Q-Waves Quicklink HD review

Initial setup is fairly simple and involves installing the driver for the USB dongle. Once that’s done and the other dongle is plugged in and the base connected to your TV’s HDMI input, the two dongles pair automatically and your laptop’s screen will be mirrored on your TV. Using Windows’ Display Properties, you can change this to an Extended display. Our 37in LG TV’s resolution was correctly detected, but the resulting image was too large. Changing the TV’s aspect ratio to ‘Just Scan’ prevented it from scaling the image, and led to a perfect fit.

We played a 1080p QuickTime trailer in Windows Media Player to find out how the Quicklink HD coped with hi-def video. There were no noticeable problems with compression artefacts. However, despite the relatively low 9.5Mbit/s bitrate, frames were dropped and the video became jerky on occasion. This didn’t happen with a 720p version of the trailer. We played the 1080p version several times and noticed that audio was sometimes out of sync with the video, but was fine the other times we played it.

Overall, we were impressed with the Quicklink HD’s ease of use and reliability; the connection never dropped throughout our tests. Even when we rebooted our laptop, or removed and reinserted the dongle, we never had to reconfigure the extended desktop – it behaved no differently from a second monitor.

The main problem with the kit is the price. £122 is a lot of money for what is essentially an HDMI cable replacement. A 6m HDMI cable can cost 10 times less and eliminates the issue of dropped frames. If you absolutely have to have wireless HD video, this is a good choice, but those that can live with a wire should save their money.