UPerfect Delta Max Touch review: folding dual-screen 18.5-inch monitor

Price When Reviewed

$499.99

Best Prices Today: UPerfect Delta Max Touch Dual Screen Monitor

$589.99

External displays can transform a MacBook into a workable desktop setup, freeing the laptop user from the constraints of the smaller screen—even the spacious 16-inch display. Portable external displays give the extra benefit of being transportable and easily stored away when not required.

The UPerfect Delta Max Touch stands out from the portable external display crowd being a stacked set of two screens, each of which can operate as a touchscreen—although more on the debatable touch element later.

Portable design

The Delta Max Touch is a set of two 18.5-inch screens that are joined at a hinged center. They can be adjusted to the best-suited angle depending on your situation, and folded completely to create a slim portable package that can be slipped under your arm or carried in one hand.

How much you carry the monitor around may depend on your strength or size of backpack. UPerfect describes the folded dual display as “Feather Like”. You would need a lot of feathers to match the 5.21lb (2.36kg) weight.

That said, it is easily liftable and folds up to a manageable 16.73 × 10.24 × 0.79 inches (42.5 x 26 x 2cm). It is simple to carry, but you wouldn’t want to hold it in your arms too long or carry it in your backpack for hours.

Simon Jary

It is certainly more portable than a standard external display, let alone two. We can envisage it being a dual display that you can fold and store out of sight when working from home, or commuted short distances to an office or farther afield in a car.

It unfolds to 16.73 x 20.47 x 0.39 inches (42.5 × 52 × 1cm).

Simon Jary

It looks sleek in black aluminum, with a built-in stand folded flush to the outside of the lower screen. You can modify the angle of the stand to adjust the height and angle of the screen to suit your best working posture.

The central hinge also allows for flexible adjustment of the two screens to a comfortable and ergonomic angle when used in either a stacked arrangement or folded back on itself to share meeting content with people facing you—say, so you looking at one screen and the clients on the other side of the meeting seeing the other.

The standard way of adding more than one external display is to have two external monitors side by side, creating a wide extended screen display, with a gap in between where the first monitor ends and the next begins.

While this works well for most people, the extended screens mean you are constantly rotating your neck and shoulders when looking at or moving things between the two, which over time can cause neck pain.

A vertically stacked monitor, on the other hand, can be more ergonomic as the body doesn’t need to frequently turn left and right. The line of sight remains directly in front of the user, reducing frequent rotation of the neck. Of course, there is more up-and-down neck movement, but with the adjustable stand, this can be reduced a little to make viewing more comfortable. It can stand almost flat straight on to the viewer.

It is certainly an improvement on staring down at a small laptop screen, with your shoulders hunched and eyes squinting. A decent laptop stand—discover the best MacBook stands we have tested—can help alleviate laptop users’ bent-back syndrome but we like the Delta’s upright dual-screen approach. Previously we have used the larger Mobile Pixels Geminos Dual Vertical FHD Monitor stacked monitors, but the greater size did sometimes mean more looking up at an unnatural angle, which brought its own neck issues.

We are interested to try out the forthcoming 23.8-inch Delta Mega dual display to see if the increased size also creates more up and down neck movement.

While there is no gravity sensor to work out which orientation you have set up your monitors, they can be set to Portrait mode if you alter the Rotation in the Mac’s System Settings>Displays.

There are four 75 x 75mm holes on the back of the monitor, so you can affix a VESA Mount if you want to install the stacked monitor onto an arm or the wall to save desk space. 

UPerfect

Video settings

The UPerfect Delta Max Touch is impressively flexible in its display options. The screens can be set in four configurations, using either USB-C or HDMI connections.

First, all three screens—laptop plus dual-screen Delta Max— can show the same mirrored display (A, A, A in the illustration above). This could be useful if using the Delta Max in its inverted V shape with one screen facing opposite the other if you want the same screen on both plus your commanding laptop. Scenarios include presentations to colleagues or clients.

Second, each of the two Delta screens can show the same image, while the laptop shows another (B, B, A), which would be useful in the meeting setup described above but where the user wants a different screen on their laptop.

Third, the two Delta screens can merge to show one larger screen while the laptop shows another (Big B, A) in UPerfect’s “Sequence” mode on the On Screen Display (OSD). In effect, this creates a large second monitor, although the merger isn’t seamless with the hinge and screen bezel interrupting the join in the middle. This can be annoying but the two screens as one works well in traditional Extended modes. You’ll get a similar disconnect using standalone external displays.

Finally, each screen can display a different image (A, B, C). This is native in Windows but requires free-to-download third-party software—either DisplayLink or InstantView—to work on a Mac. UPerfect doesn’t state this as a Mac option but we got it working using InstantView and just the USB-C connection, not even requiring the HDMI option. We include more detail about how to install and use DisplayLink in another screen tutorial.

You need to play around with the OSD controls and set the mode to what UPerfect calls “StandAlong”, which I presume is just mis-translated ‘Standalone’.

The Delta Max can also support two devices connected at the same time, with each computer controlling one of the screens.

As well as with laptop and desktop Mac and Windows computers, it works with iPhone or games consoles.

Simon Jary

With the monitor folded back into an inverted V shape, User X could work on one screen while User Y worked on the other, quite independently—meaning this one monitor could provide external screen support for two colleagues on the same table as each screen can be controlled by different computers at the same time.

Video quality

The picture quality and pixel density on this IPS panel display are excellent, with a 100% sRGB Color Gamut.

Each screen has a max full HD resolution of 1920×1080 pixels, with a 16:9 display ratio. If you are after a 4K monitor, this is not for you, but HD is all productivity professionals should require. As a touchscreen it should also appeal to creatives, but you wouldn’t expect a 4K touchscreen at this price, let alone a foldable dual-screen portable at that high a resolution.

UPerfect claims up to a 100Hz refresh rate on the Delta Max but we could only get it to 60Hz on the Mac—still respectable for non-gamers. Apparently 100Hz is possible only in the “Clone” mode that mirrors top and bottom screen, but I found this too tricky to achieve due to the vagaries of the OSD. Brightness is up to 300 nits (cd/m²).

UPerfect employs Ucare low-blue-light technology to reduce blue light and therefore eye fatigue. This is turned on using the On Screen Display, and does impact colour quality.

Touch too basic on Mac

There’s no extra software for the touchscreen so there’s little customization of gestures and swipes and so forth. Indeed, using a Mac the touch controls are very basic.

We could move folders and windows around using a finger, but not all apps played ball. And the touch controls worked better on the bottom screen than the top. It turns out that while it’s a 10-point touchscreen for Windows, it’s just one-touch for Mac, which is more a limitation of the macOS than the monitor itself. Other touchscreen monitors do work with the Mac through third-party software—an option lacking with the Delta Max Touch.

Even basic touch functions such as pinch and zoom either didn’t work and others were sporadically functional.

If it’s full touch control on a Mac you are after, go for a more pro touch monitor such as the Alogic Clarity Pro Touch. Read our full roundup of the best monitors for Mac.

Simon Jary

Side ports and power

On the right side of the lower monitor are five ports. The bottom USB-C input port is to power the screens, and this power can also be channelled to the connected laptop at 25W.

Above that, the next USB-C port is to link to your MacBook’s Thunderbolt port to create the video data connection. You need only one USB-C cable to use both screens.

There are two Mini HDMI ports, so if connecting two computers one or both could use HDMI as the connector. The monitor ships with two Mini-HDMI–to–HDMI cables as well as a couple of USB-C–to–USB-C cables. We found the single USB-C connection to be al we needed.

A 45W USB-C wall charger is also included. The monitor itself uses 16W, so only 25W is left over for passthrough to the connected laptop. That’s just about enough to keep you going on a smaller MacBook, although even our 14-inch M2 MacBook Pro never ran out of juice when connected to the Delta Max. For power security we’d recommend at least a 65W PD power adapter. See our roundup for the best USB-C PD chargers for Mac.

Some portable monitors include a built-in battery so you can use it when away from a power source. The Delta Max Touch doesn’t have one so you need to be connected to a power source via USB-C when using it.

UPerfect

Controls

On the other side of the monitor are four buttons to control the On Screen Display (OSD) options, such as Picture (Brightness, Contrast, Black Equalizer), Color Effects (Saturation, Hue, Sharpness), Display Rotation, Aspect Ratio, and Volume.

With the lack of detailed instructions, you just have to get the hang of how these work, twiddling pulley buttons and clicking others until you work out its logic. To be fair, it’s rare to find a monitor with an intuitive OSD, and we did master them after a half hour or so of trial and error and a little mild cursing.

The monitor comes with a thin and not too helpful skimpy four-page user manual, but you can find a slightly more detailed PDF manual online, although Mac instructions aren’t well catered for.

The Delta Max is a reasonably plug-and-play product—connect it to your Mac or Macs using either the USB-C or HDMI cable and do the setup on the Mac’s System Settings—but the scant instructions don’t mention touch (perhaps wisely) and include only details for Windows users.

Speakers

The monitor has a built-in 1W speaker, which unsurprisingly we found tinny compared to the speaker in even our connected M2 MacBook Pro. This lack of bass or fullness is typical of monitor speakers.

It’s fine for voice calls and basic spoken videos but not an immersive theatre sound if you are watching a movie or playing an action game.

Simon Jary

Price

The Delta Max Touch is priced starting at $499.99 or £369 for the “No Touch” version, which we’d recommend as the touch control are so basic using a Mac. Adding touch, the price rises to $599.99 or £445. If you do find the No Touch model cheaper, then maybe opt for that but we wouldn’t advise Mac users to pay extra for touch.

For a dual-screen monitor this flexible, we think the price is reasonable taking into consideration its foldability and adjustable orientations.

UPerfect also sells a $649.99 Delta Mega version with duals 23.8-inch screens, which work better with chart or spreadsheet work. This model lacks any touch controls, which doesn’t bother us as we found the Delta Max’s touch to be inadequate using a Mac. We hope to review this model soon to compare the screen sizes, but we expect it to operate in a similar fashion in other respects.

(UPerfect is offering $60 off for orders above $400 using the code Macworld​60, and $80 off orders above $500.)

Simon Jary

Should you buy the UPerfect Delta Max Touch?

Ignore the poor touch functions, and the Delta Max is a great solution if you want a good-looking and well-built and super-adjustable portable extended dual screen that connects to your laptop for a more spacious screen experience that can be simply folded away to a super-slim package when not in use. The ability to run off two computers and the flexibility to bend right back to offer front and back mirrored screens could be the solutions you are looking for in a adaptable dual-screen display.