 The spud or spontaneous pop-up display was billed as a godsend for all manner of situations. A high-resolution, battery-powered, portable display for watching movies on the train, sharing presentations with colleagues, and being more productive with your small-screen laptop. So then in November 2016, I backed it on Kickstarter, and now, two and a half years later, I am among the first to get my hands on Dorovia's high-resolution, portable monitor. Dear spudbacker, we finally delivered it. Yay! Accessories, including an HDMI cable, USB Type-C cable, wall wart, and North American power plug. Finally, the spud itself. So, uh, let's find out if this was a good idea. I think the best way to tackle a product like this is to go through the manufacturer's selling points one at a time. So we'll start with what exactly it is. It's a 24-inch display that collapses and expands like a ruggedized umbrella. Well, I'm not familiar with the term ruggedized umbrella, but I guess it might be something a little bit like this, so sure. And the display area is comfortably 24 inches, which Arovia points out is 23 times larger than a smartphone screen. Although, I don't know how well those numbers hold up now that iPhones don't look like this anymore. Their point does still stand though, if you're watching a movie, this is a lot bigger than this. That said, as I'm always reminding my wife, there's more to life than size, so let's go ahead and fire it up and have a look at the performance. So to get it connected, we've got a single HDMI input. The Type-C here is actually only for charging, that's not a separate input. We've got our power button, which we hold down for four seconds until it flashes. That'll turn it on. You can see we've got about 75% battery. It does have integrated speakers, apparently. So there's our volume up and volume down. We've got a brightness control wheel and a USB 5-volt output. Down here, we've got an exhaust vent, so it is actively cooled. I can actually feel the fan blowing in my face right now, as well as an intake. And then this is our focus knob, and then we've got one of those little threaded inserts for throwing it on like a little tripod or something like that. So theoretically, it should now be working, actually. All right, there we go. I kind of wish I could see what you guys are seeing, because from my perspective, I am pretty disappointed by the brightness in person, but I don't know how exactly the camera is capturing it. David, how would you say, how representative would you say the experience is? It actually kind of looks brighter on the camera than it does in real life. Looks brighter on camera than in real life? Yeah. Ooh, all right. To put this in perspective, ladies and gentlemen, here, I'm going to turn my LCD all the way down to mega ultra power saving. How do they compare now? Maybe it can go brighter still, because here's where I would normally use this thing, I'd say. Let's turn it up a little bit. I'm going to crank it. Those colors, though. It's clearly purple. And on the Chrome logo, there's no distinction between the white circle around the blue dot in the middle and the yellow part of the wheel, like nothing. Here, let's put something white on the screen. You'd think, given the specs of the projector and the distance of the screen are known quantities, that they would have been able to get the image a little bit closer to the edge. Like, there's not really a way that I could conceivably get it to stick out further, so I could get a bigger image out of it. I'm going to try and adjust the focus, though. That's kind of rough, actually. So you can see the focus right dead center is actually not bad, but there is a lot of blur up in the corners and even, I'd say, anywhere outside about a sort of four inch diameter circle in the middle is noticeably blurry. Material's quality seems all right for the most part, though. This is a nice, lightweight, but durable feeling fabric. This is kind of floppy. I actually initially thought that maybe this was some kind of stand or something, because it's got like this bend in here, but I couldn't find any meaningful way to prop it up on it, so it seems like this is basically it seems like this is basically how it mounts. So the thing is, what really intrigued me and probably a lot of the nearly 2,000 spudbackers was the prospect of using this thing as a high resolution secondary display for a laptop when they're working on the go. So kind of, kind of like this, which I guess brings us perfectly to our next selling point. Use it everywhere. All right, so watching movies? Well, my main issue with that is visual fidelity. Arovia's very loosey goosey use of the term high resolution is something that I think they could have done a better job of. It's only 720p and unfortunately, no amount of tinkering with the focus dial off camera managed to fix the issue that I was having with focus. So no matter what we load up on it, it just doesn't look good. Using it outside? Actually, yeah, I could kind of see that, but I'm also pretty sure that they did some fairly aggressive color grading in this promotional video, because from our experience, you're going to be using it around dusk or later. For sales presentations? Yeah, I could see this fitting pretty nicely into a briefcase or something like that. That is as long as there isn't already a TV or a projector in the meeting room that you're heading into. And then for cooking, again, yeah, I could kind of see that as long as you've got the counter space. As for the coffee shop, sure, having a big screen display there might be nice, but I really don't know if you want to be that guy. I think overall you guys can kind of see where I'm going with this. Most places, truth be told, just don't have like a convenient four square feet of space to plop down a fully deployed Spud. Like at two pounds, it's obviously a lot lighter than an old tube style CRT monitor, but it's nearly the same size, bringing us to portability, which I think is probably the spuds most compelling selling point, because here's the thing, all of my convenience and image quality complaints aside, if I absolutely needed a large screen display in any of those situations, this really is my only option, is what I would have said if in the last two and a half years since I backed the thing, we hadn't seen a veritable explosion of portable battery powered LCDs. Now I'm not saying that the Spud doesn't do some things well, it's way bigger than any portable display on the market, even that $4,000 one from ASUS, and the material that Arovia sourced for the projection screen is spectacular. Like check this out, I wish they made never iron shirts out of this stuff, because it's just, it's actually kind of amazing. The inclusion of a healthy integrated battery and a USB port for a Chromecast or something like that, that's a great feature, and the overall fit and finish of the thing just is surprisingly good for a kick-started product. The thing is I just don't really understand who this thing is for, like on the one hand, they seem to be going after the like elegance crowd with the whole size of a book thing in the marketing, but here's my issue with that. Hold on, let me just get this folded down. There we go. Saying to me that this is the size of a book is kind of like saying that a truck is about the size of a car. Like yes, this is a lot more like a book than it is like a full tower computer, but this is a pretty big book and a folded spud is more than double its size by volume. Now as for the practicality crowd, well, I think those folks are probably buying pocket projectors for 50 bucks on AliExpress and pointing them at a pillowcase propped up on a couple of sticks when they go camping. For myself though, none of that is really the main problem. For me, the issue comes down to the price. If this thing was 99 bucks at the Walmart, I'd be like, heck yeah, that's basically camping accessory territory, but at the nearly 400 US dollars that I paid for this, I would take the trade off in size any day of the week and go with something like this Chinese portable monitor. I mean, if it's not big enough, then all I have to do is sit a little closer or pick it up and hold it since it's so lightweight and the form factor is so much like a tablet. Also, since the resolution isn't straight out of 2005, almost no matter how close I get to it, actually no matter how close I get to it, it's still going to look a lot better than the Spud. Sorry, Spud, you're just potato image quality. I can't believe I didn't think of that joke until now. So thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Maybe we'll also throw in a link for like more practical portable monitors. Asus has one that's about the same price. This one's actually cheaper. Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join.