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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.
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
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.
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"
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)...
HDTV broadcast over the air is not compressed, the picture is phenomenal, and the subscription fee consists of purchasing an antenna.
Otherwise I'd recommend going satellite. I had HDTV, free 6 month offer, from the local cable provider and the compression was horrific. HDTV from satellite is a world better if that's your only other way to get a signal. But over the air is by far the best available.
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
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.
Compared with 480i, 720p is definitely "high definition."
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
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
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.