Quality of PC hooked upto TV (1 Viewer)

[Angel K]

Has anyone hooked up there CPU to there big screen TV? I want to know if the quality would be any good, or just blurry. I heard someone mention that the HDTV would be better, any truth to that? As you can tell I'm a lay man when it comes to this. I do not want to spend my hard earned money on the wrong products. So please bare with me if I ask a question, that sounds to easy.
PS: I plan on buying a P3 or P4, I want to be able to go on the net, read/write email, use the programs on the CPU and also play some Games. I want the quality to be good, not blurry. What do I need to do, to make this work. Thanks so much for your time.
Thanks,

 

[Steven K]

Get an Athlon... they kick much ass. Right now, there are so many problems with the P4, it's sad. You have to buy expensive Rambus memory. Intel has done away with MMXSSE and gone with a brute force method. At this point, the P4 is not worth the money. Go with AMD, you wont be disappointed.

 

[Abdul Jalib]

Direct view monitors use a shadow mask, which helps keep the text nice and crisp. RPTV's use three different CRT's that are converged use no shadow mask, so this causes some fuzziness even though they ultimately can display more detail than a direct view monitor.
Also, interlaced resolutions stink for text no matter what set you're on. When I need to do Windows work on my HDTV, I switch to 800x600p, but that's not exactly a lot of real estate. Only a few HD-ready sets will accept 600p or 720p RGB, with most of the rest being stuck down at 480p RGB or sometimes component input only.
For DVD's, interlaced resolutions work nicely, and the blurriness of small text on a RPTV is not a problem. For computer work, use a direct view monitor. I have a 21" monitor sitting beside my HDTV, splitting the HTPC's VGA output with an Extron VGA splitter.
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[Angel K]

So from what Im reading, there is not way to see crisp clear text, like if I was on the web or email on a big screen TV. It sounds like I would have to shrink the size of windows, so if I have a 50inch TV I would really be looking at what, then? Once again sorry if these questions sound lame, but I do not know about this, and dont want to go throu the big mistake of buying the wrong products.
Thanks again for all the help.
Angel

 

[Roger W]

I receive clear enough text with a 640x480 desktop on my HDTV (not using HD input) with the s-vhs TV-out from the conexant bt869 on my Geforce card. Most of the time I can us TVtool to get 800x600 to look clear, but both settings are fuzzy meaning you can see the words but the pixels are gone (maybe that's better). The Conexant TV-out chips have built-in flicker filters so that interlaced signals are almost flicker free. When SVGA to HDTV conversion becomes available to PC users (it's already perfected and being used in the MS-XBOX for HDTV-out) the extremely high resolution of 1080i will diminish the noticable flicker to almost nothing, especially since you won't be sitting so close to the screen.
Actually the HDTV capable Conexant chip (cx25871) being used in the XBOX and Linux game consoles is appearing on most of the Geforce3 cards with TV-out, but Nvidia doesn't offer drivers yet for an HDTV display and might not be working on it yet. So long story short- it is possible with a newer big screen TV to see text clearly, with some loss of sharpness and lower desktop resolution, but it could be awhile before monitor quality HDTV-out is offered (by then HDTVs will be closer in price to PC monitors anyway).

 

[Angel K]

If you can just lend a hand. I plan on buying a P3 or P4. What type of video card should I buy? I know you mentioned it but just want to make sure that what you are talking about is a video card. Also if you can think of anything else that I might need for the CPU to inhance the quality. Thanks so much for the time.
Angel

 

[Chris Mannes]

Steven K. Quick correction.
The P4 supports MMX & SSE.
http://developer.intel.com/design/Pe...ref/#streaming
As well as adding SSE2.

 

[Thomas_Berg]

i have an AMD Athalon 1.33 and it kills the P4 1.7 in almost all speed tests. AMD is cheaper and better right now.
make sure you get a good video card with an s-video TV out on the back. i have a GeForce 2 with s-video out and the quality is pretty good.
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-Thomas
Click here to visit my webpage.

 

[Andres Munoz]

How would games look on a regular TV set? I own a 32" WEGA (not the XBR). Connection would be through S-video.
I guess the game would have to be played at a 640x480 resolution right? The TV wouldn't be able to support anything higher?
And this brings me to another question. I guess there shouldn't be a problem if I connected the PC to one of the S-video inputs in my receiver and then using the receiver's S-video monitor out that already goes to the TV?
It's just like connecting any other component like a VHS or a DVD player right?
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Andres
http://home.earthlink.net/~coolvirus

[Edited last by Andres Munoz on August 21, 2001 at 03:07 PM]

 

[Angel K]

When you say 640x480 resolution, does that mean that it will not take up the 52 inch size of the Tv? Or that it can but will not look clear, even for reading web sites? Thanks for all the help
Angel

 

[NickSo]

640x480 is the native resolution of all Non-HD sets im pretty sure...
So its like taking a 640x480 resolution picture, and blowing it up to fit 52", which results in lotsa jaggies and totally looks bad. And most TVs are interlaced, so you'll actually be seeing like half of the lines in 640...
Im not 100% sure, but i think thats right...
PS - PC games on TV look just like a Dreamcast games on TV
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The So Family Home Theater!
http://www.multimania.com/sonick182/ht/index.html

 

[Andres Munoz]

Angel: It should take up the whole size of the screen but the pixels will be big (as opposed to having a higher resolution like 1024x768 where there will be more pixels to fill up the screen and therefore they'll be of smaller size).
And from what I've read, yes, reading text will be kind of difficult.

 

[Ken Chan]

Regular TV has about 480 visible scan lines (horizontal lines from top to bottom); that's the vertical resolution. Those lines are also interlaced, but that probably won't matter much. Horizontal res is varied, depending on the source (e.g. VHS vs DVD) and the set itself.
With a computer, the only resolution you probably have that matches is 640x480. Anything else would have to be scaled to 480 vertical anyway.
I've played DOOM and such on the big screen, and they looked fine. Of course, those old games were 320x200, so they actually had to be scaled up. A modern game running at 640x480 would probably look good too.
Web sites would probably be so-so. If you've ever seen the screens on WebTV, the text is really big -- you'd probably have to change the settings to make it readable.
//Ken

 

[NickSo]

480... ohyeah... oops...