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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."
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
This is very true -- and that native resolution is pretty sub-par as well. For a monitor that size I'd like to see an absolute minimum of 1920x1200 pixels. I'm pretty spoiled by the 17" 1920x1200 monitor in my macbook pro -- even though it is TN, it is very, very sharp.
Also this thing apparently has no led backlighting either.
All in all, this is a real yawner. Wake me up when someone has a 23 or 24 inch led backlight monitor with true 8 or 10 bits per channel, and a dot pitch in excess of 130/inch.
Ian Ameline
There's no real use for 1080i/1080p though at the moment, other than for PC usage and BluRay. By the time telecomm companies get around to broadcasting in 1080, it's most likely OLEDs will have taken over the market of LCDS, leaving you with an outdated television.
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)...
my 42" LG 42LB5D has a feature that's eerily similar to what's described in the summary...
So does my $10 digital picture frame...
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
The funny thing is... it's not even a new technology. It's been done... my 42" LG 42LB5D has a feature that's eerily similar to what's described in the summary... It can be hooked up to a USB hard drive, and display pictures, play mp3s, and other media content. *shrugs*
My Philips has the same thing. Plus it runs embedded Linux. Philips complied with the GPL by including a flyer with the TV telling me how to get the source code.
Where did you get a digital picture frame for $10?
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.