Wireless technologies for video have been a hot item over the past few years. Running cabling can be a significant portion of retrofitting new gear into an existing facility, so where there's opportunity to do the installation reliably using wireless technologies, a church can benefit from reduced expense and a shortened installation timeframe.
Along these lines, Honestech has come out with the nScreen Deluxe product, allowing a Wi-Fi enabled computer or tablet to wirelessly project its screen onto a separate display system. With the footprint of a wireless router, the small box connects to your video display or projector through a composite video connector or an HDMI connector. You then install the nScreen Deluxe software on your computer or tablet and connect to the nScreen wireless router built in to this device. Next, the software allows you to share your screen with the device, which in turn puts it on the attached monitor.
As you can only connect your computer to one Wi-Fi access point at a time, and thus can't be connected to your facility's wireless system for Internet access, the nScreen Deluxe also has a wired Ethernet connector. If you use this to tie the nScreen Deluxe into your wired networking infrastructure, it will also act as a router to the rest of your network and the Internet. This retains your data connectivity as well as enabling you to project the contents of your screen. Or, through advanced configuration via its web browser interface, you can configure the nScreen Deluxe to connect to your facility's Wi-Fi network, and access it through that.
In addition to sharing your screen, the system also transmits the audio from your PC to the box, which in turn sends it to the monitor over the HDMI connection and out through the audio output connectors on the box.
So, how did it stand up? The system was easy to install, and it did project my laptop's screen successfully to my HD television. Even when I moved my laptop to the far opposite end of my home (down one floor and about 60 feet away), the system had no problem maintaining the connection. And I was able to access the Internet as well, as described above.
I did have to lower the resolution of my laptop display—I normally run at 1,920x1,080, and had to go down to 1,280x720 for the system to be used. There was also about one second of latency between when my laptop screen changed and the remote display reflected that change. Audio, however, is also delayed for the same amount, so that videos play in sync with the audio.
Also, by default, the mouse pointer was not shown on the screen. There is an option for displaying the mouse pointer, but this also caused the mouse pointer to always be displayed—even in a PowerPoint presentation, where normally if you don't move the mouse, the mouse pointer is hidden.
The quality of the display was good, especially when I adjusted the settings to give higher priority to the video display over data transmission. Changing the settings to favor data over video provided a more pixilated update of the screen on the remote monitor.
The nScreen Deluxe can be useful for a conference or classroom environment for PowerPoint presentations, or to use as a digital signage solution to get a screen out in the lobby to show a PowerPoint presentation from a computer based in the office without running cabling. At only $149, it could be a convenient solution for this sort of application.
