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LG Display made a portable 27-inch monitor, and it’s kind of awesome

LG Display made a portable 27-inch monitor, and it’s kind of awesome

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A single USB-C cable provides both video and power

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LG Display is reliably one of the more exciting companies at CES, as every year it comes to the Las Vegas convention with something truly futuristic. This particular one isn’t a rollable, flexible, or transparent display, but it’s still a pretty cool little innovation. The 27-inch Neo Art Portable Monitor Display is a prototype of a grab-and-go monitor that lets you feed it both power and video via a single USB-C cable. That makes the monitor eminently transportable, with a thin and light design that honestly makes it practical to tote around between rooms in your house or office meeting rooms.

I tried the Neo Art display for myself at CES 2019, and it’s actually much more refined than a concept or prototype usually is. Connecting it to a MacBook Pro is truly plug-and-play, and LG Display’s demo had a single MBP powering two of the 27-inch displays at once. Of course, the MacBook Pro quickly needed to be recharged again — and this really illustrates the weakness of the models that only have two USB-C ports, leaving me without another port for my power cable — but just the fact that it’s possible to feed two 27-inch displays along with a 13-inch MacBook panel at once off a single laptop’s battery is profoundly impressive.

The Neo Art displays have humble specs, being LCD panels with 1920 x 1080 resolution and no additional frills like embedded speakers or a webcam, but their picture looks attractive and vibrant in person.

Two 27-inch LG Display Neo Art portable monitors driven off a single MacBook Pro.
Two 27-inch LG Display Neo Art portable monitors driven off a single MacBook Pro.
Photo by Vlad Savov / The Verge

As usual, LG Display’s demonstrations aren’t a promise of any sort of retail product. They’re a cool exploration of what’s possible. But, just this week, LG Electronics announced that the previous LG Display highlight, the 65-inch rollable OLED TV, is going to be a real product we can buy early in 2019. So you never know, maybe if there’s enough consumer interest, the Neo Art portable 27-incher might also become a real purchasable commodity.

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