I’m looking at replacing some older monitors in an office and will probably need to buy around 20 monitors for 10 dual monitor setups. The users have laptops and should connect via USB-C to monitors, network and peripherals. However, only the first monitor needs a USB-C hub and the 2nd one would only need DisplayPort and should be similar if not identical in terms of appearance/panel.
I’m struggling to find such a setup as the monitors I look at usually don’t have a simpler version with the same “chassi”.
Has anyone found a good pair of monitors that would fit this bill, one with USB-C hub (with networking) and the other one without, cheaper but with a similar or identical appearance.
Probably looking at 24" or 27" 1920x1600 or 1440p resolutions.
Check into the Dell U2421, U2721 (with LAN), U2520 as primary monitors and their cheaper P-Series for secondary monitor. They should look relatively simple and similar from the front. The P Series mostly has slightly bigger bezels.
I have the U2520 and its been great for USB-C Docking as it shows the connection-standards in the OSD and has options to downgrade USB-Speed in order to get the full Displayport-Bandwidth the Notebooks are capable of. But I believe the 21-Series only supplies 65W instead of the 90W on my model. But should be fine for most ‘Office’ Notebooks.
@caprica modern Thunderbolt Docks / Monitors are backward-compatible to plain USB-C, but that is still a very high-end feature to be integrated into a monitor anway…
+1 for the U2520D. I have one of these in a triple monitor setup with two older dell monitors and it does some handy things, not all in the online literature:
dispalyport passthrough, meaning you only need a single cable for multimonitor.
the display provides active edid on all 3 inputs (USBC dispalyport and hdmi). Meaning I can swap inputs and it doesn’t screw up my screen layout. A godsend for Linux.
no external power brick, may not matter to you but when you have 3 monitors they are a mess, much easier to get a 3 in 1 IEC cable splitter.
Also looks great, no bling, and I’ve had the previous models to this for a few years now and they have been rock solid.
Independent personal opinion, Not affiliated with dell
Mhh, weird.
I need to do further testing on the active EDID stuff, because the monitor disappears from the Full-Size Displayport when I switch over to USB-C (but not from USB-C when switched back).
Why the hell would they do this for 2 out of 3 inputs? (I have not really used HDMI as Input)
That’s not the behaviour I get, it works both ways. May be related to the GPU though, I can’t say how it would work on a Nvidia card as I don’t have one in this setup. The USBC connection is direct to an Intel powered laptop, desktops to vega56 and rx480.