Okay, I'll admit it - I'm spoiled. When I'm working in my office I've got two laptops, and each is driving a big screen that's almost 2000-pixels wide. So when I travel, being forced to work on one small laptop screen puts me in screen withdrawal. Not anymore.

Why is one screen such a hardship? For email and downloading photos, it's fine. However, I spend a lot of time building programs in PowerPoint. And I have a great system where I prep images (size, sharpening, convert to sRGB) in Photo Mechanic (www.camerabits.com), then drag and drop them into the slides where I want them. It's fast and easy, and almost impossible to do on a lone laptop screen. Also, if I'm going to do any work in Photoshop or Capture NX, having a second screen for palettes lets me see more of the photo I'm working on.

A couple of months ago while window shopping at a computer store, I had a revelation. There were inexpensive 17-inch displays that weighed well under ten pounds. Aha! Last week I bought an Acer 17-inch with 1440 X 900 resolution. Using half of the styrofoam packaging as a cradle, it drops nicely into one of my favorite travel bags, a Lowepro Pro Roller 2 (which is a soft-side rigid case). It takes up about 3-inches in the bottom of the bag and adds eight pounds to the weight. Last week it got its first road test.

I had workshops to teach in Monterey, CA and Las Vegas. At the same time I had another program that I needed to work on, and would have some free time to do that. The screen performed like a champ. And I figured out that when I wasn't working on it, it doubled nicely as a screen to host a movie. It's amazing that with a hundred channels to choose from in a hotel, there's nothing to watch...

For the price, I wasn't expecting much in the way of color quality, and that's okay for what I need it for. However, I did go ahead and calibrate and profile it using the Gretag Macbeth Eye-One package (now sold by X-Rite), and it did surprisingly well (even had separate Red, Green and Blue controls). Next time I have a little time to waste at home, I'll run it through some print tests. If it works well, that will be icing on the cake. Right now though, I'm just enjoying having the extra screen space on the road.