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Computer Optional For AOC's New HD Display
MojoKid writes "As a 22-inch, HD flat-panel display, AOC's new 2230Fm LCD has nothing necessarily earth-shattering about its design. But what got our attention was the marketing tag for the device: 'No PC Required.' It turns out that, in addition to being a traditional flat-screen LCD with a native resolution of 1680 x 1050 (HDCP ready), the 2230Fm also includes a built-in media player, with what AOC calls its HD3 technology. The 2230Fm supports MPEG-1, 2, and 4 video formats. Supported audio formats include MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG, FLA, and M4A. Supported photo formats include JPG, TIFF, PNG, BMP, and GIF images with resolutions up to 8000 x 8000 pixels. The display also has a low 2ms response time and high 20,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio."
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What does it run? It would be interesting if it was embedded Linux, because there would be so much you could do with it (server, etc)
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Oh well.
if it was a IPS panel and not a TN Panel :(
How is this "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters" exactly?
I'm all for having the option of having a low power embedded computer system in the display, just the ticket for a number of applications; but I cannot help but suspect that the value of such systems will be severely curtailled without some sort of standardization.(particularly given that the slightly uglier but much, much more standard option of an embedded PC in a VESA mount is always waiting in the wings)
Obviously, whatever board is working its magic in this AOC, and similar, is a full blown computer. I'm not sure about this case; but a fair few of these have a network stack, browser, and everything. Do you want to depend on a monitor vendor for security updates and bugfixes? Do you want to learn that the board embedded in your pricey display has all the personality quirks of a cut-rate DVD player from the wrong side of the bargain bin? Any sort of real integration with other systems, which would open all sorts of really interesting possibilities, is likely to be either a)a gigantic pain in the ass and kinda flakey, b)specifically blessed by the vendor and all the gods for this and only this use case and accompanying software, or c) Not Happening Buddy.
Going ahead and turning these things into full blown computers probably isn't the answer; but it would be very, very nice to see some sort of standardization, option for user access to the guts, etc. Appliances have their place; but they really do limit the possibilities of a given situation.
Wow, nice way to drive traffic to hothardware.com. Is HotHardware paying Slashdot for the traffic or are Slashdot editors just not so bright.
@de_machina
I saw a laptop some years back which had a CD player separate from the computer; if you had a CD in the drive, you could spin it up and plug in headphones to get tunes out of it without powering up the whole machine.
Sounds pretty similar, I think. I didn't see the point of it then, either.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
No 720-line standard should have ever earned the "HD" moniker. The term "HD" should be reserved for displays and sources with resolution of 1920x1080 or greater. Real HD sources will look like ass on this display.
Life would have been much clearer if we had called 720p "extended definition" instead of HD. A lot of people would have been saved from buying lousy TVs and monitors.
Other wise.. sounds pretty cool :)
obviously it'll come without the extra £200 or so that Apple normally charge for having it in black
TFA doesn't mention network streaming or what USB HD file systems it will support, or even if it supports USB storage other than flash drives. So, based on description available, users will need to copy a few of their media files to an SD card or flash drive (using the computer that is not necessary), and plug it into the back. Fantastic. This is definitely worth the extra space and the 200 dollar markup over regular 22 inch monitors.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
slap in a NIC and web browser and you have the future PC.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
judging by its photo next to the story text it seems rather thick and bulky for an LCD. Probably as thick as a traditional CRT
So this is really another digital picture frame.
from the have-been-living-under-a-rock-department?, sd card readers, usb ports, mp3 and video decoders have been built into, say, dvd players, for quite a few years now. I can buy them for about 100 euro at any local discounter. Come back when it has builtin skype and web capabilities. This tv is just like a tv with built-in dvd player, it probably has the same hardware as any current dvd player, except that it doesn't have the dvd-drive. This slashdot post is crap.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
I got a total of three different LCDs from AOC with the last one purchased approx. a year ago. Poor craftmaship (chipping paint, uneven edges around the screen), more dead pixels than other brands I commonly buy, and most importantly unbearable ground loop hum generated by poor grounding that affects all equipment on the same circuit make me believe they are not all that hot (they may have improved since--although you won't see me holding my breath)...
Does the embedded player contain DRM? If not, it sounds like a great piece of gear! If it's crippled with DRM, it has about as much value as microsoft's media player to me: $0.
I like it. Anyone know where it's from?
I hate to beat a dead horse, but it seems to me that in a case like this, there's no partiuclar reason for the vendor to lock you out of the system. Why not let you dig around in the OS? You're not even trying to sell me some kind of addon or anything, so there's not even short sited selfish motivation (Sony PSP, etc.) for locking me out.
expandfairuse.org
Big screen TVs such as these give them hope and strength to push on in hope that one day, they too will have a wall with a socket to plug a TV such as that into.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
LG scarlet line of LCD HDTVs already do it (google for "lg scarlet" - I am too lazy to type in the URL :-). It needs a FAT filesystem on a USB HDD. Samsung Series 6 and Series 5 LCD TVs do it - though it's doesn't do divx movies (LG model does). This is clearly a slashvertisement.
>...if it was embedded Linux... so much you could do with it (server, etc)
Well -- and I'm really surprised at why no one does this yet -- I want a monitor _with_ a Linux thin client for my Birthday.
Ok, there are small TCs which one can piggyback onto monitors (HP, for instance, makes one).
But, and this is my point, a monitor including a thin client would save me a lot of money because I would put them at every corner of my house for...
- internet;
- tv/divx;
- for pabx and voip;
- multimedia (mp3/ogg playing);
- [alarm] clock.
All this (hopefully) for 1.2 the price of an equivalent monitor.
I'd buy some 3 or 4 right now... all I need is that wonderful LTSP (or FreeNX).
A TN panel, I guess? Good to know that AOC's new HD display is optional for my computer, then. :-)
Ezekiel 23:20
I had no idea that there was a special monitor for playing Age of Conan.
HDTV broadcast over the air is not compressed
Citation sorely needed. "Uncompressed" is what gets sent over your DVI or HDMI cable: 1920x1080 pixels, 3 channels, 8 bits per channel, 24 distinct frames per second, or 1.2 Gbps. To squeeze this into the roughly 19.39 Mbps provided by the 8VSB physical layer, ATSC DTV uses MPEG-2 video compression.
That sounds ominous ... does this mean it will self-destruct if the user attempts to play a file without first presenting it with a valid photo ID, passport, security certificate and retinal scan?
I prefer monitors that aren't purposefully crippled and that don't attempt to moonlight as copyright lawyers ...
This kind of thing would be useful for saving power at kiosks, expos and the like, and it would be convenient to use if you could update what was on the display over a network.
Isn't it infinitely much easier just to load a DVD into a tray, than it is to rip a DVD, copy it onto a storage device, and plug it into a TV?
It's much easier to get a DVD, isn't it? Or is this blatant advocacy of piracy? Plus with the capacities of Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs, you must be crazy to rip them somewhere else.
We just started (December/07) our HDTV air-borne transmissions.
In retail stores, and everybody is pretty much adopting this terminology...
- nnnn x 720 is called "HDTV-ready" and
- nnnn x 1080 is labeled "Full-HD".
Brazilian HD is based on the Japanese standard (thus incompatible with both US and European HDTV systems); there are already a few sets with a digital "tuner" included -- for most people, though, the best option is to acquire a "digital conversor" (which I did).
Broadcastings are sent in one of the following formats: 1080i, 720i, 720p, 480p, 480i and 1Seg (320x240).
The conversors are set-top boxes and come in two flavors:
1) a "lo-res" one which outputs 480i for use with standard PAL-M or NTSC TV sets and
2) a hi-res one with HDMI output.
To this date, I acquired two lo-res boxes. Images are as perfect as in DVD playing, with no visible artifacts. I am kind of an exception, however, as high prices have kept people from buying such boxes. Prices are expected to drop by half very soon, though.
I've read the Brazilian system uses MPEG-4 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBTVD ) -- link to photos at the bottom.
Mind you, the programs suck horribly and, despite being HDTV with a 16:9 aspect, a broadcaster chose to crop today the borders of the movie Robots (Pixar?) to make it 4:3. I don't know why they did this, but if I had an expensive giant plasma or LCD TV, it would be very upsetting. :-/
Some photos also at http://www.guiadohardware.net/comunidade/tv-decodificador/809877/ (for the last pair of photos, the images show how degraded is digital TV thru a cable operator versus the one received by the new system).
Some computers didn't even have soundcards, and those that did certainly weren't going to handle the CD audio. So the CD player itself handled all playback and converted it to analogue audio, which you then listened to by either plugging headphones in to the CD player or running a wire to the sound card which then mixed it (again in analogue). All the OS did in terms of CD playback was tell it to start to play the disc.
Little different now. You'll discover that many CD players lack analogue outs at all, and even when they have them they generally aren't hooked up. Instead the computer fetches the audio across the IDE or SATA connection and then gets it to the sound card digitally. These days it is no significant strain on the computer's busses to do that so there's no compelling reason to do things over a separate connection.
Well I think you need to do a little more research first. The resolution isn't sub-par at all. Par would mean normal, median, average, etc. A little research turns up that essentially every 22" desktop monitor is 1680x1050. So the resolution is right on par.
As for LED backlighting, are you kidding me? That is currently very expensive. It's neat and all, but you aren't going to see it outside of either laptops (where the reduction in thickness and power is worth it) or extremely high end displays (where the increase in colour gamut is worth it). At present you need to be willing to drop serious cash to get such a display.
I also don't get all the hating on cheap monitors. Are LCDs something only the rich should be allowed to have? No? Then stop bitching when companies want to make budget displays. You want a better monitor? Go get one. There's plenty out there. I personally have an NEC 2690 and I just love it. Highly recommended. However, don't cry when you can't have it for $400.
There's a market for high end displays, and a market for cheap ones. If you aren't interested in a given segment, ignore it, but don't hate on those that are. Some people don't have thousands to spend on a display and want a monitor for a couple hundred, even if that means a cheap TN panel.
You click on his name and you land on a store. What a surprise. Slashdot editors....
Send your spendthrift head of state this
http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/09/toshibas-10-new-regza-lcds-3x-ethernet-built-in-dvr-and-much/
That one may be new but they've had them since at least 2006
These TN Panels are simply POS.
If there was a full-blown computer inside the beast, they would not be able to sell it for 400 bucks.
What most people do not see is that most of the work inside a flat-screen TV today is done by software anyways. There is an assembly of chips, one for the tuner, one for decoding digital streams, one for analog stuff and some memory, and what holds all of it together is software.
If you have the computing power to run the TV with all its control logic and OSD, plus the decoder DSP you need anyways to process DVB signals (which is not much more than MPEG2 and MPEG4 streams) and stuff coming in over HDMI, building a mediaplayer like the one described is just a matter of putting in a card reader and investing some man-months of coding work.
WTF is this now? Engadget? Even if you were able to throw Linux/MythTV on this, I would still question whether this was news-worthy. How the hell did this get posted to /.?
Samsung and many others have marketed full blown XP, CE and Linux based thin clients for many years Capable of all the above plus web & email
Real happiness lies in the completion of work using your own brains and skills.
I always suspected they were going to port Age of Conan (AOC) for consoles....
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
This functionality is actually somewhat common in current high end televisions.
I don't see why this is news. My parents have a Toshiba 30" CRT TV with a media card reader in it that plays the cards and any media on it as if it were playing a DVD or VHS tape. Why is this new technology?
Oh... I get it. This is an advertisement disguised as a news item.
But seriously, WTF, /.? I'm fairly new to /. so this s**t may be going on all the time for all I know, but this really is low. Advertisements should be advertisements, news items should be news items (we get it, guys. And we do click ads you know). I hated it when ads did it in magazines, I hate it here too.
I'm guessing this will be one of the models that uses dithering to fake its claimed "millions of colors."