continuum with a usb monitor?

[rory753]

I'm posting my experience, but I was wondering if it's limited to just my particular monitor. I have a lenovo thinkvision 1423p USB monitor, which uses a usb 3 connection. I was interested to see if it worked with continuum on my 950 xl. the simple test was plugging it into the display dock just to see if it might work, which of course, it didn't (usb 2.0). I then talked with a microsoft sales person broadly about hooking up a usb monitor for continuum, and they said that yes, it should work. I went ahead and bought a usb-c to usb b(3.0) convertor to see if it would help, but nope, still didn't work.

has anyone else tried usb monitors? is this a lost cause?

 

[AndyCalling]

A USB monitor will essentially have a 'graphics card' (read 'chip') inside it, rather than relying on one built in to your PC (or device). The problem is, the device would need to have a suitable driver to run the monitor embedded graphics chip. I don't know what video drivers are included with W10 on mobiles, but I'm guessing it's just limited to the one used in the official dock or that continuum does not offload to an external graphics chip but uses a proprietary method to form a video link from the internal graphics chip (apu) to the official (or compatible) dock.

That's my thinking. Hope it helps. Of course, I may yet be wrong... ~

 

[rory753]

A USB monitor will essentially have a 'graphics card' (read 'chip') inside it, rather than relying on one built in to your PC (or device). The problem is, the device would need to have a suitable driver to run the monitor embedded graphics chip...

Yeah, i figured as much. the lenovo i use does require running an exe to make it work with a regular pc, but i was hoping that was simply because it's also supports inking(would have been super cool to ink with a 950xl!). Now, I'm just wondering about usb monitors in general, since I don't see very many people talking about them. it's an outside case, but was just wondering...

 

[Don Geronimo]

Portable USB monitors that use DisplayLink won't work as @AndyCalling stated for now; I haven't seen any portable USB monitors yet that don't.

I'm personally hoping that USB-C monitors will come out sooner than later. The only ones that I think could work right now are GeChic monitors that can take HDMI as input.