Testing Hagibis wireless HDMI transmitter-receiver dongles
Hagibis is a Chinese brand that offers wireless HDMI dongles. It promises a no-setup experience and claims to support multiple devices and systems. I got one of their kits and put it to the test.
Hagibis kits consist of transmitter and receiver dongles. Depending on which kit you get the ports may differ but my kit had male HDMI on the transmitter and female HDMI on the receiver as well as optional VGA out and headphone port. Note that there are other dongles for Miracast/DLNA that have a receiver only and are way more limited that this pure HDMI setup.
You plug the transmitter to your laptop, PC, game console or phone and you are done with that. The receiver requires 5V micro-USB power to work. You connect it to a display via a regular HDMI cable and that should also be done.
When you connect the receiver to a display and it's powered on it will display an info-screen showcasing ways of connecting to it - either via their transmitter or various Miracast, DLNA, AirPlay protocols. When their transmitter is connected to a devices it will quickly connect with the receiver and start showing the intended image.
Company states up to 9 meters of range and that seems to be what I've got. The dongles can handle corners, like putting transmitter behind a corner in home but putting it behind something thicker will cut the connection. The dongles don't seems to require direct line of sight so some obstacles should be fine. However when doing the UFO Test for refresh rate I've notices it picked up more stutters when one of the dongles was behind a wall corner so getting through doors or thin wall may not give the best experience if it will work at all.
As for the image quality - it's pretty good. There is bit of compression - if you play a movie with some dark, black parts you will be able notice some artifacts in those areas. Even so text is clearly visible. The dongles I have can only do 1080p and when connected to a higher resolution display the image will be stretched to match.
As for system compatibility that did vary:
- Linux: Works on Xubuntu 21.10 (tested with Radeon desktop), does not work on few older versions I had available (Radeon and Nvidia desktops).
- ChromeOS: Works on a very old Chromebook out of the box
- Motorola Moto G200: Works and Motorola Ready For (Samsung DEX alike) triggers properly
- Windows: Did not work properly for me - Windows 10 is behaving like it's connecting and disconnecting to a display without showing any image on the screen (Lenovo Ryzen iGPU laptop, Nvidia PC)
- Recommended Android Miracast/DLNA applications: none of them really work while displaying absurd amount of ads. Reviews match the outcome ;) Other apps may work better...
To connect the Hagibis dongle to a phone I had to use a dual-female HDMI adapter as for my phone I had USB-C to HDMI male cable. With such dongle it worked without problems.
Hagibis dongles can be found on Aliexpress, Amazon and similar sites. The kit I have goes for around $99 but some sales do happen, especially on Aliexpress. Note that they offer way more accessories under this brand.
It looks like a good dongle for mobile devices to for example remotely connect them to a TV and watch some content. Gaming may be somewhat limited to 60Hz with some drops depending to connection quality. It's stated in the description of the device that it also works with Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo Switch but I wasn't able to test it not to mention macOS. Windows problems I got may indicate that it’s not as plug and play as advertised so a conference/presentation setup it may be tricky unless you test and troubleshoot all devices willing to use it.
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