The ViewSonic VG1656-2K is similar to our best touchscreen pick, but without the touchscreen. It has good color accuracy and hit 396 nits of brightness, the brightest portable monitor we saw in this round of testing. But at $300 we don’t think the 2K resolution is a big enough jump for most people to warrant paying more than twice the price of our top pick. If you know you want the extra resolution for better scaling, it’s a great monitor, but it’s a bit more expensive than we’d like.
The Pluggable USB-C Portable Monitor looked OK when we first powered it up, but tested poorly in terms of contrast and color accuracy. We repeatedly measured the contrast of the unit we tested around 460:1, which is well below our threshold of 1000:1 for an IPS display. It supports a higher rate of pass-through charging than our picks, with 100W of power that it can funnel into a connected laptop, and it adds an extra USB-C port with up to 10 Gbps of data throughput. These could be useful features, but they didn’t make up for the poor image quality compared with the competition.
The Espresso Displays 15 unit that we were sent by the company for review had an issue that caused the screen to go black when connected to an input source, unless power was connected through the second USB-C port. Espresso told us this was an issue with the firmware update that specifically affected review units, but we can’t recommend the monitor until we’ve tested another copy successfully ourselves.
We tested two portable monitors by Ricoh, the 150 and 150BW. These are both 15.6-inch, 1080p touchscreen OLED displays, and the 150BW can receive wireless video over Wi-Fi from a Windows computer. They’re very slim, and both have a svelte kickstand that flips out of the back of the back of the display. This all sounds great, but the Ricoh 150 typically costs $550 and the Ricoh 150BW typically costs $850. This is much too expensive for a portable monitor, and we’d want to see these features cost closer to $400 to be realistically competitive.
The AOC 16T3EA had an issue in which its contrast ratio would drop when we turned it up to full brightness, a problem we’ve seen before in budget monitors. Its stand was also a bit limiting, and we preferred the look of other portable monitors.
We bought the Arzopa S1 Table but were unable to test it because it emitted a high-pitched whine when we powered it on, an issue that we saw a few other buyers report in online reviews. Arzopa accepted the return and replaced the unit in about three weeks, and the replacement didn’t have the same issue. We still think our top pick is a better monitor due to its kickstand, and a Wirecutter staffer long-term testing the replacement unit independently shared that they were a bit confused by the case stand at first and it had, rarely, collapsed when bumped.
The Arzopa Z1C is similar to our top pick, the Z1FC, except it doesn’t have a 144 Hz refresh rate for smoother motion. The Z1C unit we tested was much less color-accurate than the Z1FC, and we also thought the Z1FC’s picture looked better.
The Asus ZenScreen MB166CR is a lower-cost portable monitor in Asus’s line. However, its gimmick is a screw-on kickstand that is truly annoying to use. Adjusting the kickstand loosens it, which means you have to tighten the screw—but twisting the screw tight causes friction that changes the stand’s position. Life is too short to spend any amount of time fiddling with this stand.
Meant for creative pros, the Espresso Displays 17 Pro is a 17-inch, touchscreen, 4K portable monitor. Our testing showed that it could produce 97% of the colors in the DCI-P3 gamut, which makes it great for creative work. It also provides touchscreen and stylus functionality when connected to a Mac, features that you’d typically have to pay hundreds or thousands more for in a pen display such as those made by Wacom. We like this monitor on paper, but when we tested it, we found it to be too bulky and heavy to carry around comfortably—the Pro Stand made for the 17 Pro weighs 1.8 pounds, bringing the full portable setup to more than 4 pounds, not including your laptop or charging bricks. The monitor also has no physical buttons, so you need to use the espressoFlow software to change any settings, and we found the color settings in the app too limited for us to quickly fine-tune the display.
The ViewSonic VX1655 wasn’t as sharp as the other monitors we tested, and when we put it in sRGB mode to test its color accuracy, its contrast dropped to about 630:1. Other budget monitors offer a better experience.
The ViewSonic VX1655-4K is a competitive 4K display that we would have named our upgrade pick—but the OLED version is better. The VX1655-4K is color-accurate and bright, reaching nearly 500 nits. We recommend the OLED version because it gets even brighter, and OLED screens generally look better due to their increased contrast. But if you don’t like the glossy screen coating of the OLED model, the VX1655-4K is a worthy portable monitor to get instead.
The HP E14 G4 is a solid portable monitor with a 14-inch, 1080p display, a sturdy stand, and a basic on-screen menu for changing brightness, contrast, and color. But it’s smaller and much more expensive than our top pick, and it offers about the same image quality.
The Dell C1422H is extremely similar to HP’s E14 G4 in size and image quality, but it has fewer image settings. It’s a few years old, and you can get a better picture for much less money.
The Lenovo ThinkVision M14d is a 14-inch display with an impressive 2240×1400 resolution. It’s a nice monitor, but its $475 price tag at the time of our review was simply too high for that resolution and the monitor’s IPS display technology.
We also tested the Asus ZenScreen Go MB16AWP, a higher-end display with wireless connectivity and its own internal battery. This model has the ability to connect to your phone to act as a larger screen for you to watch TV or movies. However, when testing the wireless features, we found that many popular streaming services limit how their videos are viewed, which includes streaming video locally to another wireless device nearby. Although we were able to successfully stream video through Plex, the video was choppy and unwatchable. The wireless communication worked well for adding a second wireless display to Windows computers, though, so if you have that specific need, this monitor could be a good option. Overall, however, paying a premium for the battery and the wireless features of the MB16AWP doesn’t seem worth it given its restrictions.
This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Signe Brewster.
