Microsoft Surface Hub

Every creative studio is going to want a Microsoft Surface Hub, but few will be able to justify the cost. It's a digital-whiteboard-meets-conferencing-system that both impresses and has practical benefits for creatives – whether you work for a branding or digital agency, or a visual effects or video post house. But it's also £21,000. I got to try out the Surface Hub at Microsoft's London HQ. It's been on sale in a limited fashion for about a year, mainly to very large businesses – but now Microsoft has opened up the number of resellers, so it's only now that its available to a wider range of agencies (who can afford it). The purpose of the Surface Hub is to be a large screen that sits in your biggest meeting room. During internal or client meetings, you can create and annotate materials related to a project – sketching ideas or wireframes; adding notes to photos, screengrabs or other images; building moodboards or otherwise sorting research materials, and a whole bunch more. Developers can build industry-specific applications – such as tools for marking up 4K video.