Personal computing discussed

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End User
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Luna Display: It’s glorious!

Sat Oct 20, 2018 10:06 pm

Using an iPad Pro as a display has been something I’ve been doing since the release of the original iPad Pro. I had settled on Duet Display as the performance was excellent, in large part due to it’s direct USB to Lightning connection. Having said that, I've always wanted the freedom of a wireless solution.

In August of 2017 I backed a project on Kickstarter, Luna Display. Luna Display stated that it was "The only hardware solution that turns any iPad into a true, wireless second display". That was music to my ears! I immediately became a backer.

My Luna Display finally arrived this past week. I was not disappointed. Luna Display is absolutely glorious!

Luna Display brings the freedom of wireless while preserving the excellent performance of Duet Display. Available for Mini DisplayPort or USB-C, Luna Display leverages its proprietary LIQUID Technology to provide lag free performance at 60 FPS by tapping directly into the performance of a Macs GPU. All via Wi-Fi. If Wi-Fi is not available one can use a USB to Lightning cable. I tested a local to my MacBook Pro Wi-Fi network connection and it worked (although at this point, if you wanted to be connected to the Internet, you'd need to be connected via ethernet).

Luna Display supports both touch and Apple Pencil.

Here is my current setup:

Image
 
derFunkenstein
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Re: Luna Display: It’s glorious!

Sat Oct 20, 2018 10:34 pm

I'm glad you like it, but regurgitating marketing schtick is beneath you. One cannot have "lag free" and "wireless"
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End User
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Re: Luna Display: It’s glorious!

Sat Oct 20, 2018 10:52 pm

derFunkenstein wrote:
I'm glad you like it, but regurgitating marketing schtick is beneath you. One cannot have "lag free" and "wireless"

Fair enough.

It is really very responsive when scrolling or moving a window about or making a hidden/magnified Dock appear. Very impressive. I highly recommend it.
 
qmacpoint
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Re: Luna Display: It’s glorious!

Sun Oct 21, 2018 4:50 pm

End User wrote:
derFunkenstein wrote:
I'm glad you like it, but regurgitating marketing schtick is beneath you. One cannot have "lag free" and "wireless"

It is really very responsive when scrolling or moving a window about or making a hidden/magnified Dock appear. Very impressive. I highly recommend it.

How is it compared to duet display? I used to toy with it back when my iPad Mini 1st gen was still updated (now I just use it as a picture display thingy), and it was pretty snappy back then! (although wired)
Also, how does it handle disconnects? I'm a consultant and more often than not I had to walk away from my desktop with my laptop for meetings, and leave my ipad at my desk, which brought weird device issues on Windows, and was my #1 blue screen crash problem back then...
 
End User
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Re: Luna Display: It’s glorious!

Tue Nov 20, 2018 3:56 pm

qmacpoint wrote:
How is it compared to duet display? I used to toy with it back when my iPad Mini 1st gen was still updated (now I just use it as a picture display thingy), and it was pretty snappy back then! (although wired)
Also, how does it handle disconnects? I'm a consultant and more often than not I had to walk away from my desktop with my laptop for meetings, and leave my ipad at my desk, which brought weird device issues on Windows, and was my #1 blue screen crash problem back then...

I'll try and do a comparison test this weekend.
 
End User
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Re: Luna Display: It’s glorious!

Tue Nov 20, 2018 3:57 pm

2018 Mac mini with a touch display via Luna Display and an 2018 iPad Pro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqLR20jh9Qk
 
the
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Re: Luna Display: It’s glorious!

Wed Nov 21, 2018 9:32 am

derFunkenstein wrote:
I'm glad you like it, but regurgitating marketing schtick is beneath you. One cannot have "lag free" and "wireless"


I've seen it with 60 Ghz equipment but there are a ton of caveats with that frequency. Pretty much need line of sight and a thick piece of paper can interrupt a signal.

Other wireless display technologies are a bag of hurt with side of pick your poison. A lot leverage H.264 which adds a frame of latency minimum with three more likely. The lone exception are some implementations that'll do H.264 forwarding. Instead of decoding a H.264 video in a window locally, then re-encoding the entire screen as an H.264 for transmission, the wireless display client will take the initial H.264 stream and forward it onto the end point for direct decoding there. The H.264 forwarding only adds a few milliseconds of latency which can legitimately appear 'lag free' for that edge case.
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Veerappan
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Re: Luna Display: It’s glorious!

Wed Nov 21, 2018 10:25 am

For those discussing latency... From the luna site comparing their solution versus Duet at https://lunadisplay.com/pages/luna-disp ... et-display
Luna typically sees latency of 16 to 32ms over WiFi.
 
End User
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Re: Luna Display: It’s glorious!

Sat Nov 24, 2018 9:25 pm

I was waiting for my 2018 iPad Pro to arrive before I gave any further feedback.

I'm using the USB Type-C version of Luna Display. I had previously been using Duet Display. If a Wi-Fi network is not available you can use a USB or Thunderbolt 3 cable to establish a connection between the Mac and the iPad. My testing was done via my home Wi-Fi network.

In a full screen video test I played a battle scene from Black Panther in both Plex via Chrome and VLC. Luna Display made the video look as if there was a layer of lightly frosted glass above the video or, to put it another way, the way reflections look in glass from an RTX BFV demo. The movie looked normal when using Duet Display. Audio was in sync for both.

While lag can be noticeable if you really go looking for it (frantically moving a window around) I have to say that I was stunned at how well Google Maps in 3D mode performed when flying through New York City (fullscreen in Chrome on the iPad). General desktop performance is excellent.

HiDPI support and quality of the desktop graphics (apart from video) set Luna Display apart from the competition.

Mission Control is handled very well by Luna Display.

Touch works well in my limited testing of the feature (flying through NYC via Google Maps 3D). I'm not an artist nor did I buy the new Apple Pencil so that aspect of Luna Display I'll leave to others.


As far as my workflow goes, Luna Display knocks it out of the park when it comes to HiDPI support and Mission Control performance. The performance of 3D mode in Google Maps was impressive. I'm a happy camper.
 
qmacpoint
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Re: Luna Display: It’s glorious!

Tue Nov 27, 2018 2:36 pm

I used to use Duet display as an on-the-go display with a 1st gen iPad mini and it worked well for what I needed it to be - except when I needed to go for meetings: Plugging on / off the iPad mini would sometimes cause a driver error, and most of the times a catastrophic blue screen error on Windows and a beach ball crash under OS X (at the time, refusing to retroactively call it macOS). Does this happen with Luna when you use it through a dedicated connection? (i.e. connecting and disconnecting the display)

If Luna can support a sort of "docking station" behavior, then I would be super impressed!

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