The USB standard is a very popular one at the present. You may connect just about any kind of device to a desktop, notebook or laptop PC using a USB port. Keyboards, mice, PDAs, webcams, photo cameras, printers and scanners, to name just a few, are all connectible through a simple USB cable and port. Using the USB standard provides a simple and cheap way to link various mobile devices to a PC. Until now, connecting a monitor (CRT or LCD, doesn't matter) using the USB standard was impossible. Until now, as the company DisplayLink created a special add-on card that lets you do just that.

The hardware producer LG launched on Monday its line of USB compatible monitors, which use a USB cable to deliver HD quality graphics without using a classical DVI cable or a VGA one. The FlatronWide L206W is a 20-inch widescreen monitor that will be the first ever monitor to use the technology perfected by the DisplayLink company. Using the DL-160 chip the monitor receives the informational data stream from a virtual graphical card (that is emulated and gets the real data from the installed video card) running on the host computer and it reconstructs the stream into a displayable image.

One other feature of this monitor is that it houses a USB hub so it can accommodate and play host with a number of different USB based devices or even other three monitors. According to claims from the DisplayLink company, up to six monitors will be supported in the near future. "For too long, multi-monitor computing has been too costly and complex," said Hamid Farzaneh, president and CEO of DisplayLink, in a statement, cited by the news site Digitaltrends. "But now it is made simple thanks to DisplayLink's network display technology. DisplayLink offers this new technology not only to LG, but to Samsung, toshiba and Sunix as well".