 Sq Inches of screen space (20.5″*12″*3) not including the built in screen on my laptop. See the picture for reference.
Only problems I have with this setup is I can only run the displays at 3840×800 (3×1280x800). This is a limitation of the th2g supported resolutions. I could run the panels at their native 1920×1200 if I only ran two of them. I would like to use the 5040×1050 (3×1680x1050) resolution, which is only supported under XP and Vista. I hope Matrox fixes this in a future firmware update, or Apple makes a fix in an OS X update. Running at 3840×800 is fine, just things are not as sharp as they could be, and they show up quite large on at 24″ screen at that low of a resolution.
The other issues I have is the panels only support HDMI and VGA in. This was an easy fix because DVI and HDMI use the same signals, sense I had to buy cables anyway, I picked up DVI->HDMI cables for $6 each.
Issues going forward, I was going to replace my laptop with a new unibody MacBookPro, but Apple, in a really dumb move, switched from dual link DVI, to Mini DisplayPort. Short is, the port is not supported by anyone, and not my th2go for sure. You also have to have an adapter to get VGA or DVI out, so it is workable, but to run this amount of screen space, you have to have dual link DVI, like what is in my old MacBookPro, and used by Apples own 30″ display. Well Apple has a part of this for $100 (rip) and it doesn’t work. If you look at the comments on the product page, and online don’t even bother trying till it is fixed by Apple. So I am waiting to upgrade.
