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.

Comments

Use with a projector?

[slimsam1]

Could you potentially use this device with a projector? Might make a great (much cheaper) alternative to a giant HDTV.

Re:Hmm

[The Clockwork Troll]

The best CRT-based consumer HDTV's are far less sophisticated than the best consumer monitors.

Consider that the best purpose-built HDTV's can only display 720 lines of video non-interlaced and 1080 lines interlaced, and even then only at a refresh rate of 60Hz.

What's on your desktop is a far better display device, it's just smaller, and mostly what you're paying for with HDTV's is size.

what??

[updog]

That headline is very misleading. This box does not turn your TV or monitor into an HDTV as it implies. Look at the input and output capability:

TV/Video input compatibility
480i, 480p, 576p, 720p, 1080i

RGB output capability
640x480, 800x600, 852x480, 1024x768, 1280x720, 1280s768, 1280x1024

Clearly, This takes up to a 1080i HD input and displays up to 1280x1024.

Re:What a Waste

[Babbster]

Having just purchased one of the cheapest HDTVs possible, you're just dead wrong. I paid $700 for a 27" direct-view HDTV (a Samsung) and I will still have to buy an HDTV tumor that will run me between $300 (for a PC HDTV tuner card) and $800 (for one of the nicer HDTV set-top boxes with satellite HDTV capability and all the outputs including DVI). If I had gone with something like the Viewsonic deal, I would have paid $300 less for the display and with a $500 set-top box I would have only been $100 over the cost of my (again, cheap) HDTV.

At the VERY least, this box gives you the ability to connect your Xbox or Gamecube to your monitor and get the true 480p signals (for most Xbox games and many Gamecube games), and I'm sure there are gamers out there who would like to get that capability for $400 instead of spending $700 or more on an HDTV.

Now, all that being said, if you just want to use your computer monitor to watch HDTV, I recommend checking out the myHD card which you can put right into your current box (assuming it's over 400MHz) and start watching HDTV right off the bat. That card is running at $300 (as low as $250). Note that the following isn't an ad for this particular retailer (you can google and see if there are more - it's the cheapest I've found), but you can find this card at Digital Connection. It even has S-video and composite inputs with scaling to several resolutions allowing you to connect other sources. Frankly, it's a much better deal than the Viewsonic.

Huh?

[Overzeetop]

Most multi-sync monitors will already sync to HDTV. My 5 year old, 15", $99 KDS monitor will sync to 720p just fine. It takes a bit of fiddling to get the aspect ratio correct (vertical size against the lower stop), but I get a 16:9 picture and it looks pretty darned good. It just requires a cable to feed the component signal to the rgb lines of the HD15 input connector.

The advantage to this box is that it will transcode component to RGBHV, as well as tune NTSC and allow source switching via remote. Not something I'd pay $400 for. Of course, I did turn my "free" 15" Dell LCD into a TV with their less expensive NTSC unit (~$80) so I could have a TV in my bookcase.