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Ricoh Portable Monitor 150BW: 30-second review
Lightweight, portable monitors can be incredibly useful for business—essentially for screen expansion or as a way to mirror your laptop screen in meetings. One of the main issues with many of these portable monitors is that they can be a little awkward to use due to that wired connection. If you want to show others the display, those wires can get in the way, and this is where the Ricoh 150BW comes into play.
The Ricoh 150BW is a 15.6-inch OLED full HD portable monitor with a built-in battery, wireless functionality and touch screen abilities, so in a meeting, you can hand the screen around, and participants can see and interact with the display.
During testing, there was plenty to look at, considering that this is, on the surface, a relatively simple portable monitor. On the wired front, you can connect up to two input sources, which is handy, say a laptop, either Mac or PC and then utilise the screen as a full HD mirror or an expansion to the connected devices. The display input is selected using the button and rocker switch on the side.
Then there are the headline wireless features that work exceptionally well on PC devices, although not so well on Mac, with the internal battery supplying a good two and half hours of use, enabling you to wirelessly transmit your laptop’s screen’s content over to this secondary monitor. If you mirror the contents of your laptop to the monitor, then others can interact with the display via touchscreen abilities, which is a great feature in meetings and extremely useful. However, as with the wireless connection, the touchscreen features and abilities are not the most smoothly integrated.
Whilst this sounds like an excellent option, during testing, I did find quite a few quirks. Firstly, there is a slight delay between the primary monitor and this wireless option, and there’s only the ability to mirror the display when used with a Mac.
There’s also the case that the wireless connection happens through Wi-Fi, which means that you need to connect both the monitor and your laptop to a Wi-Fi connection, so the quality of the transmission is dependent on the Wi-Fi strength. If you’re looking to do a wireless transmission on the road, I found it’s best to take a cable with you, and you also need the Ricoh software in order to make the connection between the two devices.
How well it stacks up as the best portable monitor for you will depend. If you’re PC-based, then this is a great option to have, and there’s no doubting just how useful it can be. However, on a Mac, the transmitted image through the wireless connection is degraded, and there are just fewer options than when used with a PC.
Ricoh Portable Monitor 150BW: Price and availability
- How much does it cost? From £770 / $770
- When is it out? Available now
- Where can you get it? Directly from ricoh.com and online retailers
The Ricoh Portable Monitor 150BW doesn’t come cheap, with that resolution, brightness, touchscreen, and wireless ability. This monitor will set you back the best part of $800 / £800 directly through the ricoh.com website, but I am seeing it cheaper through other online retailers, including Amazon.
Ricoh Portable Monitor 150BW: Specs
Display: 15.6″ OLED
Resolution: 1920×1080 resolution
Response time: 1ms
Ports: 2 x USB Type-C
Audio: 2 Integrated 1.5w speakers – rear
Weight: economist 715g/1.58lb/25.2oz
Ricoh Portable Monitor 150BW: Design
I’ve tested a fair few portable monitors over the last year, and whilst many of them are really good, I would say the build quality of many leaves a little bit to be desired. But the first thing you notice about the Ricoh Portable Monitor 150BW out of the box is the quality—it’s really high-end. Looking at the screen itself, there’s only a thin bezel going around the sides and top, with a thicker bezel at the bottom. The screen is completely flat, which gives a really nice viewing experience.
Ricoh also made sure that the design was very minimalistic and lightweight. Its thinnest point is only 5 mm in thickness and about 12 mm at the widest—and this is only because the rubber feet add an extra couple of millimetres to the depth.
Weight-wise, it’s also really well balanced, coming in at 715 g, which, when placed with your laptop, doesn’t really add a huge amount of additional weight. During this test, I used the monitor with a MacBook Pro M1 Max, and the size at 356 x 10.8 x 221.7 millimetres meant that when I put it into my backpack, it sat nice and flush against the top.
On the back of the monitor, there is a pull-out stand, which is nice and robust, with two little rubber feet on the stand and the base of the monitor to ensure that it stays when on a desktop. Then, when it comes to connectors, there are two USB Type-C ports very neatly placed into a recess on the back, with a small cable tidy to ensure you keep everything neat when connected.
Also on the back are the two 1.5w speakers, which are more tokens than anything and don’t have a great deal of power. Then, you have the main controls of the monitor, including the main power button at the top, the menu and selection rocker dial, and the Wi-Fi on/back button. With these three buttons, you have complete control over how you operate and connect to devices. Obviously, a feature here is that it’s also touch-enabled, and if you have the Ricoh Monitor Stylus Pen Type 1, then you can use that, or your finger, to navigate through all of the settings, including connecting to Wi-Fi services and changing options.
As a portable monitor, there’s a lot more here than you’d normally expect on monitors of this type, and just enough to justify the premium-level pricing for this monitor, at least if it all works.
Ricoh Portable Monitor 150BW: Features
It’s easy to forget that this is just a portable monitor designed for use when you’re travelling, and the quality of the screen, resolution, and brightness are exceptional. When we take a look at the features, there are actually two versions of this monitor available—the wireless one that I’m looking at in this review, which also has the option to be wired, and the straight wired connection version, which is a lot cheaper.
One of the main features of the monitor is its portability. It’s lightweight and ultra-slim, which means it can slip in alongside your laptop in a laptop bag or backpack. The one thing I would say here is that there is no protective cover that comes in the box with the screen, and just a simple lined case would definitely be an advantage to keep it in top condition.
The screen itself is a 15.6-inch OLED touch display, which has the 10-point touch and can be paired with the Ricoh Stylus Pen, which I also had for this test—and it is again of a similar quality to the monitor itself.
When it comes to connection options, you can use either a wired connection through USB Type-C directly into the monitor. There is no HDMI or PD port—just USB Type-C—so you must ensure whatever machine you are attaching to has the ability to utilise a USB Type-C port as a display port. It can also connect wirelessly through macOS, iOS, and Android devices.
On the back, there are two integrated 1.5 W speakers, and you can adjust the volume of these through the interface or through the connected app.
Alongside the monitor comes the RICOH Monitor Mirroring application, which enables you to wirelessly connect to the monitor to mirror the display. Likewise, on a PC, you have the RICOH Monitor Autocast and Multicast for Windows, which enables you to mirror and expand the display.
If you want to use it for an expansion display, then you need to use a wired connection on the Mac, while the PC application enables the full range of features.
Ricoh Portable Monitor 150BW: Performance
Test Scores
Gamut 5/5
Tone response 1.5/5
White point 4/5
Luminance Uniformity 4/5
Colour Uniformity 4.5/5
Colour Accuracy 4/5
Overall 3/5
Most portable monitors simply plug in and enable you to expand the display or mirror it, and they can be useful for all sorts of situations—especially if you’re travelling light for business. The Ricoh Portable Monitor 150BW takes things just a little bit further to make it far more than just a simple portable monitor and something that could be far more useful for productivity.
When looking at this particular portable monitor, you have to take into consideration that it has several different functions that complement each other. Start off with the simple task of being either a wired or wireless monitor for your laptop—both Mac and PC systems. The straightforward wired connection works incredibly well, with the USB Type-C cable linking directly to your laptop and giving you a Full HD secondary display, which you can set as either a mirror or screen expansion for your existing machine.
This is really where most portable monitors start and end. For this use, particularly for business, the quality of the monitor and the resolution are absolutely exceptional, with that decent 300 nits of brightness and a decent amount of adjustment. The test using DataColor SpyderX showed that it had a very good gamut—the white balance, luminance uniformity, colour uniformity, and accuracy were all superb, with only the tone response letting it down.
For business tasks, this means that it will be absolutely fine. However, if you’re looking at using this as a creative monitor, then the lack of Tonal response might be an issue. For browsing or viewing documents, it’s absolutely perfect, and the fact that this is an OLED screen rather than just an IPS makes those blacks nice and deep, meaning it’s great for a bit of gaming or media playback.
A big feature of the monitor is obviously the wireless connection, and in order to make the most of this, you need to install Ricoh Monitor AutoCast on the PC or RICOH Monitor Mirroring on the Mac. Each of these applications—be that on a Mac or PC—works much the same way. First of all, you need to connect to your local area network through the monitor, and then it can be accessed by any machine on that network.
However, when doing this on the Mac, the transmission quality of the display was just okay, but I did find in several locations that there was quite a bit of artefact on the screen when using the MacBook Pro M1 Max and MacBook Air M3. However, when I switched over to an Asus ProArt laptop and did exactly the same using the Windows system, the cast was clean and seemed as good as the wired connection—so quite a difference between the two systems. On both, there was also the slightest of lag.
There’s another big difference with the Mac—you can only get a mirrored display, as the name of the application suggests. On the PC, you do get a full-screen expansion, making it a lot more useful. On the Mac, if you want screen expansion rather than just mirroring, then you need to go through the wired connection.
So, when it comes to being an expansion or mirror display—both wired and wireless—it works exceptionally well, with far better integration for PC systems than on the Mac. In fact, I would go as far as to say that if you are using a Mac, then just go through the wired version of this monitor, as just having a mirrored display wirelessly is a little bit limiting if the quality of the transmission isn’t spot on.
Now, the other part of this monitor package is the fact that you can also utilise the touchscreen. I have to say, the touchscreen functionality varies greatly. What I did find was that all of the icons aligned perfectly with the touch on the Mac system, both wired and wirelessly. However, when using Windows 11 Pro on the PC, the alignment of the touchscreen icons on the portable monitor seemed to vary. The actual OSD icons of the Ricoh display are nice and responsive; however, while connected to the Mac, everything was precise and spot-on, with the stylus working quite well. When I switched over to the PC, the use of the stylus was completely intermittent—sometimes it worked, other times it wouldn’t.
Likewise, within applications, the compatibility—even when paired to the monitor—was sporadic and obviously better with the Mirror functionality over the expanded display. While there are many levels of pressure, there is no obvious way of adjusting that pressure sensitivity within any of the applications or configuring the pen to work through any of the downloadable applications from Ricoh.
In the end, I found that using the monitor as a portable monitor worked exceptionally well but trying to integrate the use of the stylus with any application just caused more issues than it was worth.
Ricoh Portable Monitor 150BW: Final verdict
At the end of the review of the Ricoh 150BW, I had really mixed feelings about the monitor. The actual quality of the build is exceptional, and the display looks bright, clear and crisp. When it comes to use as a wired monitor, it works beautifully on both Mac and PC systems, and the fact that you can either have the display mirrored or expanded in Full HD with such a bright screen is a definite advantage for anyone working on documents, in meetings and just need a little bit more real estate when working on a laptop.
However, while there are plenty of monitors that offer superb wired connections, the real standout points here are that it can be used wirelessly and that it’s a touchscreen—and this is where the integration of Ricoh’s software really starts to fall apart.
On the Mac, the touchscreen stylus works relatively well, but there’s no obvious way to adjust the sensitivity of the stylus. So, if you do want to do any creative work on the monitor, you find yourself having to push quite hard on the surface of the screen, and that doesn’t feel great.
However, navigating on-screen options when you’re in wireless mode works quite well, as does on a PC. However, on the PC, no matter how you adjust that stylus, it just doesn’t seem to align with any of the menu items unless you flip the touch screen to be the main display. It’s always a few centimetres out, and no matter how you configure it, it just doesn’t seem to align. This was tried on three different PC systems with similar but slightly different results, including an Asus ProArt laptop, a Windows Surface machine, and an Intel Ghost Canyon NUC.
Then you have the wireless communication. On a Mac, this does work—it’s a nice feature—but considering the price of the monitor, you’d expect the visuals on the screen to look a little bit cleaner, and there are some obvious artefacts. Again, this was tested on two different MacBooks—a MacBook Pro M1 Max and a MacBook Air M3—and in both cases, the quality of the wireless visual showed some mild artefacting.
However, when it was used on a PC system, the wireless communication between the laptop and the screen was far more robust. While there was still a slight visual delay in movement, it was a huge improvement over when it was used with the Mac. The only issue is that, once again, the touch ability just seems lacking. It works, and you can draw on the screen in applications such as Photoshop or Paint, but when it comes to the actual icons, everything seems just slightly misaligned.
At the end of the test, as a portable monitor, this works well for both Mac and PC systems when it’s wired. When it comes to being used wirelessly, it’s far better on a PC system than on a Mac, and if you are a Mac user, then I’d definitely go for the wired version, which is far cheaper.
If you want the touchscreen ability, then on both Mac and PC systems, there are slight issues—especially when using the stylus—and these only get worse when you start to use it wirelessly rather than wired. These issues all seem to be caught up in the application of the Ricoh software rather than anything more fundamental, so hopefully, it’s something they can sort out. But at the moment, this is not as fluid a product as you would hope it would be at this price.
Should I buy a Ricoh Portable Monitor 150BW?
|
Value |
Extremely expensive for both a Full HD wired or even wireless monitor |
3 |
|
Design |
Exceptional design with a thin build and great looks |
4.5 |
|
Features |
Packed with features that make this an extremely interesting portable monitor, but not well executed |
4 |
|
Performance |
Visually, it looks great and the display is bright and clear, but some of the integration of advanced features isn’t so well done |
3 |
|
Overall |
There’s a lot to like about this monitor, but it’s just not as well executed as it could’ve been |
3 |
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
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