 Virtual CES this year, I stopped by the Viewsonic booth during the PEPCOM Digital Experience event. I saw a lot of really cool stuff and I mentioned to the representative that Viewsonic isn't a brand I hear mentioned often in Mac circles. I found that surprising, giving the numerous cool displays they were showing off at CES. I've asked Ray Hedrick, Product Marketing Specialist at Viewsonic to join us today to talk about some of the cool products I got to CES. I got to see at CES. Welcome to the show, Ray. Thank you, Allison. Thank you for having me. Yeah. To your point, a lot of Mac users may not know that Viewsonic makes some really, really cool solutions that work really well for Apple. So I really love the opportunity to get to talk about these. Yeah. For some reason, we talk about LG, and we talk about maybe HP, and of course, dream about the Apple monitor. But that's pretty much where the conversation stops and maybe I've run in the wrong circles. But I wanted to hear more about the cool stuff. So what are the top things you would want to tell us about that would be relatable to the Mac community? Right. Yeah. So one of the big pushes that we've had in 2020, and actually we have a whole campaign running around this and during Q4 of 2020, was an awareness campaign about USB-C, and the way that we implement USB-C on our monitor. So it's such a complicated thing. From a marketing standpoint, the entire rollout of USB-C and Thunderbolt and the connectors and all of that has just been kind of a nightmare for the last several years. But Apple made a very smart choice back in 2016 to standardize on that as their input output for their MacBooks. And depending on what model, you've got anywhere from one to four of them, and they support full DisplayPort, audio, video, USB-C connectivity, and that's their charging source. So when we look at USB-C on our monitors, we have only really implemented what we believe is the highest level of support that you would want on your monitor. So they all will support full uncompressed DisplayPort and audio. They all support USB-C transfer from the ports that are on the monitor. So if a keyboard and mouse, you connect them to the monitor, and then there's just one cable running to your Mac, so that when you come and go, you just connect it, that's all you have. But then the important... It's essentially a dock on top of being a monitor. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of the monitors on the market will do all of that, but then they leave out the USB-C power delivery standard. So they don't do the charging side of it. They will do maybe 10 to 15 Watts of USB-C. We only will use 60 to 90. So we charge... 60 to 90? Yeah, 60 to 90 Watts is what we implement on all of our USB-Cs. Even on our portable monitor, it comes with a 60-Watt wall adapter. Plug that in. And it'll charge your MacBook just with that one plug. Oh, that's fantastic. I'm a 16-inch MacBook Pro user, so that 90 Watts is singing to me. When you say 60 to 90, do you mean they all have 60 to 90, or they have 60 or 90? 60 or 90. So depending on the model, some of them are 60-Watt ones, the other ones are 90-Watt ones. Yeah. Okay. Oh, I like the... The portable USB-C monitor thing is really taking off right now. I've got a little one that's probably not the highest quality one. You could buy it, but it solves a real problem for me when I just need another display. I need a little bit more space and I can keep it in my drawer and take it out or throw it in a laptop bag. So that's cool that you've got those. I definitely want to hear about what you have there. Yeah, no, yeah. I'm sorry. No, these are not Thunderbolt displays just to be clear, right? Correct. We are looking at... So one of the things that we showed at CES this year was our concept and what would become a product later in the year of our 8K monitor. And that is our VP3286-8K. That's a 32-inch crazy IPS 8K monitor and that will be a Thunderbolt display. So that is a new entrant to us. We have not had Thunderbolt displays, but we will be bringing at least one to market this year. 8K. 8K, absolutely. I need 8K now. We all do. And what we're finding is is that even if you're kicking out 4K content, you're often authoring video content in 6 to 12K. So having an 8K monitor for both video and photography purposes is a really useful use case for customers because even when you kick it out at a lower resolution, you work at that high resolution. Okay. So the 8K monitor, I'm looking at your press kit at the same time, it's as available summer 2021 with an estimated street price of $5,000. Does it come with a stand for $5,000? Absolutely. It will come with a beautiful ergonomic stand for those $5,000. What I'm gonna want to know is where is the top of the display? Cause I'm actually looking at the Apple Pro Display XDR right now and the top of display is four and a half inches above eye level, which is not ergonomic. Yeah. So this one, we don't have the final specs on the adjustment, but it typically has five to six inches of up and down adjustment. So you can actually get it to hunkered down pretty low if you need. Good, good. So this one goes up. It's the down it doesn't do. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Cause so they went with a double hinge design. So it's sort of where it mouths to the stand. You can't go much down from there. So ours does not do that. It's the more traditional. It floats along the back of the stand. So you go on adjustment. Okay. Plus 8K, not just that stinkin' 6K. Plus Thunderbolt and full Adobe RGB. It comes factory calibrated cause of course this is a professional photo monitor. It has to, actually one of the really cool things about that monitor is that it comes with a little puck that is a controller for the UI, you know, Mac users, Apple users, very important UI. And we focus on that. So it's a very easy to navigate through the menu in the monitor if you need to. But also that little puck is a screen calibrator. So you put it on your screen, you calibrate it. You can do it every day, once a month, six months, whatever you want, but it comes with its screen calibrator. Oh, that's really slick. Okay. So if we get away from the monitors that most people don't need and can't afford, but we all love to learn about and dream about them. What are other monitors that you consider great for Mac users? So if they're looking at, if your users are looking at monitors like right now, we've got a lot of solutions, especially for work from home. So we've got some in what we call our VX lineup. Those are more our premium look and feel monitors. If I could throw out a part number, I would throw out VX 2785-2K. That is a 2K monitor, 2560 by 1440, 27-inch USB-C with power delivery. And we've used it with MacBooks here in the office and it makes a real slick one cable, you know, plug it in, it charges your MacBook. It's a nice 27-inch display to work on and it's an IPS screen that's full 8-bit. So the color quality is actually really, really up to the standards of a Mac user. Okay, what's the brightness on a display like that in nits? That one's a 300-nit brightness. 300 nits, okay. Most people don't demand really high nits. I do, because I find that my eyes focus better when I get more bright light into my eyes, but a lot of people hate bright light into their eyes. So it's a, you know, please everybody, okay? Yeah, no, I'm actually the same way. I usually turn the brightness all the way up on my monitors. Yeah, so what about in the 4K range? In the 4K range, one to really look at right now is what we call the VP2785-4K. That monitor is part of our VP lineup, which is our color professional monitors, but even being a color professional monitor, it is under $1,000. And full 4K resolution, USB-C again, with power delivery, USB ports, if you, you know, you want to connect keyboard and mouse directly to your monitor, you can do that as well, or if you need somewhere to plug in a thumb drive, you've got that right on the side. And 4K, full Adobe RGB and full DCI P3 as well. So if you need to use it for video work, they like P3 wide color gamut for final cut. So that works really well on that monitor. Okay, so you're distinguishing here between the VX lineup and the VP lineup. Correct. The VX you said was premium look and feel, but is that your lower priced options and the VP is the higher priced stuff? Right, those would be more your home or your home office monitors. We don't really include things like the ability to have factory color calibration on those. Everything is, you know, calibrated to the panel, but they're not, you know, Delta II or less in terms of color accuracy to the Adobe RGB space like you would get on a VP. So they are a little bit different customer, but if you have a Mac user where this is their email and their Excel machine, you know, that's where those monitors are really awesome. Okay, so the VX is for normal people. Yeah, yeah, the VX is for normal people. It's reasonably priced. You can usually pick those up right around $300 street price. Okay, do you have a 4K version of the VX lineup? We do have some 4K offerings in the VX lineup. We have a 32 inch 4K that customers might want to check out. We have two of them that jumped to mind would be VX3211 and VX3216, those would be two 4K monitors to check out. Okay. So not 27 inch 4K, 27 inches 2K and 32 inches 4K? There are 27 inch 4K offerings. I don't believe we have any in the VX right now. Okay, okay, so if you want to go to 4K, that would be in the VP line of 4K at 27 inches. You'd go into the, into the VP lineup, right? Yeah. Okay, well, this is pretty interesting. I like everything about what you're saying. I like that you've got them in these different price points. You've got normal people stuff. You've got stuff for the high-end video photographer, color calibration and the color gamut and all those words, I don't actually understand. But the idea of USB-C to power the device, have it as a hub, that's what normal people really need and want right now. And I think that that's a real, that's attractive to me as a Mac user. And I think that's probably attractive to my audience as well. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we have, as of right now, there are 18 models with the USB-C that we offer to the market. So all of those power delivery would work perfectly on a MacBook. Oh wow, that's fantastic. So to be honest, the names of these monitors don't quite roll off the tongue for me to be able to remember which one's which. Where would people find the USB-C monitors that you've been talking about today? I believe that, well, actually, we have a landing page at muesonic.com. So even if you just Google a View Sonic USB-C, that landing page should actually be one of the first results. And we kind of show towards the bottom of that page. We show you all the benefits of the USB-C that we implement. And then towards the bottom, we give you like a breakout of, okay, here's the ones, here's the safe ones. So these are all the ones that have it. So. Oh, very good. Very good. Well, that sounds fantastic. So viewsonic.com is how we go learn more about these monitors and see what we need for, I mean, Christmas is over, but I don't know, my birthday's coming up. You never know what's gonna happen, right? Absolutely. All right, well, thank you very much for joining us, Ray. This was fantastic. Thank you so much, Allison. Love, Minger.