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Turn Your Monitor Into an HDTV
orangerobot writes "ViewSonic has released an interesting new box that turns any VGA monitor into an HDTV video display with support for standards up to 1080i. At $399 it's a little on the pricey side, but according to the review from EnvyNews, the unit performs pretty well." Like the review, I can't figure out what the target market for this is, but it's still a cool device.
1920 x 1080i (or 1280x720p if you go that way).
Pretty low, actually. And most current TVs don't display anywhere near 1920, more like 1440 or 1280.
A lot of projectors in the market now have DVI input, so you should be able to connect an HDTV "tuner" to the projector via DVI and have it project the image. The only problem is that most projectors use the 4:3 aspect ratio (there are some projectors that are native 16:9 or 16:10).
Actually, many HDTV recievers output VGA D-sub anyway. My $315 Samsung SIR-T150 has a VGA output that I've watched on a PC LCD monitor. And if you are interested in recording HD, check out the MDP-100 card. http://www.cellarcinemas.com/cgi-bin/store/HTDV-MY HD.html
It only works with over-the-air, but you can record data streams right to your HDD with it.
bob
And most current TVs don't display anywhere near 1920, more like 1440 or 1280.
That's not quite accurate, at least when it comes to direct-view HDTV's. Some HDTV's down-sample a 1080i signal to a 720p signal, but most of them actually display the full 1080i picture. The thing, though, is that the picture tube isn't capable of resolving a picture that fine. The best consumer picture tubes on the market can resolve about 800 lines of resolution; these sets cost $2,000-$4,000. The best professional tubes can resolve about 1,000 lines, but they cost, literally, ten times more.
So the TV tries to display the full 1920x1080 picture-- it scans all the pixels-- but the tube isn't capable of resolving it.
I write in my journal
This has got to be the worst review I've ever seen in my life. Let's run it down.
1. They're reviewing an HDTV converter. You might want to mention to folks that 1080i is a lot wider (19xx) than 1280 across.
2. The product got a decent review. What's wrong with this? Check out 3 'n 4.
3. It has a blue tint over the picture. No matter how subtle it is, tints over the picture is generally a pretty crappy problem on a $400 converter.
4. In the quality section, they not ONCE spoke about component quality. They went into S-Video and Composite ONLY (maybe RF too, I forget). Now who in the HELL would spend $400 on a converter and give a rat's patoot about component and s-video quality? Ati sells crap that converts those just fine for around $100.
That is all.
They are called up-converters and they have existed for years now. Here is a listing of them:
http://www.dvdirect.com/Prods/TVO/default.htm
Mad Hatter
Actually, what you need is an HDTV tuner card. There are several on the market, for the price of a top graphics card (that is to say, under $300) The computer I'm on now has a MyHD MDP-100 $260 from the Digital Connection, who also happen to offer the primary US tech support for the card, on bug report/support threads on the AVS forum (read the entire forum - there have been separate followup threads for each driver revision and they contain other support tips too. Especially check out the v1.55.2 driver thread. That driver allowed DVDs to be displayed in 1080i - something the DVD consortium has since declared to be forbidden. All other cards and DVD players display DVD in 480p)
The MyHD comes with VGA output with a passthrough cable for dual monitor or simultaneous computer/HDTV use, and a breakout cable that gives Component Video and s-video. it also offers your choice of stereo or Dolby outputs. I don't usually to use it in that mode however. I find that it's usually simpler and equally high quality to simply rout the video through my (decent but nothing special) graphics card.
I also own a Telemann tuner, but I can't look at the model number and outputs right now. It's in the basement, cabled through the floor to a Toshiba DLP-650 LCD projector (though it's a used 1999 model, I usually can't even imagine what better quality would look like. Maybe a tad blacker blacks -it's only 300:1 contrast ratio, unlike the newer models at 450-3000:1- but that's it!) There is at least a third major manufacturer, whose name eludes me at the moment, but all the model numbers and details are listed in the support thread I linked above, with more info in other threads
In short, the card you want is out there. I've run the LCD projector off the MyHD a junkbox celeron 466 and ATI Rage-something card, running Win98 and projecting onto a bare wall (that was my test rig) and the results were outstanding: a crystal clear 120"+ image for a total equipment cost much less than a hinky 60" rear projection screen on sale at Best Buy. I did later upgrade to a better machine (Athlon 1700XP, but it worked with a P-III 800, too), so I could do HDTV recording. HTDV VCRs, like D-VHS, cost several thousand by themselves, but with a card, all you need is a moderately powerful CPu and a decent sized HDD to sotre them on (I saw a 200GB for $160 after rebate on Fatwallet Hot Deals forum this week) You can compress/record the transport stream to DVD-R for archival storage, and still get DVD quality or better. (I compress to DVD the next day. I haven't tried doing it in real-time yet, but it should be possible)
As much as I hate to say it, if you're building your own Home Theater PC, I'd recommend an Intel processor over a AMD. Maybe the newer or better Athlon boards are rock stable for HTPC use, and set and forget for at least a week at a stretch, but this wasn't the case for myself or others on the AVS forum a year ago (As a workaround, I have it reboot at 5 am every day. ) In general, I readfewer Atlon complaints for HTPC, I almost never heard Intel problems - and the drop in Atlon issues may be due to a shift to Intel, which is the general advice of that board.
There is also a section in the FAQ called "Can I use any vga card as a display device?" which answers the other half of the question.
I do this in my computer room and it works quite nicely...
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
- The specs for the Viewsonic box mention:
Uh, the "i" stands for interlaced. Getting that wrong betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of how "real" video (not PC video) works; hopefully this is a tech writer goof and not exposing basic video incompetence on the part of the designers.
- Don't fall into the trap of thinking that your computer monitor (ostensibly higher resolution) can display video better than your TV. There are color gamut issues, as well as screen phosphor differences.
- Just to give you a healthy respect for the sheer magnitude of information bandwidth carried in a high-quality (SD, not HD) video signal, the uncompressed digital video standard (601) is 270 Mbps, and that's only using 10 bit quantization (digital audio uses 16-24 bit).
"Real" video guys cringe at computer video. Gamut, color accuracy and aberrations, frame interlacing, human optical models, it's all a whole lot more complicated than pixel grids and color bit depth.Here's a [tortured] analogy:
computer video is to "TV" video
as
a 64 kbps MP3 is to vinyl played on a high-end analog audio system.
One simple rule for its versus it's