Product: Matrox Millennium G400 32MB Dual Head
Company: Matrox
Website: http://www.matrox.com
Estimated Street Price: £150/$149.95
Review By: Byron Hinson

DualHead - Introduction

Another one of the G400's more advanced features is called the "DualHead Display" Technology. This basically allows you to have a number of different display output options, such as CRT monitors, analog flat panels, and NTSC/PAL TVs. Digital flat panel compatibility requires an additional piece of hardware.

DualHead Zoom

This feature of DualHead Display allows you to select any region of any size on your Windows desktop and have it zoomed with or without high quality filtering, so that it appears full-screen on your secondary output. Design professionals will benefit from this feature in applications such as Adobe Photoshop, where pixels can be zoomed to the second display for retouching.

Main Features:

Follow The Mouse Pointer: Use this feature if you want to pan through the zoomed area in your secondary display.

Smooth Zoomed Area: Use this feature if you want digital filtering applied to the zoomed area appearing on your secondary display. Filtering gives a smoother appearance and is good for general usage, while a non-filtered zoom is more appropriate for image editing.

DualHead DVD Max

The DualHead DVD Max mode lets you display compatible video streams and DVD titles full-screen on TV at full frame rate, without losing the Windows desktop on your primary monitor. For the first time ever, you can watch a video stream on your TV and still make use of your desktop for light work. While other software DVD solutions claim low CPU
utilization during DVD playback, they do not allow you to make use of the remaining bandwidth for any other applications. The reason for this is simple. To see DVD full-screen on TV, it must be displayed full-screen on the RGB monitor at the same time, leaving no work space on
the desktop.

However, Matrox offers you the ability to use the remaining bandwidth for applications such as word processing. It is worth noting that the extent of your desktop functionality depends on your CPU and the application you are using. Opening certain applications and accessing the hard drive may interrupt DVD playback. Bandwidth-intensive applications, such as image editing, graphic design and other similar programs should be avoided when outputting DVD to TV.

DualHead

The "DualHead" technology will no doubt be a useful addition to many business types and a few home users. It became most useful to me as a device to do drawing with via the zoom feature. But the main holding back is the fact that not many of us can afford to go out and purchase two monitors.

This site is not related to the Microsoft Corporation in any way. Windows and the Windows logo are trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation. ActiveWindows is an independent site. The information and sources here are obtained from series of hard work & research.