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Toshiba Unveils Laptop With Instant-On TV & DVR
Patik writes "Toshiba has unveiled a new laptop, Qosmio, that allows users to watch TV or a DVD without booting the OS. The laptop turns on instantly for these functions and has a 15" near-TV quality screen. To use DVR functions like time shifting and recording, the user must boot the Windows Media Center OS."
Think viewing angle and refreshrate/fade
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
Brightness, contrast, color accuracy and stability, viewing angle, there's a lot more than pixel size and area to a screen.
The DVR isn't instant on, only the TV is. I suppose if you took the "&" symbol to mean a pause, like a comma, they would be separate and only the TV would be instant on. But to me, "&" means "and" and "inclusive" and this article title implies that the DVR is also instant on.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
regular tv is 800x600
hdtv is 1024x768
NTSC video bandwidth is 4.2 MHZ. 525 lines including retrace. How do you get 800 X 600 out of that?
Check the spec. Only the 3 X 4 aspect ratio matches. Everything else is stretched to fit. Lines that are not there are generated, not sent from the source.
A very brief spec for NTSC is found here;
http://www.datapro.net/techinfo/NTSC.html
The truth shall set you free!
Why are laptops going widescreen? Shouldnt PCs be streaching the other way.
:)
Laptops aren't used only as text editors anymore. Gaming and multimedia takes advantage of widescreen. Sooner or later all DVD/TV broadcasts will be 16:9. Natural image, unlike text, is better to be bigger in horizontal direction than vertical direction. This is simply because our eyes are located next to each other sideways
"Instant-on" PCs aren't new. Take a look at the Soyo SY-P4VAL version M (I think this was on Slashdot before but I don't have a link). The built-in BIOS "media center" software lets you play MP3 CDs, audio CDs, VCDs, DVDs, and watch TV. It's only ~$130, as opposed to $2500 - $2600.
Granted, this article is about a laptop with instant-on capabilities, which is of course cooler and more expensive.
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There's some speculation that the all-new Apple iMac G5 (announced for September) will include TV functionality
I think this would rock, as it's rather a waste to have those nice wide LCD screens off at any time (that and the fact that my apartment is of the aforementioned shoebox type).
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regular tv is 800x600 hdtv is 1024x768
Wrong!
Regular TV is nX480, where n is determined by available analogue bandwidth, or by the defined digital value, whichever is less. If composite video is involved, n is less than 300, with colour resolution less than 150. If the narrowest analog link is S-Video, then image resolution may be as high as you can muster, but colour resolution is less constrained to about 400 pixels. Component can go as high as you want.
Digital modes include 352x240 (0.1 megapixels; VCD), 352x480 (0.2 megapixels; TiVo), 480x480 (0.2 megapixels; SVCD), 640x480 (0.3 megapixels; DTV/VGA), 704x480 (0.3 megapixels; DTV) and 720x480 (0.3 megapixels; DV/DVD). Note that in no case does X approach 800 nor Y approach 600. 800x600 would be 0.5 megapixels.
Now, if you've been paying attention, you've noticed that VCD is not nX480, byt nX240. To present this on an NTSC monitor, either each line is repeated, or the picture is scaled and smoothed, depending on your playback hardware.
HDTV, on the other hand, is firmly defined as 1280x720 (0.9 megapixels) or 1920x1080 (2.1 megapixels), both higher than 1024x768 (0.8 megapixels).
www.wavefront-av.com