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Well, congratulations on the whole setup. It seems you planned everything down to the last detail and it worked out well. However, if I were you, I would have
by 4cao 7y ago
Well, congratulations on the whole setup. It seems you planned everything down to the last detail and it worked out well.
However, if I were you, I would have asked myself: (1) do I really need 3 monitors, (2) if yes, can I just rent them wherever I'm headed, (3) if no, can I just substitute them with a larger UHD TV, which seem to be quite cheap these days (buy one and resell later).
In fact, if you are staying at a hotel or a serviced apartment, there would usually be a TV you could repurpose for this.
I also wanted to point out you can travel with more luggage as long as a single piece is under 32 kg, and stuff can be shipped internationally without including an invoice.
As long as a single item is below 20 kg, you could also use EMS, which works nearly as well, is cheaper, and, unlike parcel services, does not require you to appoint a customs agent on your behalf.
I'm not writing all this to critize what you did but just wanted to let you know alternate solutions should in fact be possible. As someone doing a lot of travelling, I've come to the conclusion that travelling light is the best thing one can do.
- hardwaresofton 7y ago> (2) if yes, can I just rent them wherever I'm headed, Sounds like there's a very boring but likely profitable business waiting to be spawned here. The fact that there isn't an obvious choice for renting electronic goods for digital nomads on the go is a pretty big flag.
- dheera 7y agoThey exist and they are horribly expensive. Last time I was setting up a recruiting booth and it was cheaper to buy a display from Walmart than it was to rent one. And I was able to return it to Walmart at the end, too.
- hardwaresofton 7y agoI'm surprised that it's so expensive -- would you mind giving some pointers to the companies you looked into if you remember any of them?
- dheera 7y agoI don't have names. This was at CVPR 2017 in Honolulu. The convention center had some recommended A/V rental company that quoted $350 for a simple 28" display or something of the sort. They clearly didn't understand basic economics because it cost me 4*$10=$40 Uber rides to get a display from Walmart and return it for a full refund, so the rental company would have needed to be cheaper than $40 to make sense to a customer. Also they violated the most basic axiom of rentals which is that a single day rental needs to be significantly cheaper than buying.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- CPLX 7y agoI’m in the conference and events business. I had the exact same mentality as you when I started, but after a couple broken monitors and stuff that doesn’t work and so on I started to understand the logic of paying an AV vendor to just make sure there’s a working monitor on the table.
- Johnny555 7y agoMy company needed a half dozen 32" monitors for a conference (to play videos, so 1080p was fine). We had some in storage, but it was cheaper to buy some new ones from Amazon (with free shipping) and dispose of them after the conference than to pay to ship the existing ones back and forth to the conference. They bought a spare one just in case one failed (they didn't) One of the employees manning the booth went to high school nearby and had arranged for someone from their AV department show up after the conference to pick up the monitors as a donation.
- dheera 7y agoThe shipping companies need to hear this -- not only are they losing business, but they are also encouraging people to buy unnecessary new stuff.
- mft_ 7y agoRenting equipment at conferences is indeed heinously expensive, IME. However, this is a very different case to the one of the previous commenter, who is talking about renting out equipment to the public, for the sake of ‘digital nomads’.