Millenium P750

This Matrox card is for those with a powerful host system and a yen for multiple display capabilities. Whether you work with large or numerous 2D images, or edit video, an extra slice of screen space is always very welcome. For £203, the P750 gives you a range of output options, including a pair of CRTs and a TV, two DVI panels/TV and three LCD displays. Image quality is good even when dealing with a full complement of screen real-estate, although 3D performance isn’t strong.

Matrox is well known for its video and multiple-display products, and the Millennium P750 builds on that tradition by offering support for up to three displays. Other useful features include glyph anti-aliasing for smooth text display, dual independent hardware overlays for video, and native colour calibration.

The card itself is AGP 8X, sports 64MB of DDR RAM and can support resolutions of up to 1600x1200 on digital and 1920x1440 on dual analog displays. To gain the maximum triple-headed support, you have to use the supplied DVI splitting cable, the second output running your television output via an RGB-to-TV conversion cable.

Set-up is relatively straightforward, and is accessed easily from your display control panel or via Matrox’s own custom interface. Included with the card is the Gigacolor viewer, which enables you to view 5-megapixel images with billions of colours, not just the standard millions.

The P750 really comes into its own when working with 2D. The card handles colour very well, so it’s ideal for colour-critical apps such as Photoshop. Producing crisp and responsive images across two displays, even with huge files, the P750 makes comparatively light work of heavy image-editing jobs. Working with several documents at a time can be frustrating, but the availability of so much screen space makes comparing images almost painless.

Matrox has ensured that the two monitor outputs are identical, through fully symmetrical, independently supported resolution buffers, and by supplying dual display colour-calibration software with the card. This means that you should be able to trust your eyes when examining slight variations between images.

The Viewperf 7 scores for this device were quite poor, but that’s to be expected given the product’s low memory and its obvious video/2D slant. There’s little point running, say, XSI with this card; its task is to facilitate a smoother workflow for video. With Premiere, for instance, the P750 will certainly make life easier for those who edit regularly.

Once you’ve worked in Photoshop using two calibrated LCDs, you won’t want to go back to a single set-up again. Question is, do you have the graphics card requirements that go beyond multiple display support?