New Sharp AQUOS Cordless LCD TVs

i4u writes "I4U reports about Sharp introducing AQUOS a new line of cordless LCD TV Sets. Sony introduced beginning of April the cordless Sony Vega TV series. Now Sharp introduces their line of cordless TV Sets. The Sharp AQUOS LC-15L1 is a 15" LCD TV set that has no wires. The display is powered by a built-in lithium battery. The AV signal is transmitted wirelessly from the base station that contains the tuner. The AV signal is transmitted over 2.4Ghz. The cordless Sony Vega TV series use 5GHz to avoid interference, so Sharp is a bit behind here. The AQUOS LC-15L1 will retail for about 175,000 yen starting May 1st in Japan." These look pretty cool, but of course the battery life and/or battery pricing could be an issue. I guess it depends on how important it is to be able to carry your TV from room to room.

Comments

Re:Why?

[moonbender]

Yes, it is because it is - along with 5 Ghz and a couple of more frequencies - unregulated (or minimally regulated for commercial and scientific use. 5 Ghz, according to this excellent article on Dan's Data is "inherently even less able to deal with propagation obstacles than 2.4GHz".

Re:Why?

[moonbender]

Just to add to what I said, since in the end it sounded as if I was implying that 2.4 GHz is always superior to 5 GHZ:

2.4 GHz transmission does, indeed, propagate better than 5 GHz, if it wasn't for the considerable existing sources of 2.4 GHz radiation - lots and lots of stuff uses 2.4, as the original poster pointed out, including microwave ovens. So if you're in a interference rich environment, 5 GHz might work better than 2.4 GHz. This is all covered in the article I linked to, incidently.

Re:Not feasible

[moonbender]

Ever heard of laptops? A laptop is a portable computer, including an LCD as a video output device. Last I heard, they manage an uptime of two to three hourse, more in some cases - and keep in mind, they need to power other components as well, such as the CPU and keep the hard drive spinning. ;)

I apologise for my sarcasm, but obviously this is feasible, since it has been done before countless times. :) I don't know how much battery time is in such a TV, but with a normal laptop battery, 4 hours seem completely possible. And you should watch more TV than that, anyway. ;)

Why bother with 802.11a/b? UWB is better

[loo_hoo_ser]

Why are these companies even bothering with 802.11a/b?

There is a much better technology just around the corner in the form of UWB. There is a company by the name of "Xtreme Spectrum" that has already designed a chipset specifically for conveying A/V signals using UWB. As I understand it, these signals are not prone to degradation by multipath interference. However, penetration of UWB signals through walls will be limited due to FCC restrictions on allowable power limits of UWB signals. Here is a link on the Trinity chipset:

http://www.xtremespectrum.com/PDF/xsi_trinity_brie f.pdf.

Also, to address the issue of using 802.11a/b, it's really easy to do it yourself if you have a PC equipped with TV capture card (e.g. ATI TV wonder or ATI all-in-wonder, etc) and using Windows Media Encoder (as an example) to encode a TV channel and broadcast it to your laptop/s.

I do this and it works really well, I put the laptop in "full screen mode" while watching a TV channel and get pretty respectable performance on old hardware (266 Mhz P2 laptop, 850 Mhz P3 encoder). I use WM9 (even though Microsoft "recommends" a P4 with 1.5 Ghz) for medium data rate encoding of video. I realize it uses Microsoft products, but this is just one solution to using 802.11a/b for wireless media.

So, I end up with an instant 15" inch TV in front of me. It feels even bigger because the TV is so close (as opposed to a 27" TV far away). This solution works for me whenever the wife and I have two different ideas of what to watch on TV. Yeah, I know it's a expensive way to go about it solely as a TV solution but the PC hardware/infrastructure was already there, it's just another way to use it.

Well, that's just my 2 cents...

Re:Huh?

[bigfatlamer]

Actually, the receiver is the base unit. I assume (based on no actual knowledge...that's what assumptions are after all) that you'd just plug all that stuff (DVD, cable, VCR...remember those?) into the base station which would then transmit through the base unit/receiver to the screen.

Of course, this in no way helps explain the usefulness of this. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

BFL