Wireless Cintiq for less than US$340!
Been trying out some apps that turn your tablet/phone into a pen display for your PC. Thanks to a user, I now come across SuperDisplay. To use Expresii with SuperDsiplay, please use Expresii 2020.12.29 or later. Otherwise, you need to first disable Wintab driver in the current SuperDisplay before you launch Expresii. I've been in contact with the author of SuperDisplay and and he confirms that future version of SuperDisplay would have this fixed.
Among the similar apps that I've tried, SuperDisplay is the first one that feels a charm to use! It is very fast even on 2.4GHz wifi. There're many options like having our Android device in extended display mode, customizable on-screen icons (can have different assignment for long press) for undo, redo and more. Connect wired or wireless.
The following is a comparison between using my phone as extended display vs mirrored display at 4k. My computer (AMD 2400G APU with 16GB of RAM) is stressed when it needs to handle two 4k displays causing lag in the strokes, but if you use mirrored mode, it's quite fast:
The following is a comparison between using my phone as extended display vs mirrored display at 4k. My computer (AMD 2400G APU with 16GB of RAM) is stressed when it needs to handle two 4k displays causing lag in the strokes, but if you use mirrored mode, it's quite fast:
If you only use FHD, it should run even smoother.
Here's a video showing how to setup custom on-screen icons in SuerDisplay and a demo of using them:
Here's a video showing how to setup custom on-screen icons in SuerDisplay and a demo of using them:
The on-screen icons may be taking too much of your real estate. However, the above videos are done on the Samsung Note 8 phone. Want to see how it looks if you use a tablet? Someone actually has already posted a demo video of using Expresii with SuperDisplay before me:
He is using a Samsung Tab S4 , a 10.5" Android tablet (2018, Super AMOLED, 1600 x 2560 pixels, 16:10 ratio). As suggested by reviews on Google Play, another good tablet you can use is the newer Samsung Tab S6 Lite (2020, 10.4" TFT, 1200 x 2000 pixels, 5:3 ratio), which is sold for US$325 at Amazon. If you're in Hong Kong, dcfever has several listings at HK$2000 only (=USD258) right now. So, yeah, you can pretty much have something like a wireless Cintiq for 200 or 300 something.
SuperDisplay is current sold at USD10. Well worth the money if you ask me. ^_^
SuperDisplay is current sold at USD10. Well worth the money if you ask me. ^_^
Q: Do we need a powerful Android device?
I tried my Xiaomi Mi A1 (Snapdragon 625, 4+64GB), a budget phone released in 2017. The performance is a bit slower than my Samsung Note 8 (Snapdragon 835, 6+128GB), a flagship phone also from 2017. With more testing, I found that when doing multi-touch gesture (that requires when fullscreen refresh) would be more laggy if I have more tabs opened in Chrome on my PC. Apparently, the most demanding task SuperDisplay does is the compression of your screen on our PC end and thus the bottomneck.
From Google Play reviews, it looks like the 2019 Samsung Tab A with S Pen works well, and it's quite a budget device at US$245.
2021.01.09 update: The author of SuperDisplay told me that for most cases the bottleneck is in the decoder on the Android device. And on your PC, GPU is used for the encoding, so having a fast GPU helps in getting faster response.
Q: Does it work with external graphics tablet?
I've also tried using a Huion Q620M graphics tablet on my Android phone to see if the pressure and tilt work. The answer is yes, I get both pressure and tilt readings in Expresii via SuperDisplay, but the catch is that only a portion of the Q620M maps to the phone, and then when used with SuperDisplay, the Q620M can only reach the left side of my Windows 10 (landscape) desktop.
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