BYOD – Bring your own display (to the booth and elsewhere)

I think being completely paperless (except for Christmas cards) is just fab for a great number of reasons. However, there are two aspects of working with just a tiny laptop that I have never quite come to terms with:

1. The space available on a small laptop screen is rather limited. Maybe this is just because I have got used to working on a 34-inch screen in my home office during Covid – or because the number of documents being handled in one meeting have increased even more in the last years.

2. In addition, using the pen and touchscreen of my laptop has never been particularly comfortable, as I am a heavy keyboard and hotkey user and hardly ever fold my laptop flat to be able to write or scribble comfortably.

So, in the run-up to the creation of our Cologne CAI Campus at TH Köln, I decided to test some external touchscreens that can be connected to a computer as a monitor extension. After checking the options and consulting our technician, Wacom seemed to provide the most interesting options for my purpose. Their drawing tablets and displays are made to suit the needs of artists rather than interpreters, or office workers. Wacom’s devices are optimised for drawing and scribbling, the EMR technology pens are battery free and very versatile in terms of pressure sensitivity, writing angle, exchangeable pen tips etc. Just right for my semi-artistic note taking technique, I thought. 

Out of the different models available, two seem to be especially suited for our needs:

Wacom’s Cintiq Pro 16″ is a robust option, too big to carry around every day, though small enough to be used in a permanent booth, like in our university lab. It has small collapsible feet built in, which can only be used for a flat position of the screen, unless you have cables with angled plugs so that the screen doesn’t stand on the bent cables when in upright position. However, there is a robust high quality supplementary stand which can be purchased additionally and does a brilliant job (even if it makes the whole thing even sturdier).

The pen, like everything else, is very robust and comfortable to use. The surface is nice and rough for a really great writing experience, and there are more pen settings than I could possibly dream of.

Unfortunately, the screen requires a power cable in addition to the USB-C connection to the laptop, which again is ok for a permanent installation, but not so much for travelling.

For mobile use, the only adequately sized model I found was one made by Asus, but using Wacom’s EMR technology. The 16” Asus ProArt Display is a bit smaller, so that it can be squeezed into a reasonably sized handbag or rucksack. It is a bit slimmer and more lightweight, but the casing and buttons are also a bit flimsier.

The built-in stands allow you to position the screen in a comfortable flat position for reading and writing as well as a more upright position if you just want to use it as a stand-up display. The surface has a bit less resistance to the pen movement than that of the Wacom Cintiq Pro, but it is anti-glare and still nice enough to write on. I am however still considering buying one of those paperlike screen foils. The pen, like everything else, is a bit more on the flimsy side and only has one button, and the pen settings are less sophisticated than those of the Wacom, but the options are more than sufficient for what I need. And while the Asus pen also works on the Wacom screen, it doesn’t work the other way around.

As you can see on the pictures, in the booth it makes working with several documents, glossaries etc. much more convenient than having to jump back and forth between them on one small screen. So much so that I felt notably less tired after my first nine-to-five day in the booth in double screen mode.


At my office desk, I tested combining the screens with my usual setup of a laptop and a 34-inch monitor, making it a luxurious three-screen setting. This worked perfectly fine with the Asus model, in a way that I could use my windows pen on the windows screen, the Asus pen on the Asus screen, and mouse and keyboard on all three. It was a bit more of a hassle with the Wacom, where combining finger touch and pen didn’t seem to be an option (or I wasn’t able to figure out how). But then using the Wacom in the permanent booth, as an only screen solution connected to a permanent PC, seems a reasonable option. In this scenario, using only the pen and no mouse or fingers might be the most intuitive option for students and training participants.

So these are my first impressions. Does anyone else use screen extensions when travelling? I would be very interested in knowing what your experiences are!

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About the author:

Anja Rütten has specialised in tec, information and terminology management since the mid-1990s. She holds a professorship in interpreting studies and Computer-Aided Interpreting at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences.

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Disclaimer:

Views or opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.


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