Product Review: The EZCast Lightning to HDMI Adapter

27 Apr 2023

The use case I bought the device for was for travelling to stream Netflix, Disney+, etc. to a TV or maybe play some games on a big screen (Minecraft etc.) I was too cheap to get the original Apple dongle which costs 20-30€ more than the knock-offs. As mentioned in the abstract, I sent device back as it could not fulfill any of my requirements.

The setup is reasonable easy: Plug the device into the iPad, attach the HDMI cable and a power source. Apparently it does not draw the power from the iPad and won’t do anything without plugging a Lightning cable into it. Here’s the first shortcomming: The dongle won’t patch the power through to the iPad.

First glaring problem when using the device was the latency it introduces. That basically makes it unusable for anything that requires realtime interaction. Look at the iPad where the jump happens immediately and then how about a second later the jump happens on the TV.

Final Verdict

So why did I send the device back?

• It’s too slow for real time games, that lag I saw felt like ~1 second.
• Cannot handle DRM: Any streaming service that uses DRM won’t work.
• Streaming videos from my NAS kind of worked, but not 100% fluid. I saw many dropped frames and the playback seemed stuttery because of that.
• Even playing Youtube videos required me to change the resolution and bitrate settings so I could get a somewhat fluid playback.

The only valid usecase I can come up with is to use it for the occasional slidedeck presentation where you hook up your phone/tablet to a beamer or large screen.