In many respects this is an ideal small monitor for surveillance cameras, and this is the primary purpose for which I use it. It can be tucked away inconspicuously almost anywhere. It can be mounted on a wall, or left standing on its included small stand. If you are using a dedicated surveillance video camera then you can connect it directly to one of this monitor’s video inputs. However, if you are using an IP camera (which I am), then getting the video feed can be a bit trickier. You can connect it to one of your main computers as an extra monitor, but that could limit you with respect to where you can position your monitor. I’ve been able to hook it up to my inexpensive Raspberry Pi microcomputer, and this provides an excellent self-contained monitoring setup.

This monitor comes with a mounting case, a separate stand, and a small remote. All of these are very well made and serve their respective purposes more than adequately. The stand lets you attach the monitor either to the dashboard or position it on a table. In order to keep it safely secured to a surface you’d need to have the stand attached via four little screws. I would have much preferred it if the stand had a large suction cup instead.

Unfortunately the monitor doesn’t come with a power supply. If you plan on using it in your car, then connecting it to the car’s power circuit should work, and in that case you wouldn’t need the extra power supply anyways. However, having a stand-alone power supply would come in handy for most other uses. Fortunately, the monitor can be used with almost any power supply that runs on anywhere between 3 V and 9 V. I’ve even been able to connect it a standard 9V battery. You would need a very particular attachment to connect it to most small power supplies, which, unfortunately, is not that common. I really wish that there were an easy way to power this monitor through a standard USB power supply. That would really make it extra convenient for the majority of purposes.

One of the biggest issues that I have with this monitor is that it doesn’t come with any instructions. For the most part it was easy to figure out what various options/buttons/cables are for, but it still required some fiddling around.

The screen is not very sharp, even at the higher resolutions. There is a certain amount of blurriness to the way that the image is presented. This is more than acceptable for the basic surveillance, but I would not want to use this monitor for video viewing.

The monitor has a total of four cables attached to it: one VGA input cable and a triple cable consisting of two RC video cables and a power supply cable. Unfortunately, all of these cables are permanently attached and cannot be removed. This would be OK if you decide to permanently attach this monitor to some surface and tuck all of the cables behind so they are not visible, but if you have the monitor by itself on a stand then all these extra cables really stick out.

I have not tried installing this monitor in my car, so I am not really sure how easy or difficult that would be. If you just attach it to the provided stand and connect all the cables properly then it would in principle be extremely easy. For anything beyond that I would recommend that you go to a professional.

Overall I really like this small monitor, but it certainly has a lot of room for improvement. It is one of the cheapest such monitors that I’ve come across, and would certainly recommend it to anyone who is budget conscious.