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Review of ColorGraphic Voyager VGA PCMCIA Card

This card has great potential for dumping your laptop and using the iPAQ on the road. It allows you to display the output of your iPAQ onto a standard VGA or SVGA monitor.

The card costs $195, and you get a PCMCIA card and a small adapter to plug the monitor cable into.

You also need to download drivers, which allow the iPAQ to output whatever is on it's screen onto the monitor. The drivers installed first time, no problems. They allow you to choose a resolution of either 600x480 or 800x600 and also allow you to stretch to fit.

One strange effect of the drivers can be seen from the screenshot, is that they make my Gigabar move to the bottom of the screen. Perhaps this is due the Windows CE 2 heritage of the drivers.

So what is it like to use? The display is crisp and looked great on a 21" monitor, it made any application easy to read, with no flicker.

However the downside is that there is a noticable lag between what is displayed on the iPAQ and when it is displayed on the actual monitor. I hope that this is something that can be cured, or else it would make it difficult to use day to day.

UPDATE: I have been informed that you can change the update frequency within the Voyager Shadow software. This can be set to a specific number of seconds or to update in realtime.

Where I think this card would have great use is for demonstrating the iPAQ, showing graphics, or an application at a trade show or similiar. Now if someone could come up with a Powerpoint viewer this would be a killer application.

Given a dual PCMCIA sleeve, this card, and Ethernet or modem card and a keyboard, I could quite happily envisage leaving the laptop in the office.

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 copyright Greg Hilton 2001

Last Updated 09 May 2001